Beginning of the end.

March 28th, I was born. Lower class I would say.  I was the oldest of two, my sister Donna was my younger sister.  We lived in Michigan, but moved to Colorado when I was still a toddler to be near my fathers parents.  My dad, a caring, protective father during most days, a alcoholic some days most nights.  My mother, loving, hard working woman married to a abusive alcoholic.  She only knew this kind of life, her father was the same way.  My father worked in the oil fields since he was 13 so a bunch of roughneck, mostly drinking men, pretty much raised him.    This set a stage for a very troubled, hard life for two young girls.  Not only was my father abusive to my mother when he was drinking, he spared our animals no remorse.  
My earliest memories was when I was 5 and started kindergarten.  We moved from home to home, at this point we lived in what I later referred to as the "shack".  It was, a very small, one bedroom, which me and my sister shared, my parents slept on a couch that turned into a bed, no real bathroom, a little closet with a bucket.  I recall laying in our little room, we had just got a kitten, probably a stray,  it was late, and I hear him come home, yelling at my mom, I knew what was coming.  I would lay and play a mind game, that I was convinced it worked, I could "will" my dad not to hit my mother, to be so drunk, just tonight, that he would just pass out by saying over and over under my breath "he is going to be good tonight, he is going to be good tonight".  Some times it worked, sometimes it didn't.  This particular night, it didn't work.  The kitten had made a horrible mistake, one that would cost him his life, he had gotten up on the table in front of my dad.  Out the door he went, the cries, from the little kitten, the banging as it hit the outside wall over and over and over until the cries were gone, his and mine.  This was the first of many very long nights to come.