Overcoming an abusive childhood

TRIGGER WARNING: This may be upsetting for some people.

MY FIRST mistake was to be born a girl.

My parents married in austerity-stricken post-war Britain, and waited six years until they could afford to have children. Motivated by family pressure, they wanted a boy, so I was immediately behind the Eight ball. Once my brother came along, I had zero chance of catching up.

The sad truth was neither was suited to parenthood at all, although my mother in particular spoiled my brother. The sad irony was they were both schoolteachers.

My dad loathed his own father, who already had six motherless children when he married my grandmother during World War I and had six more. My father was the fourth of the second batch. Probably due to dire family finances, he had to leave school at 14 and take an apprenticeship, unlike his older brothers who finished school and went into professional roles.

He never forgave his father. He couldn’t let go.

To the outside world, he was affable, always cracking jokes, respected and feared by his students for his searing sarcasm and enthusiastic cane-wielding. At home, my frequent transgressions would be punished with a beating, loss of privileges and a long period of glowering. My parents once had to take me to the doctor with cuts to my face from being knocked across our gravel driveway — the doctor didn’t even ask what had happened.

The word “love” was never spoken at home and never demonstrated, except in one way: “Daddy” came into my room frequently from as early as I can remember, supposedly to say goodnight but actually to do what is euphemistically known as “fondling” under my bedclothes. I would sometimes try to protect myself with my pillows or pretend to be asleep, but nothing worked, and the visits continued until I reached puberty. This was the only “love” I knew, and as a result, when my first boyfriend tried to kiss me, I panicked and ran.

Worse still was the psychological abuse. My dad relished putting me down verbally and humiliating me, often in front of my friends. I became introverted, failed my exams and later developed an eating disorder, but nobody answered those cries for help. Neither parent approved of any friendship or relationship I formed and they tried to sabotage them all, until I became pregnant and my dad was forced to bribe my boyfriend to make an honest woman of me in time.

My mother was merely distant — she often hit me (her favourite saying was “I’ll knock you into the middle of next week”), would sulk afterwards and never went against my father — even after he threw me, my husband and young children out of their home. Otherwise, she was relatively benign.

I’m sharing my story now because I want others to know that the legacy of childhood abuse does not have to overshadow the rest of your life. I forced myself to examine dispassionately my father’s own unhappy upbringing. This helped me understand how it left him with a desperate desire to control his own life, which he extended to controlling me.

Since sexual abuse is often “inherited”, it’s more than possible his own father did likewise to him. So, although I can never forget, I was able to forgive him and my mother too, as he also controlled her.

I’ve never managed to keep a relationship with a man going for long but in the parental stakes, I not only won the battle with my childhood, I smashed it. In their declining years, my parents acknowledged that fact tacitly and we were able to make a kind of peace, which benefited everyone — most of all, I hope, my children.

The cycle of abuse can be broken.

October 26th 2015 is Blue Knot Day, the day Adults Surviving Child Abuse (ASCA) asks all Australians to unite in support of the 5 million Australian adult survivors of childhood trauma and abuse.