by Deborah Kay
I made mistakes. I made big mistakes too.
The first mistake came while I was still together with Chris – before our third child was born. It came in the midst of those empty years before the moment of that too quick-lasting resurrection of our love when we decided to have our third and last child, Dean. This is no excuse, no excuse whatsoever, but I did what every decent parent would never do, or at any rate would be educated never to do.
I found Sarah, my then four-year-old, playing with this expensive lipstick someone had given to me as a gift – and that I had warned her never to touch. The lipstick was blue but when you smoothed it on your lips it came out red. It was semi-permanent lipstick that took twenty-four hours before it even began to fade. It was almost impossible to wash off.
I walked into her room on this particular afternoon – when she was meant to be having her afternoon nap – and found her standing there, a smile bigger than a clown, the lipstick smeared like oil paint all over her mouth and nose and cheeks and chin. Her face looked so “done-up”, it was obvious she also had some blush and rouge on it.
Caught in a better moment, she would have looked... like a clown. And perhaps that’s the point when I should have stood back, looked at the incident objectively, and laughed. I should have. Instead, I looked at her bed and saw it too had thick lipstick all over the pristine white sheets. The bedspread was painted red.
I snapped. I fully and completely snapped.
I turned around and slapped her and then because it did not seem to mean enough, I slapped her again and again across the face and head until she could no longer cry, could hardly breathe, she was shrieking so loud.
Thank heavens at some point a neighbour called out, ‘Deb, is everything all right over there?’ Else I don’t know that I would have stopped.
The truth was nothing was all right “over there”. I was shaken, shivering and trembling, and when I “came to” I saw faint specks of blood on the side of my daughter’s face. I felt so ashamed I wanted to run from the house forever.
‘What have I done? What have I done?’ I cried to myself. I never thought I could be that person. That monster.
There was – and never can be – any excuse for my behaviour. But now I can see how parents can beat up their children – it happens when their esteem is low, when they feel their lives are out of control, when they are barely holding down jobs, and are in relationships they cannot get out of. When they feel, as I did then, like shit... like an absolute swamp.
That beating made me realise I was trapped in a bog with slippery edges, and I could not climb my way out. I looked inside myself and saw both Mum and Dad; they were coming out in me, Dad with his switchy-stick and Mum with her fists pounding into my back. I was a beast, a brutal ogre, I was my parents.
Yet somehow, in those moments, more than anyone it was Mum I saw standing in front of me, slapping me through my face like I was some kind of dirty washing on the line. If there was one person I did not want to be like – it was her. And my beautiful child was on the receiving end of this moment of being her, of standing up to my madness. Of being beaten for everything I hated and resented – and feared – in my life.
I felt so bad about what happened that I immediately called Lifeline. To tell them what had happened, to ask them if they thought I was on the brink. A strange thing happened, that does not, I don’t think, usually happen with Lifeline. I was asked what had made me call, and when I told them I was told there was no one available I could talk to for the next three weeks.
Three weeks!
I was in despair. But in the end it made me realise something: I had to deal with this episode – with my life – myself. Maybe that was the lesson. If you can’t get help, don’t simply lie back and think of the world caving in around you. Get up out of the gravel and do something yourself.
And so I made up to Sarah for it. I made up for it – not, as would be so easy to do, by offering her lollies and material things, but by saying sorry to her – sorry without begging. Without expectation. And promising never to do it again. That was the only guarantee I could give her. I would not do it again. No matter what she did.
I also told all the people I could trust about it. I felt so embarrassed and ashamed, I felt I could not keep it a secret; I didn’t want secrets in my life any more. Secrets that soiled our property and our upbringing on Perenjora Dam Road.
If I did something wrong – and I had – I wanted others to know about it. I did not feel I should hide it from those I could trust.
I realise now I wanted feedback, I wanted reassurance, I wanted people to know I maybe needed help.
I saw also I would rather be a serial confessor than keep things hidden like black holes in my chest. Ever since I witnessed that little girl, Grace, getting beaten by her mum for eating the Devon sausage I had so hungrily munched into as an eight year old, I wanted to confess, to tell people the truth, to let them know what I had done when I had done anything wrong. I swore to keep confessing, but never to snap again.
And yet... and yet... I did it again. Only it happened much later, when Chris and I were living in Melbourne, and not with Sarah this time but with my now little two year-old. With my cute, adorable son, Dean that I had promised a safe and loving environment to, an environment filled with reasonable discipline and masses of open space and oxygen.
Again, I don’t know if it is an excuse, and I don’t want to use it as one, but I was lying half asleep on the couch in our lounge room, one pretend eye on the kids, the other in dreamland, when Dean walked up to me and blew a trumpet in my ear. The little devil. I don’t know if he realised what that does to a giant sleeping eardrum? To any eardrum? To the daughter of beasts?
I sprung up and walloped him hard all over his nappy covered bottom... Mum, Mum, Mum, Dad, Dad, Dad, coming out all over in me again, until something, probably the yelping tears and the sound of a child, my own child Sarah pleading, begging me to stop, brought me to a halt.
I looked at both of them, Sarah and Dean, and felt guilty. Guilty before her as well as before my little boy that I had damaged. Back to my senses, once again I had to apologise – and once again I did it without material or sweet-tasting things. Once again, I did it without begging. Or expectation. And once more I gave that guarantee: I would never do it again.
This time I kept my word. This isn’t to say they didn’t continue to get the odd hiding. But not like that. Nowhere ever near like that. And they only got it when I had judged, after the best judgement I could make in the time allowed, that it was necessary.
That firm discipline – combined with the effort and time I put into their school and schooling – seemed to bring off a pretty well rounded upbringing.
In the end, my eldest daughter, Sarah, aced her classes most of the time – was at any rate totally an “A-plus” student, worked obsessively, and eventually graduated from The University of Queensland with physiotherapy – honours. It seemed the harder the birth the saner or at least the cleverer they came out.
My second daughter, Ruth, although also a diligent student fell into some difficulties in her Senior year – her grades went right down in the last half of the year – but she immediately got a job and came back to her education soon after her days of trauma. She is happily married now and firmly Christian and religious. Even today it saddens her that I haven’t taken the Lord as my Saviour.
She believes, as a result, I won’t go to Heaven. But I believe I will be fine. Belief in myself is what I have learnt. That is what I need, and with that belief the Universe will take care of me.
My daughter works as an administrator for the government – ironically, in their child safety section – keeping meticulous notes and files on the many aspects of child abuse cases. Talk about coming full circle.
Another full circle: Dean, my son, a mostly “A” student, followed his dad into the Air Force. He studied exactly the same course as Chris had done all those years ago, becoming an avionics technician. He loves it. His
moods are softer than his dad’s.
But also, not only encouraging them but encouraged by my three children in turn, especially my eldest, Sarah, giving me the confidence to push myself, I began to study, to further my own education. I started with short certificate courses and then slowly built my studies and training up. I finally qualified as a skilled and efficient (or so I like to think) teacher aide, a job that has kept me going to this day, even though my children are no longer at school.
To get to where they were, however, my children still had to live their lives, much of it with me as a single mum. And seeing my relationship with my parents, with my own family, they intuited there was more to my own growing up and becoming their mother than, to put it mildly and blandly, met even a child’s egocentric eye.
Particularly Sarah, maybe being the oldest, started being curious fairly early – asking questions. Only they were not the questions that a parent looks up in a dictionary or encyclopaedia, they were the questions I did not ever want to answer. Questions that brought back all the pain, the dirt, the anguish, the unknowing shame.
I had kept it all secret, so, so secret, I did not ever want my children or anyone else to know who did not already know. No one was talking about it any longer, I was happy with that, my secrets were my own.
How could it all suddenly – like a rogue storm cloud – spring into the air above us again?
47.
You make the best of things. You try to sort out the worst. I have done my best to scrape away the past, to bury it in the ground at my feet, but eventually, in some way, at some time, it comes back and grabs you like spikes at the ankles.
I made a point of teaching each one of my children three things: 1.) Your body is your body and no one else has a right to touch it without your consent.
2.) Always stand up for yourself. It doesn’t matter how big they are: Stand up to em. As I had learnt, it frightens them away. Even the big ones.
And finally, 3.) I taught them, if there is ever anything bothering you, tell me, and tried to make them feel safe and comfortable enough to do so.
But knowing children, in case they didn’t feel comfortable telling me, I taught them this: If you can’t come to me, that’s fine, but make sure you go and speak to someone – an adult person. Someone you think you can trust. And keep talking until you have been heard. If you are not satisfied with the response, choose another adult person until you feel you have been understood.
I made sure my bedroom door was always open to them.
With this background, Sarah, nine, came home from school camp one day and told me that one of the kids in her class was very upset.
‘Something very terrible is happening to her, Mum. Something to do with her stepfather.’
I stared down at her, every fibre in my being knowing, already wriggling. ‘Yes...’
‘Everyone knows, Mum... but nobody will say anything.’
Oh my God, I thought. Oh my God, here we go.
‘He’s probably hurting her in some way, Sarah, and she just doesn’t know how to deal with it.’ I tried to talk in a way sufficiently responsive but uncommitted enough for the subject to be dismissed and forgotten about.
She stared back at me. ‘How would you know that, Mum?’ Just like that – a child’s adult-eye to a mother’s dishonest eye. ‘How would you know that, Mum?’
‘I just know, sweetheart. I know.’
‘Well, you tell me how you know, Mum. I want to know how you know.’
She wasn’t letting me off the hook. Not in any way. It was obvious to me she knew more than she was letting on, in fact knew, at the least, a lot more than I thought she knew about that awful word “hurting”.
But I did not want to continue that conversation, not at that time. Not with Sarah so young and innocent. I still felt too ashamed. Was too afraid that my own dark ghosts, my own lies and deceptions and hurts would come bumbling from my lips and I would not be able to control what I said.
I was having counselling at the time, but there was one thing I still did not want, even though the counsellor gave me “the permission and the power” to confess it, was for my children to know.
I could stand up to my father, the culprit, the beast, “the murderer”, but the wounds were still too raw to tell my children. Still too close to the veins to wipe away the veneer of innocence and joy when they greeted their tall as a house, loving and jokey Grandad – their “Grandy”, as they affectionately called him.
The grandfather they looked up to with the awe of puppies.
I tried, strategically, feigning disinterest, to leave it more or less at that, explaining to Sarah a little further what I thought she already knew, that that girl’s stepfather was hurting his stepdaughter by touching her without having the permission I always warned about. But exactly how he was touching her was not for me to say.
She gazed at me sceptically, and I felt my heart diving. I had to tell her something more. It was also important, I could see it in her bloating face, that I did something. Did something rather than just listen and feel sorry and turn my cheek.
She was eyeing me with those blue, doe-like eyes of hers, and they were insistent, not letting go. Eventually I told her, yes, I would do something and resolved at that moment that I would. I would phone the police – the police – because, I had to be honest with her, her school friend was obviously feeling so much pain she felt compelled to tell her mates about it.
My decision, my decisiveness, made Sarah happy. Her eyes finally let go of mine, seeing I was doing something about it, actually willing to stand in the road for someone else.
That same day, I called the local police station, albeit anonymously, and was put through to the Protective Behaviour Unit. I told them what I had heard from my daughter, and, in the end, in the weeks ahead, that family was successfully investigated. That is to say, The Devil, the Dark Perpetrator within had been brought into the daylight, and there was some justice done. The stepfather was brought to heel, made to confess, and desist. One hopes forever.
But Sarah never let up. This idea of “hurting” and “being hurt” by being “touched” was growing in her mind. I think too, even at her young age, she was seeing in my own bulging lips that they were thick with shame, guilt, there was something wrong, something I was hiding.
Sarah was intuitive for her age – there was just nothing I could do about it. And over the next days, weeks, months, she kept at me, kept at me as badly as any obsessive child over a toy they desperately wanted. She kept asking about “hurting” and “touching”, and how I knew so much about it.
One day, it must have been as long as a year later, Sarah, ten then, Ruth, eight, I decided I had had enough of the questions. It was time to speak. I knew the truth, at least some of it, a small quantity of it, had to come out. Dean, my son, was still far too young, so I sat my two daughters down on a kitchen bench and told them as simply as I could, my story.
‘When I was a little girl,’ I told them, seeing them peering up at me from their miniature two-seater wooden bench, ‘I was touched by someone... in the wrong way. You know, in that way I said to be careful of. In my private parts. Like that girl at your school.’
‘By who?’ Sarah’s response, in her typical child-adult way was like an exclamation mark I couldn’t get around.
I shook my head. ‘That, I am afraid, I can’t tell you.’
It hit me like a massive rock, just how hard it was to tell anyone, to tell my children something that might crush them, that would definitely change their world, which would destroy the mystery and joy in it. How could a simple truth be so difficult – that the person responsible was the lovable, affable, always ready with a joke creature whose head reached so high into the air at times it looked like it actually touched the sun.
‘Tell us, Mum. You have to!’ It was Sarah, coaxing.
I could see the concern, something motherly in her, something protective and at the same time sharp and already mature and judgemental abiding
in her. Next to her, I saw Ruth, eight, her long flowing hair like a doll’s, her still feline greenish-blue eyes interested but not as interested, her eyes merely following her older sister but not caring in the same way.
All I knew at that time was that I did not want to reveal the truth to them – I did not want to devastate, did not want to shatter that “Father Christmas/Tooth Fairy” illusion for either of them. I did not want them to see their grandad – their loving “Grandy” – for what he was, a monster. Not yet. Not yet.
‘The only thing I can say,’ I eventually struggled, ‘is that you are safe... safe from the person. I can assure you... you will always be safe from that person.’
It is so difficult this thing – to shatter illusions. To shatter a child’s illusions about people they cherish and love. It is even more difficult when the person is a relative, is a part of their skin and blood. A part of the same seed.
As with all the exotic lies we tell in order to keep our children happy, I wanted my children to be protected from the real world, from the real beasts in their family tree for as long as possible. I looked especially at my tough little interrogator, Sarah.
‘Sweetheart,’ I said, ‘all you need to know is that I’m not hurt anymore. I’m fine now. So, there’s nothing to worry about. Everything is okay.’
She and her younger sister trundled off then, into the garden to play, perhaps even, by the looks of their body language, to ask questions between themselves. And in fact that is probably just what happened – because it was obvious Sarah was not satisfied with my explanations or my reasoning. In the weeks and months that followed, she still never let up, still kept asking, ‘Who did this thing to you, Mum?’
She would ask at bath-times or bedtimes or in those quiet moments when I thought I was safe. ‘Why did they do it to you, Mum?’
Shaking my head, I would shush her quiet, but eventually in her grown up-child way she would continue by saying, ‘My mum and dad would have protected me.’ And then she would give a wry smile. Even at her age, a wryness on the lips.