My Life

This is a reprint of an article that I wrote in 2010. At that time, after I posted it; my family was outraged. How dare I air our "shit" in public. How dare I speak of the bad things done to me without telling of the bad things I had done. When told I was doing it on the recommendation of a therapist the comment was "Your therapist is an ass."  After that my family decided to publically ridicule me. They said I deserved it for putting my crap out there. It was "MY" crap. I should be able to tell my own story without fear. Without having to tell yours. What happened was I went into a pretty severe depression for more than 2 years. I don't know how I survived.. It had to be God and I give him the glory as nothing else was able to reach my mind. It was Him and I in a battle for my life. I reprint it below.

Me at Four, even then I never smiled

 I would look at my brother with love and encouragement “you can do it”. My eyes, brimming with tears so heavy that I didn’t dare blink unless a tear would stray down my face and it would all start again. I couldn’t swallow because of the enormous lump in my throat. I think that lump was full of the tears I couldn’t cry that got collected on the inside. My hand would reach out to hold his and comfort him, but then I wonder if I did it because I wanted to live. If he lost it, we were doomed. If I lost it we were doomed. I didn’t want to die, but today could be they day. Then there were the days when I really hoped that line would be crossed so I never had to go through that hurt, the pain of the beatings, the screaming, the terror and the fear.

My profile picture shows a little girl that already knew what her life would be and she’s sad and she is vigilante. I want to rescue her! Shortly after this photo was taken we moved to a tiny mountain town. We had an airstream trailer that dad was working on. We heard the biggest explosion and it was like the air was sucked out of the room. My dad came to the door and he was badly burned. My dad was in shock, he didn’t speak, his eyes were wide, and he stood like Jesus with his arms outstreached with his skin all pink, red, and black, and falling off. My brother and I started to cry.

Later my mom came home without my dad and my brother and I start to cry again. I was just 3 (almost 4) and he was only 1 (almost 2). Well, she started to scream at us for crying. That she wasn’t going to get stuck with a bunch of crybabies and we better hope that he gets better, because if he didn’t, we didn’t have a mom either. We really started to cry and she hit us and pulled out hair and told us to shut up. We ended up on the floor in a corner, clinging to each other. I was whispering to my baby brother that it was okay and that I wouldn’t let her hurt him and I would take care of him. I told him that I loved him and he didn’t have to cry. He nodded his head, and his finger came up to take away a tear that rolled down my face. She told us to come out of the corner and come eat our dinner. As we got close to her she yanked us by the arms and we started to cry again. Then it started. She told us she warned us and obviously we didn’t want her for a mother. She tied us to the kitchen chairs and then built a fire in middle of the kitchen and then left the house. I can’t tell you the depth of our fear, the screams and screams, that wouldn’t stop. The fear I had for my brother, who was just a tiny baby. I was supposed to protect him. She eventually came back because she “loved us”. If we promised to be good and not cry, she would put out the fire. This is the first memory I have of my life on earth.

Later ended up being abandoned in a hotel room in Calgary. I don’t know how long we were there until the police came. They took us the Calgary Creche orphanage and when they tried to take my brother from my arms I screamed and fought and they decided to let us stay together. By morning, we were in separate rooms. More people telling us lies. There was a plate glass window that separated boys from girls, and I could see my brother crying. I went over there and climbed in the crib with him so he wouldn’t be afraid . The nuns found me and beat my butt and made me feel so ashamed, because “Girls don’t sleep with boys”.  Are you kidding me? I was 4 and he was 2. We were siblings! I had orders from the “Punisher” to take care of him. Do you have any idea what she can do to me? Eventually we went back home with her. I don’t know how or why. I had just turned 5.

We moved into the house in small prairie town. It had a dirt cellar which became our place of terror. We would get pushed into the cellar and the trap door closed. There was no light as the bulb had been removed and we would stand there in the dark. We knew there were salamanders and spiders and were too afraid to sit on the steps, because there were webs behind them, and possibly even mice. Hours and hours and hours. Our legs would ache. We’d have to pee!! We’d be hungry, tired, and sometimes terrified. Something would brush you leg, or arm, face and the fear was bigger than anything you could imagine. The screams were primal and came from somewhere so deep within our souls. And no one heard them. Not a single person. The next favourite place was the coal shed. I would have to stand in the coal shed with my shoes, and white socks. I’d be told to not move and if I got dirty, well...The slightest move caused coal dust to rise up in the air. I never won this one. From the shed to a beating. That’s the way it went. I learned to disassociate from the beatings and the horror. It was like I was watching it from somewhere else and they couldn’t get me. A verse from a poem I wrote:

You never touched that little girl

She’s safe somewhere in a another world

I kept her safe from your evil hands

And the things that she can’t understand
I taught her how to run and hide
And locked her somewhere safe inside

Many bad things happened in that house. We then moved to the big house. Let’s see. In that house my mother stabbed my father with a knife. We then moved to another province and life was even worse if you can imagine.

There is a story that has been in our family about me pinching my sister. It was blown way out of proportion to what actually happened. Yes, I pinched her. What sibling hasn’t pinched, poked, or done something to their sibling? But this pinching has been heaped on me by mother about what a horrible nasty person and related and embellished to my sister. It was a Pinch!! One Pinch!! My sister was were really annoying that day, and I pinched her! End of story. I am sorry. What wasn’t told was another day, that dreadful horrible day, when I didn’t clean the kitchen to her specification. You know how she could always find a finger print, a hair. She told me that day that if I didn’t do it proper she would kill me. Well, it wasn’t proper. I’m now bargaining for my life, but she has other plans. Since it was my fault, and since I would be dead, then she didn’t want any of her kids and would kill them all. Since it was my fault, I would get to watch her. She picked up my sister who was just a few months old and the knife was above her head and I started screaming and sceaming and screaming.  I could not stop and I pushed her. She yelled at me to stop, but I couldn’t, then she said she would kill me first and shut me up and she grabbed me and the knife was above me and still I scream. I scream until everything goes black and I don’t remember. Then there were the days with guns when she was going to kill our stepfather. “Don’t let him in” she says. If you let him in, I will have to kill you too.” We were beaten so hard with the belt and the piece of conveyor belt, that not only were there welts, but the skin would break and we would bleed. During those times we would be kept home from school. When she did send us back to school, the punishment would continue. We weren’t allowed to bath, or change our clothes. We wore the same things day after day. She would do spot visits to school, with “I forget to give them their lunch”, “They forgot a book”, etc., so she could check if we changed on the way to school.

Then there was the day when I was nine, when she made me watch her die. I was a few minutes late coming home from school, so therefore I didn’t love her. If I loved her I would do what she said. If I didn’t love her, then she didn’t want to live. She told me to sit on the chair and not leave it. She had a knife and told me if I got off the chair she would kill me instead. She reclined on the couch and took a bunch of pills and started to die. I pleaded with her, I wanted to get help and every time I went to stand up, she raised the knife.  My dad got home in time to take her to the hospital. She spent a long time in the hospital

My dad worked out of town a lot. He built roads, dams, worked on oil rigs, logged, farmed. We didn’t see him often, so I don’t think he had any clue. He was always good to us. We loved him very much. Our parents divorced when I as 10 and only saw my dad once more before died when I was 13. My mother hid us from him.

My brother and I shared some really hard things. There were six of us who were severely abused, but it was a little different with the two of us. We were the eldest and the first. We shared secrets that we have never told to the world, for we were sure that no person would believe us. He was 11 and I was 13 when we were told it appeared that we had PTSD. When I was 17 and he was 15 we were told that we did had PTSD. That is when we both left our house of horror. What led up to that event was a particularly bad day for me. I wasn’t allowed to go to school, and there was screaming and the proverbial “mopping of the floor” with me. Right at 9 she told me to get my sorry butt off to school and to get out of her sight. I opened the cupboard and saw her pills and took every one of them and left for school, but instead went into the bush to die. My brother Lawrence had had a bad feeling when he left for school and waited for me. He knew. He got me to help, came with me to the hospital. The doctor talked to us and told us of PTSD. We knew our lives would never be the same. I went into the foster system, and he went to grandmas. He no longer would be beaten every singe morning. Every day he had the crap beaten out of him. I am grateful that he knew what would happen that morning, as I didn’t. We always had a close and spiritual connection, and I really miss him.

Years later I was cleaning my basement and I wanted to watch a show at 5 pm. Right about that time I got really sick. I don’t know what came over me, but I was really sick and had terrible pain in my stomach. It lasted for about 2.5 hours. About 30 minutes later the phone rang. It was a doctor in Lethbridge who called to say 3 hours earlier, my brother had been in a motorcycle accident and had died on the operating room table about ½ hour before. That spiritual connection was always there. He was 27 years old.

I have done the counseling, the psychiatrists, whatever has been suggested. I have overcome. I have moved on. I made it!! They didn’t win. Those that did the beatings, those that molested me, didn’t succeed. Now it seems the effects of Child Abuse are far reaching. If you have PTSD, it apparently never goes away. I never knew that. You can learn to control the emotional aspects, but the physical ones, you can’t. The dizziness, rapid heart rate, stomach, colon, inability to sleep is all PTSD and they were able to measure the amounts of chemical produced by me. They said when you experience a severe trauma, sometimes a switch gets turned on your DNA and it doesn’t get turned off. My body is so used to the flight or flight and it can not differentiate between good stress or bad stress. Other chemicals as well are all out of balance, that’s why the tremors and the dizziness, among others.  I am stunned that still goes on 40 years after I was set free. Is there such a thing a freedom?

The proof of some of it. My mom would take pictures of us. Here I am dressed in a diaper and pair of rubber paints after having a bed wetting accident. She was making fun of me in my princess headband with the rhinestones and wearing a diaper. She was asking me if she thought I was pretty. She said she was sending it to my teacher, and to the kids at school. She was sending to my grandma and grandpa, my aunts and my uncles, and all my cousins to show them what a beautiful crybaby princess I was in my diaper and rubber pants. A princess who "pissed the bed." I should be so proud of myself. Later on she sent me out the door just like that to go to school. I fighting and screaming to get back in the house. After a while she relents and lets me in to dress in proper clothes, but the horror for me, remained.

My beloved brother washing his clothes and blankets after his bed wetting accident. He must have been sick this day as he messed his pajamas. Later, my mother smeared the feces over his face. There is a photo of that but it is to disgusting to post. Just writing the words is disgusting enough. He is crying his poor heart out. How this could happen is beyond me. I am on the chair in the background with me feet up. I must have been "bad" as the only time my feet were up and on the chair is when I had to sleep on the chair. I tended to swing my legs and would bang the rungs, so I had to keep my feet up. To those in the world who claim it wasn't so bad, this is just a tiny peek at our lives. It was so much worse than this.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, I will overcome this too. The abusers have no power over me. None!! I have forgiven them, it now between them and God. I am praying for healing for my body that remembers the abuse. The things I cannot control.

“They have greatly oppressed me from my youth, but they have not gained the victory over me.  Plowmen have plowed my back and made their furrows long.  But the Lord is righteous; he has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.”  Psalm 129:2-4