I grew up in severe Domestic Violence in the early 60's when race riots in England were the talk of politics and Enoch Powell made his famous 'Rivers of Blood' speech (1968). My mother is a petite red haired, Irish Catholic from Ennis, County Clare and my father is a tall, chocolate colored Yoruba Nigerian. They met and came together in turbulent times. My parents faced disgust and social isolation to be together. The story goes that my alcoholic Irish grandmother died falling off a Peat Bog Cart and breaking her neck when she heard the news that I, a mixed race child, had been born to her daughter. My brother was born soon after.
I don't know when the violence began or when it had seeped so deep into my consciousness that it became the air I breathed, but I have clear memories of my mother, carrying my brother, with a swollen lip and black eye. I have vivid memories of hiding underneath the kitchen table with my little brother wanting to protect him so bad it hurt. Running out in to the street, with bare feet in pajamas, my mother always silently crying with a misshapen face, memories of blood covering my hands...... there was the time my dad threw the TV out of the window from the top floor of our three storey house because I had said I was glad the 'News' was over and DR WHO was coming on, my mother tried to stop him from lunging at me and he broke her arm over his kneethe sickening 'snap' followed by the scream of pain..or the time he held her head between his knees as he stood over her and repeatedly pounded her head with the leg of the bed that had broken off, a solid wooden leg with the circumference of a fist, or the time he beat my brother so badly in the bathtub as he tried to climb out because the water was too hot, of my mother pleading and crying with my brother to please open his swollen shut eyes and she would buy him some ice-cream, of trips to the hospital with my aunt Florida, me, my brother and my mother, broken, weeping, exhausted from the effort of escape. By the time I was six it was normal to always be ready to run to rescue or escape, bodies with a constant flow of adrenalin, fuelled by uncertainty and fear.
My children ask me why I don't really like roller coasters or Ferris wheels, Why would I use such a ride to get the rush others get only when they are riding? I have that rush in my veins, in my bones, in my brain, all the time, my body believes that 'the rush' is the normal state for it to be in, even now. Therapists call it Hyper Vigilance, I call it normal, watching, waiting for the attack . My memories that cause me to stop in my tracks as someone walks determinedly toward me, they call PTSD. 'Oh My God! What are they doing? Why are they coming toward me? Is his fist balled up? Are his teeth clenched and his face squeezed up in that horrible mask of pre-punch delivery?' What came first, the ADHD or the Adrenaline? The depression or the Knowledge that somehow you were not like other people, they could think things through without making themselves. They can relax if someone starts shouting and not feel threatened by every sound or movement they perceive. My brain and body are rarely at rest. It's not like the descriptions of possible insanity, it is no flight of incoherent thought, on the contrary, the thoughts are coherent and logical, they just flow at such a swift rate it takes prescribed 'speed' to slow it down and give the opportunity for focus, concentration on one thing at a time and not the cacophony of thought , movement, sound and distraction that make up the tapestry of my world. I dare not focus on any one thing, what if the attack comes from a different direction and I am unprepared. As a child you learn to keep your important things nearby even in sleep, as an adult it doesn't change, just in case you have to get up and run, for rescue or escape.
And yet, my dad could be a very caring man, he would come home from work and bring my brother and I a red lolly (ice pop) and a bar of chocolate. He taught me how to ride my bike without training wheels, he let me have a cat and later, a dog. He would take us to the movies and to parks. And I love him. But the same man punched me backward off a six foot high wall with a fence behind it because I was sitting on the wall talking to one of the boys in the neighborhood, I was twelve. I never saw the punch coming. I landed on the steel fence, it bent with the impact. Then I had to limp home, unable to walk properly right behind him knowing there was worse to come, praying that my mother would not try to intervene, that only made him madder and she ended up beaten, ' just let me take it mom, please, it will stop sooner, I don't want you to die'.... That sadness, that feeling of impending doom, of loss, of grief, it never leaves you. I have learned to live with it, I wonder how on earth I carried it around as a child when I can just about bear it now.
There is life though. I am determined that children should not have to suffer from the long term effects of DV. I don't know yet how or what I can do on a bigger scale but it will come to me. Make it Stop is a good theme, trouble is, it never stops once it has happened to you.