Content note: This piece contains explicit descriptions of domestic violence.
My childhood is filled with happy memories. Playing with our rabbits in the garden, going to the toy shop on a Saturday, and always getting a McFlurry on the way home from school. Yet, the shadow of the violent domestic abuse my mother faced from my father is also ever present, as is the immense pressure I felt as the eldest sibling to try to keep my sisters safe. I remember many nights spent with us huddled in my bed to keep away from the turbulence, playing the TV extra loud to drown out the shouting. These are things no child should ever have to experience, and for me, the feeling of having to protect myself from a man I am close to has carried through to adulthood, even in the relationships I feel the happiest and safest in.
My earliest memory of my father’s violence towards my mother is from when I was four years old. I see glimpses and flashes of me, perched on a chair, while my father is strangling my mother against the wall.
I think about this memory often.
It’s only now, in my early twenties, that I realize abuse in my parents' relationship had probably been going on for a long time, probably before I was even born. I have so many questions – did this start before or after they got married? What was my mum feeling when she was abused for the first time? Why did she feel as though she couldn’t ’ reach out to anyone about it?
I could ask her all these things in person, but there’s a part of me that chooses not to. One, I don’t want to reawaken her trauma , and two, my siblings and I grew up to ignore that it was happening around us and remained in our little bubble of role-playing happy families. So, maybe I also don’t ask because I don ’t want to reawaken my own trauma, either.
I witnessed these instances of abuse once in a while during my later childhood as well, often after something had been brewing inside my father for a long time. This often resulted in smashed plates in the living room, broken glass in the kitchen, and my father then refusing to take me to my after-school lessons.
His violence was never targeted towards his children. In fact, he has never laid a finger on us: his abuse was reserved wholly for my mother.
My father is the most hardworking person I’ve ever known. He always had two jobs, one in the day and one at night. In this regard, he did anything to provide for his family. He was a refugee who had to flee war-torn Sri Lanka and immigrate to France on his own when he was only 16 years old. He’s described the horrific things that he saw during his escape to me; things that I couldn’t imagine I would have been able to comprehend as a teenager. I don’t say this to excuse his actions, but I do believe a lot of his violent actions result from the trauma that he still carries with him.
My entire childhood played out in stereotypical gender norms; my father went to work whilst my mother did all the cooking, cleaning, and looking after their children. My mum didn’t drive much during our childhood; something I thought was completely strange for a woman to do until I saw my uncle ’s girlfriend rock up to our house for the first time in her convertible when I was nine. My mum was also completely dependent on my father for money and support and a lot of the explosive abuse seemed to erupt from the former.
When I was ten years old, my parents got into a dispute just before we were about to leave the house for a birthday party. My father drove us to the party without my mother. I remember clear as day my father telling me that if I ever saw him behave that way again, I should call the police. He knew I’d never do that – I’d seen plenty of soap operas on TV that gave me the idea that one call to social services would result in my siblings and I being split up and taken away from our parents.
When I was eleven, I had worked hard to get accepted to a prestigious secondary school. The arguments and heated discussions stopped for a while after that, and what I took from that was the idea that the better I performed as a child, the longer we could remain happy as a family. After all, these disputes only happened because my parents wanted the best for their children. Right? That’s what we were led to believe.
Of course, they started back up soon enough, regardless of how well I did. As I became a teenager and my awareness changed, I also noticed that my mother was becoming stronger. Something in her sparked, so that she could start to fight back and keep my father from trampling all over her or locking her out of the house for not leaving him enough rice in the pan. The feminist in me roots for my mother, but her resistance only made things worse. There was an issue of money when she was at home looking after the children, but there was also an issue when she finally got a job and didn’t have as much time to do the cooking or cleaning. He was never satisfied. When I was fourteen, my mother became depressed and my father told her, “If you really want to go, just take one too many paracetamols.” I was terrified to come home that day; afraid I would find my mum dead.
You never do realize how much something has deeply affected you until you step away and look back. I was 21 when I moved out of home to a new city to do my master’s degree, and I spent a lot of time reflecting my childhood and how relieved and lucky I felt to be past that phase of my life. I looked into getting a therapist to talk about it with, but as a student I couldn’t afford it, so instead I channeled all that energy into something that was free: writing. I mapped out possible explanations of my childhood experiences and analyzed everything until I was finally able to start making some peace for myself.
But my parents’ relationship made me deeply insecure. I was insecure about so many aspects of my life. Insecure about the way I looked, insecure about my future prospects, and mostly insecure in my romantic relationships.
I dated a lot of boys more than my peers when I was a teenager because I didn’t get any validation at home, and I needed to take my mind off things. My only experience of romantic relationships growing up were those of my parents and grandparents, another deeply fragile relationship.
This history and its impacts were reflected in the way I behaved towards my boyfriends at the time. I never normalized violence or thought it was acceptable, but I had definitely picked up my father’s lack of positive feeling and support for his partner . I was distrustful, immature, and most of all, I lacked empathy – something that really wasn ’t embodied at home. My lack of emotional intelligence and my inability to express my feelings came from an atmosphere of having to hide in fear that anything you say will be taken out of context and result in your mother taking a beating for not raising you right. This trickled through and made me the kind of person that runs away from problems rather than confront them head on. I picked up on manipulation as well, but soon enough discovered that was not me.
I’m in my twenties now, and I’m in the longest and happiest relationship I’ve ever been in so far.
My partner and I have parallels from our childhoods which help us connect and understand each other deeply. I still have a lot of work to do, though. I cocoon when I have a big problem, and just like my father, I let myself brew up with anger or frustration before (metaphorically, not literally) slamming the door on someone. It took a long time to learn to create a healthy and secure relationship with my partner. I used to flinch or get ready to defend myself every time he raised his arm to do a mundane task or to just stroke my hair. I used to keep my feelings to myself to the point where he would think I wasn’t interested in him anymore. I never witnessed a healthy relationship, and so didn’t even know the qualities of a good one. It really took me a while to feel safe around him, without the thought that one day he might just flip out on me.
I fell in love with him when we both made a meal to have together – he helped me cook and clean up. I didn’t ever see my father do this unless he absolutely had to. I realize now what my boyfriend was doing was the bare minimum and an expected role of anyone, but until then I was oblivious to what a ‘normal’ relationship looked like.
After our first major argument, we didn’t speak for 3 days. That didn’t sit right with me. That’s exactly how my parents’ relationship played out and I didn’t want a repetition of that. So that evening, we spoke for hours about everything. There was no shouting, blaming, or violence involved – just two adults productively communicating about everything we were thinking and feeling. We do that often, and it leads us to be on the same page nearly all of the time.
A positive result of some of my childhood experiences is my independence and self-sufficiency – maybe because I don’t ever want to be stuck in a relationship like my mother was? My partner and I need each other, but we also appreciate our time alone. My parents are separated now and seem happier on their individual paths. I know I’ll never find out the true reasons behind my father’s actions, but I want the trauma of my past to end with me.
I want to leave you with a poem I wrote when I was 18:
Volcano
How still he lay.
No noise, no noise.
A surprise to us all for there was
no grumble, only poise.
We still made sure to creep around on our tiptoes,
for noise of any kind could wake him in an instant.
He woke up one day.
There were no stirs, however.
No noise, no noise.
Only the awakening of a looming figure
watching over us. Examining us.
Waiting to catch us off guard.
He stayed awake.
We went by our day silently and on edge,
He sat in our view growing impatient from
day to night and night to day.
But still there was no noise, no –
The grumbles began. An impending doom; a surprise we saw coming.
He roared, rumbled, screeched.
Molten substances of red, orange, yellow spat at us.
His grumble thundering in our ears.
But he could not catch us each time, no matter how hard he tried.
He couldn’t get us, he didn’t want to.
Instead, he destroyed our surroundings,
The furnishings of our home, the flowers of our bed.
Gone.
He sat in silence, voiceless.
His anger turned to sadness
whilst his sadness turned to pain
We waited for silence to return upon us.
We did not claim ourselves to be victims of his destruction.
We were just the trigger .
And with that, he lay dormant again.
The aftermath was peaceful.
He helped us plant our flowers.
We hoped the blossoms would appear this time,
before he came to destroy them once more.