Content warning: This essay contains description of physical violence and forced confinement.
The earliest memory I can recall includes violence. I was sitting on my parent’s bed with my sister besides me and floral patterns on the bedspread. My parents were shouting at each other and my mother was crying. My sister was staring at them and crying too. I didn’t understand the situation, but I remember playing with some Hot Wheels. My father looked towards my sister and then began to walk towards us. He grabbed a plastic clothes hanger besides my sister. It was white. He went back to my mother with her hands covering her face and began to hit her with it. My sister covered my eyes with her hands. End of memory.
For a time, my parents lived separately. I didn’t understand it at the time, but the reason was my father’s violence towards my mom. I understand now that all the hospital visits to see my mom was a result of her numerous suicide attempts. I used to think she just a got sick more often than others.
When I was six my mom left town. I didn’t understand why but I felt abandoned at the time. I didn’t see her for more than two years after that.
The threat of violence constantly loomed over my head growing up. My dad used to complain that I didn’t participate in enough sports and that I was lazy. I didn’t, and I was, but what does a seven-year-old know? I remember fearing the end of term report cards. If we didn’t get adequate grades, we would be hit. Eventually my sister figured out that if she covered her cheeks with her hands it wouldn’t hurt as much. I copied her. My dad soon caught on and would promise not to hit us if we put our hands down. Being children, we trusted him. It would almost always result in a harder slap.
The school I attended had a strict uniform for boys’ Grades 1 to 6 —shorts and a short-sleeved white button-up shirt. If I sat in the front seat of the car and my dad picked me up from school, he’d insist we play a game. He would hit my bare thighs. By the time we got home my legs were red and my eyes were too, I would cry as he hit me. Eventually all I did when I sat in the front was attempt to anticipate this ‘game’. He changed the rules on me when I got good at anticipating his ‘game.’ He offered me $10 if I wouldn’t squirm when he hit me, and I wasn’t allowed to cry. If I squirmed or cried, I lost the game.
Puppy dog syndrome is how I like to think about my other experience at home — the idea that a puppy will return to its abuser even though it was beaten. And it will return with forgiveness and love. I knew that spending time with my father often resulted in getting hurt, even if it wasn’t always physical. I would return with love and affection and forgiveness. Because when you’re nine do you really know any better? On many weekends my sister would stay with my grandparents and I would stay with my dad. Because sometimes he was a good father.
On one weekend he had promised that it would be just the two of us. No sister to tease me and his girlfriend wouldn’t be there to get in the way of our father-son bonding time. He had lied, and his girlfriend was there. Being old enough to understand the betrayal and just starting to gain the confidence to ask questions, I asked why he had lied. What I received in return was a beating that I will never forget. He beat me outside in the garden where my crying wouldn’t get in the way of his girlfriend watching TV. He beat me with my toys, he beat with a hanger, and finally he hit me with his belt. The night ended when I wet myself from fear and was subsequently locked in a bedroom in the early evening. He unlocked me sometime late in the afternoon the next day.
That was home for me. From the ages of five to twelve I lived on and off with my father. The beatings weren’t a daily or even weekly affair, and they were slaps more than anything else. It was an experience I thought many others had. I’m glad I was wrong. Until I was thirteen, I didn’t know what it meant to have a non-violent relationship with my parents.
One of the best parts of calling a new place home is the change in routine and experiences that you have. Moving away from what I used to consider home was probably one of the best things that has ever happened to me. Making friends with people who don’t consider violence the norm is one of the many reasons I love where I am now. I enjoy the society and culture that University has introduced me to because of how different it is from the one back home. The general belief that things should be talked out instead of beaten in is something I never realized existed. Where a child’s game with their parent would more likely be a game of catch instead instead of slap on the thigh.
My new home is different in many ways that I don’t know to describe. It’s the things that I would never have thought would be appreciated and now sit at the forefront of my attention. Enjoying the company of others doesn’t include a nagging feeling that the situation could turn at any second. Someone having a beer doesn’t turn into someone else being hit. I can love those around me and in my home without being afraid that I may be doing the wrong thing and will get hit as a result. I no longer play sports because I fear a beating if I don’t, I play because I want to. At the end of the semester when my grades come out I no longer feel my father’s wrath. Now I feel a sense of accomplishment of what I have achieved. The change in my home has changed much more than my feelings towards activities and events. It has changed my personality, my sense of belonging and fundamentally who I am as a person.
I’m home now, I wasn’t before. Home for me is where you don’t get beat for asking questions. It’s a low bar, but it’s the only one I know.