¶ … fighting and arguing my parents finally separated when I was thirteen. The final break-up was one thing, but all the events that preceded were as difficult to cope with. When I look back at the events through my childhood lens I can remember some things very vividly and some things are a blur. Growing into adulthood and trying to have a relationship of my own must have been affected by the incidents that occurred in the home during my early childhood years.
I was the fifth of my parents' six children and it is only as I became an adult and began to understand things that I realised what a burden it was on my parents, financially, emotionally and otherwise, to raise six children. So that by the time I came along they were already so stressed out. It must be therefore that from the time I was born there was tension and quarrelling in the house almost constantly. What was the most difficult to deal with was the violence. I am not sure when the physical
There were several instances since that and I can distinctly remember to this day how scared I used to be. Though I can't tell exactly what I was scared about- that my mother would be so badly beaten that she might die? That my father would turn his anger on one of us? That we were so little and helpless?
The one particular incident that I remember most occurred very late one night. The children were all asleep and I can only guess at what preceded the incident, but the memory started with my mother running from the marital bedroom through our room in the middle of the night. She was closely followed by my father with a strap beating her as he would one of us children. It was astounding to me that an adult would beat another adult in such a manner. Fear gripped me. All the siblings woke up and for a few short moments we all stood there paralysed by fear. Not one of us dared…
