Last night I was watching a documentary done by Louis Theroux where he was talking to paroled sex offenders in Los Angeles. These are people I read about every single day - deviant, deceptive people who prey on the young and innocent to gratify themselves with little or no regard for what their actions might do to others.
They're scum. Absolutely no doubt about it. How can I think anything else?
But one thing one of them said really struck me. He described his father as a "piece of shit" and his mother an "angel" and described being slapped on one side of his face and stroked upon the other. He broke down in tears, and in total anguish said " I'm tired of making decisions. I'm tired or not knowing which one's a stroke and which one's a slap."
It was one moment of total and complete honesty that really hit me, because in that moment I completely and totally understood what this man was talking about. He was describing my life.
Now dont get me wrong, there is NO excuse for this man's actions. None. Nada. Zip.
What I do identify with is this sense of complete and total confusion, uncertainty, bliss and pain. This was my childhood. On the one hand, I had a really lovely relationship with my grandparents, and lived a very privaledged existence in a way - I always had food on the table, a roof over my head, clothes, went to private school, and really had a very sheltered upbringing picking flowers and drawing rainbows.
And on the other hand, I had an alcoholic abusive father who beat up my mother verbally and physically, and after she left turned on me. As a child, I lived in constant fear, exacerbated even further by the persistent secret keeping between my parents and my grandparents - there was so many things I had to keep from my grandparents and vice versa, and any time I let slip something I shouldn't have said I would either dissolve into panic, or walk around with a sick, heavy, burning pain in my gut that sooner or later word would get back to the other and I'd be yelled at, belittled, slapped or hit. I was literally living between the stroke and the slap. I never knew what was coming next, I never knew what kind of mood my father and mother would be in.
As I got older and the abuse actively turned on me, this fear and panic deepened as the consequences got more serious and the violence became more frequent. I lived in a very lonely prison, and I was definitely not my own best friend.
I have come a LONG way since then, but every once in a while that panic and fear sets back in. And in little things too.....little worries, little fears. The other morning I accidentally broke a glass on the floor at work and just like I did when I was five I started apologising profusely and panicked a little...i pulled myself together, but it really took me straight back into that place. Sometimes I feel like I'm a world away from where I used to be, but in moments like that it's right there.
So what's my point? Well, I guess the point is that we abhor physical and sexual abuse, we are disgusted with violence against children. We condemn those who perpetrate bruises, broken bones, scratches, welts, sprains....I just wish that the same disgust could be shown for the true horror that is emotional, mental and spiritual abuse that is perpetrated upon children every single day through sheer uncertainty and instability in the home. I wish I could adequately describe for others the profound impact this kind of environment can have on a child, then on the pre teen, the teen, the young adult, the adult, the middle aged person, the old person. Children are sponges, they absorb the emotional life of their parents - when you take out your frustrations, pains, hurts onto your children, or ask them to keep secrets, you are creating permanent scars that no one can see. For you, it's one bad day. For them, it's a lifetime of confusion.
Sometimes it's not the stroke OR the slap that causes us pain - sometimes its having to live in between them both.
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