Contains graphic imagery
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I remember being very lonely in my crib; and hungry. I have vivid memories of standing up in my cot screaming, singing & yelling. Clamour and chaos were survival for me. My racket would remind my mother I was there, but it also incensed her.
Sometimes she would respond with food, sometimes violence but her visits were reliably accompanied by a cacophony of garbled and discordant shrieking. It was language even though it hurt, and I would cry for a moment but soon be back up on my feet, howling at the moon, possibly begging for more. If I stayed down, I would sleep for many hours. Too many for a toddler. But I needed it. I look back now and I know that my mother had depression, anxiety and probably some kind of trauma response herself. My relentless defiance was something my mother coveted. She loathed my connection to light, beauty, joy, the stars and she, unconsciously, did everything she could to break me.
Between 0-3, loving attention was intermittent and conditional. Her fierce anger, vitriol, contempt and maliciousness toward me was the soil in which my heart and personality grew. It made me crazy; and it made me indestructible. I’m glad she started to leave me alone after that.
My environment was corrupt. I lived across the road from a large nature reserve about 600m wide by 1600m long. It was just bush with large telegraph towers planted through it. According to urban legend, Tommy Twohead and McGoofus McGhan lived there and they we not very nice to children. On the opposite side, was a large creek which was where criminals dumped cars, dead animals and sometimes, dead bodies. I saw my first dead body down there. It was tied to a telegraph pole and had its head blown off. No one ever talked to me about this so I thought it wasn’t something I shouldn’t talk about.
Every second house in my neighbourhood was doing something illegal and every other house was often their neighbours’ victim. Many times, I came home to a neighbour raiding our fridge or stealing our stuff and telling me “Don’t tell or I’ll KILL YOU!”. One time when I was 6, they grabbed one of my budgies out of the cage and wrung its neck in front of me, just to make a point. This same neighbour dragged me inside his house from the street walking home from school one day. He had my undies around my knees when another neighbour burst in and rescued me. A very lucky day.
Another example of my friendly neighbourhood is, on the night of a local football presentation the wrong person won “Best and Fairest”. A “hit” was put on them and drugged to the eyeballs, the hitmen ended up storming into the wrong house, the one I was staying in. At 7, I was already far too adept at far too many things. Within seconds I had my friend under the nearest bed, covering her mouth to stifle her screams because unfortunately, she caught sight of her innocent father being stabbed over and over and again. I held her mouth so hard it made her pass out. I thought I had killed her, but my mind was focused on remembering the description of the two men who entered the house. Their hair, t-shirt, shoes and even the make, model and licence plate of their car.
My friend woke up and screamed, attracting one of the hitmen into our room. His shoe was not 2 inches from my nose. All he had to do was bend down and we would have both been dead. I really believe he knew we were there and had decided that 2 little girls were not a significant threat, so he’d leave us alone. Lucky again. They left and I ran out to see “Ba” (my friend’s father’s nickname). I could see he was still breathing but he was in a pool of his own blood. I grabbed sheets and blankets out of the cupboard and covered and tucked him in, then called an ambulance, then the police.
Waiting for them to arrive the hitmen came back. As soon as I saw the car out the front I ran to the back door and let the two enormous Alsatians out which thankfully, was enough to deter them from entering again. I don’t know why they came back. It took the ambulance 30 minutes to arrive and the police 2 and a bit hours. They didn’t take my testimonial seriously because I was a kid and they left me and my friend in the house alone so we went to bed. It was close to 3am at this point. When I got home the next morning, I told Mum about it and all I remember is her SCREAMING at me, her face in mine “HOW COULD YOU?” and other words I didn’t understand and it was never spoken of again.
My big brother loved me. He would hold me and touch my nose and poke my chubby cheeks. He was gentle and sweet and everything I did made him laugh. But when I started to stand and walk things changed between us. I became a pet. A source of entertainment. The older I got the less he saw me as a feeling human I think. He used me as a guinea pig for horrible things like forcing me to put my nose in dog poo, he made me taste an ash tray and take down my pants and let the neighbour’s boy touch his willy on my bald mons pubis. He held the latter over me for more than 10 years. “Kylie, do this or I’ll tell Mum about ……etcetc.”
It got worse. He would come into my room as I slept and wake me by biting down on my neck because he knew I was scared of vampires. His brays and cachinnations were payment for my pain and fear. I thought the sun shone from his arse. He could tell me the sky was red and I would look up and say “Absolutely”. My brother grew up in the same house as I did but instead of being the receptacle for my mother’s anger, he was her surrogate husband because my Dad was rarely around. I think something happened to my brother when he was about 11 because he seemed to lose what little empathy he had.
He started to come into my room at night, it happened most nights. He would lie next to me and hold me, he would move around a lot and tell me everything is ok. He would get on top of me and make me get on top of him. I always had clothes on. I am so grateful for that. And it took many years to think about these things and admit to myself that sometimes, it felt good. This all happened under my mother’s nose, at least 4 nights a week for about 6 years until he moved out of home. It broke my heart when he left.
My Dad was a truck driver, a musician and an alcoholic and was very rarely home. Upon his arrival he would have a bag of chocolates and we would watch TV and eat them together, my sister, my brother and I and joke about how Dad’s big beer belly was our favourite pillow. My mother would be sitting at the dining room table seething. My Dad was as apparently clueless as my Mum when it came to my protection. He left me in the paws of some very sleazy and corrupt individuals in some very squalid and disreputable environments.
A time that I can talk about is when I was about 8. I was accompanying my father to a rehearsal. Dad got so drunk he couldn’t walk. I remember watching him crawl and fall toward the bathroom to use the toilet or perhaps to throw up. The moment he was out of the room, Dad’s bandmate came over to me, pulled down my pants and performed oral sex on me. He talked to me and gave me compliments the whole way through it. I remember that I felt completely helpless and that it tickled. Maybe it was only 5 minutes, maybe it was 15 but when we could hear Dad approach, he stopped, pulled up my pants, looked and pointed at me and mouthed “Don’t you say anything” with a menacing face.
By the time I saw Dad, it was like I had completely forgotten it even happened. Then Dad said it was time to go and he made me drive an automatic Kingswood from Blackheath to St. Mary's. I think this is where I really started to split. 5% of me was having a great time, 5% was trying to keep Dad quiet and the rest of me was in a heightened state of panic and terror and my hands, which had gripped a steering wheel without respite (for an hour and twenty three minutes according to Google Maps), were sore. That wasn’t the only time Dad left me in the hands of predators. I’ve never figured out whether he did it on purpose or not.
Read Part 2: The Abruptness of Traumatic Bullying
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