Scars

That honours the scars of suffering transformed

The thing that abuse teaches you better than anything else is to doubt yourself. In writing about it, I have found myself wondering whether my child-mind has overstated the events of my childhood, whether it was actually as bad, as painful or as distressing as I remember it to be.

The whip-called-martinet that was made and used at home did not resemble the pictures on Wikipedia. It was sturdier, bigger, the hollow handle was made from some kind of metal piping. The cords were made of tough leather cord, square on the cross-section, cut diagonal at the tips. And those tips bit.

I remember this. I remember the pattern of the stripes on my legs and the bruises and the broken skin and the length of time it took for those wounds to heal. Weeks not days. And I have understood, for the first time I think, the severity of the whipping.

So for the first time in my life, I took a mirror and looked at the back of legs. And yes, right there in the places I remember the lacerations, are scars.

I have real scars. They are evidence of real abuse.

My memory is accurate. I have not imagined that any part of this was worse than it really was.

I don’t want to overstate the whip-called-martinet. It is not the whole of what happened, but it’s the part I can tell that people might understand. It was an infrequent event that punctuated a span of experience that is so distorted and overwhelming and incomprehensible that I may never find the words to convey it. But the whip-called-martinet was a tangible expression of every other thing that lay behind it – every thought, word, deed that caused a whip to seem acceptable to those who wielded it. And it was in those thoughts, words, deeds that the greatest injury was done to the child who was me.