Cruelty

At what point did you realise

how terrible things were for me, for us? 

How long did it take for even one person to stop assuming the oddness of my behaviour was some weird personal quirk, and start noticing that it was the functional by-product of an insanity-making level of abnormality in my home life?

That weirdness grew like a spiny capsule around me, around my identity, and carved a shape into my life that was not my own. That wrong-shaped cavity around me went on to keep me disconnected from good things I may have welcomed into my life had that damage not been a permanent fixture of my experience. And I wonder how long those incorrect assumptions about me continued to affect the way other people responded to me? Did it keep me more socially disconnected than I might have been had I been ushered lovingly into the world by a family who cared for me and who accepted and loved the person I am instead of trying to mould me into a gross facsimile of an impossible standard? 

I cannot allow this rear-gazing contemplation of those past assaults to erode my satisfaction with those parts of my current life that are solid, joyful, loving and life-giving. But when the cruelty of la Narcisse’s recent actions summons forth the memories of the much greater cruelty that she perpetrated against me for many years, I cannot simply put that away again. I cannot make the fact of years of physical and psychological abuse and dehumanising neglect so small as to be unremarkable, unnoticeable, invisible like I did when my survival depended on it. Neither can I wear the chokehold of not talking, of not telling the people around me the bald facts of what occurred. 

And it is a fresh assault now to know that la Narcisse’s poisonous, mendacious narrative is being allowed to go unchallenged, protected by lawyers paid for with an inheritance that, without the lies and manipulations and abuses of the last 40 years, would have belonged to my siblings and I. It is a robbery akin to the repeated acts of financial abuse that la Narcisse perpetrated on me. So thus it is that I am now still being abused financially by la Narcisse, just like I was when she and my mother withheld all of my austudy and scholarship money, forcing me to use the birthday money sent by relatives to buy bus tickets and stationery, to pay for the only pair of shoes I owned, just to get to uni. (That’s the real reason I never completed a degree: her abuse. I wasn’t allowed to get a parttime job and continue studying. When I ran out of birthday money to fund my studies, she threw me out of the house). I am still being abused financially by her in the present like I was when she refused to let me have a dress for my graduation, when my grandmother offered to pay $100 to buy or make one, and instead I wore a $20 cotton sundress from kmart and a pair of sandals, even though I was the College Valedictorian. (That key moment in my life, which should have been one of celebration and well-earned pride in my success became one of debasement and humiliation, and that is the feeling I find in the memory of that event). I am still being abused financially by la Narcisse in her recent actions, just like I was when she sent us to boarding school but paid only a fraction of the required amount for allowances, so that we didn’t have money to pay entrance charges for the activities that all the boarders did on afternoons and weekends, or for food or other small expenses like things we needed for school. (An afternoon at the swimming pool is a lot less pleasant when you spend hours in the hot carpark without so much as a drink of water because you don’t have 50c to get in). And all the while la Narcisse continued to smoke, drink, eat steak, and visit the casino, so poverty was never the causal factor in the deprivation, despite her revisionist retellings. She simply assigned my siblings and I the very lowest priority and worth. Or maybe she just took some kind of sick satisfaction from the way her financial abuses always caused the maximum discomfort and distress to us. 

And that is the absolute truth of la Narcisse’s recent actions: they were cruel. They were crueller than necessary to protect her financial interests. They were crueller than necessary to punish me for hinting in writing about the nature of the physical violence that she committed, as I did on this blog and elsewhere back in early 2016. They were crueller than was needed to shore up her sense of being wronged by my eventual refusal to play along with her self-righteous claim to have been motivated by love and concern for my spiritual welfare. They were crueller than necessary to continue the lies she must have propagated within her own extended family, so that her relative, who was the person who agreed to contact us in the event of a crisis or death, as I discussed with my mother only weeks before she died, simply did not carry out that agreed role. (The identity of that relative and the job they do and the people they are close to all add layer upon layer of egregiousness to their willful non-action, and delivers its own cruelty). The truth is that la Narcisse has acted to inflict the greatest possible pain and distress even in the matter of the death of her lifelong friend and mother of her godchildren. And this doesn’t flatter her. She might think herself strategically clever as if her “success” justifies her cruelty. But she lives alone now, and she will likely die alone, and it will be cruelty that stands at her graveside where the mourners and loved ones would otherwise have been. 

But that is no comfort to me, as I stare into the foaming pit of 40 years of unrelenting abuse and calculated viciousness that has left scars on my body and my mind. I have worked hard to calm that seething past, to acknowledge it and leave it be, without telling all of it, and yet it still writhes and breathes, enlivened by these last acts of unnecessary cruelty. It is a lonely thing to have lived through such painful experiences and then discover that the people in your life have such a tiny comprehension of what it was that happened. The telling is never comfortable, but the silence is most painful of all.