My Story
As I write this story I’m aware of the themes of cycles of having wanted to start a new life and a search for new beginnings many times in my life.
My parents were immigrants. I was born in Sri Lanka, my mother was half Sinhalese, half Scottish and my Father was a Burgher. They left Sri Lanka, to move across the world to a new land, for a new beginning and to start a new life. We moved to Melbourne, Australia. I was three years old and my brother six months.
Later, my beloved Scottish Grandmother (who I called Grams) who we had to leave behind when we migrated also left Sri Lanka and came to live with us. A year, to the day of our arrival in Australia, my younger sister was born. My parents were so very young and their hope of a new start, a new beginning was not to be. There was too much stress, too many obstacles, our family was so dysfunctional.
I know, I know, people say everyone's family is dysfunctional but mine was dysfunctional in the extreme. My parent's because of their own histories of trauma and abuse made our home a living hell. We were subjected to every form of abuse you could imagine, physical, sexual, verbal and emotional. The domestic violence was so intense it just became normal.
So we were living in a new country with extended family as my Paternal Grandparents were also now living in our house. There were five adults and three children, living in a large, five bedroom house in the South Eastern suburbs of Melbourne.
My father beat my mother constantly. No event was sacred, birthdays, Christmas, parties, bar-be-cues, every happy occasion ended in a beating. My Mother couldn't take it anymore and simply collected my brother and I at school one day, in a taxi. My grandmother was in the taxi too, ashen faced holding my four year old sister. My Mother spoke in hushed whispers and told us not to ask any questions.
Two of my Mum's work friends helped us out and were so good to us, providing us with a home until my Mother could legally get custody of us. We were hiding out like fugitives for I don't know how long until the five of us moved into a tiny two bedroom flat. We left our friends behind in the neighbourhood and we moved to a new school so lost our friends there as well.
My father remained in our large house with my dog and his messed up parents.
We had been in our new home for about a week and on the Sunday my father had his first legal visitation with us. We were supposed to go to Sunday school in the morning as our new school wasn't Catholic and then go out with him afterwards. That Sunday never came.
He turned up the night before to fight with my Mother and things turned ugly. He stabbed her to death and took his own life with the same knife in front of my younger brother, sister and I and my Grandmother. I was eight, my brother five and my sister four. That night changed my life forever.
We didn't know where we were going to live or who we were going to live with. We became wards of the state. Luckily, my Grams got custody of us. I breathed a sigh of relief believing life would be ok for us but again it wasn't to be.
After the murder/suicide life drained from her and she lost the will to live. She had a heart attack, was hospitalised for Gallstones then developed lumps in both breasts. She had a double mastectomy.
My life at nine comprised of taking care of my younger siblings. Getting them up in the morning, giving them breakfast, getting them ready for school. I would help Grams bathe and be scared of the angry, red scar where her breasts used to be. She was so frail and weak every day and it broke my heart to see the once large, jovial, happy woman I adored, a skeletal shell of herself.
I would often have to skip school to go with her to specialist appointments or sit with her in the hospital while she had chemotherapy. The other useless, dysfunctional adults around me, left me to fend for myself with my Grandmother. Because she was my Mum’s Mum and my Mum was blamed for all that had happened, my poor Grams was seen as the enemy. It wasn't much of a life for a nine year old and my childhood was over and I was already an adult but I would have done anything for my Grams.
I thought things would get better at home but they never did. Grams succumbed and lost her battle with breast cancer when I was ten. My paternal grandparents took over our care for a year and that was a nightmare.
My Dad's sister and her husband and my cousin moved into our house and the domestic violence continued. My Uncle hit both my Aunt and my cousin, who was a year older than me. My Aunt hit me and my cousin daily. My cousin suffered from severe depression and never really recovered from our childhood.
She died when she was fifty leaving her own daughter motherless, just as my siblings and I were left motherless. My remaining family members don't seem to be able to heal and the cycles just seem to continue and repeat.
By the time I was twelve years old I had been raised by five personality disordered people, a combination of both Narcissistic Personality and Borderline Personality Disorder. Life at home continued to be a living hell. The only reprieve I had was I went to a great all girls catholic school that was filled with loving teachers, who looked out for me, and friends that I loved and adored and made life somehow bearable until school ended with year twelve.
My friends like me were also experiencing severe trauma and abuse at home and initially it bonded us but eventually pulled us apart.
I made new friends at University but they weren’t the same friendships I had at school. The bond was nowhere near as strong. I was working full time and studying part time to complete by Bachelor of Arts Degree and the daily abuse continued until I simply couldn’t take it anymore.
In a convoluted plot to leave a very traditional, controlling Sri Lankan family where the only way you could leave home was to get married and I was gay, I left Melbourne and moved to Sydney on the graduate program with the company I was working for. It was the only way they would let me go. I had completed my BA and my Aunt & Uncle believed I was only going for two years. I knew I would never come back.
So I was twenty two when I left Melbourne to move to Sydney to get away from the daily abuse. I moved away because like my parents I needed to start a new life.
