Child Abuse Story From Alyce

by Alyce
(Adelaide, Australia)

I can't use my real name because I am too scared my parents will read this. It was not my father who was the cause of the abuse, it was my mother. I wanted to do something. I wanted to make it stop but I was only six, and my mother was mentally ill. She did things that I haven't really come to terms with yet, and she's said things that will always haunt me.

Since I was about six I have been bearing the brunt of an undiagnosed mental illness (possibly multiple personality disorder). It is only through therapy that I can remember what happened. They were memories of constant family violence. She would scream at me for hours on end, for things that were in her head. If I didn't say sorry she would beat me. On the odd occasion I walked in on a fight with my dad lying on the floor and her standing over him holding a knife, so I ran over and pushed her away. I ran over broken glass and then she started at me. She came towards me and hit me. She still had the knife in her hand so I ran away but she followed. She hit me so badly that I wasn't allowed out the house for a week. It happened all of the time and I thought until very recently that it was my fault. Everything I did turned into a fight, and every fight was based on something I did. I was told I was worthless, I was dirty, I was a lying trouble maker. She would hit me, repeating those things and would make me say it. It was the only way to make her stop, so I said it.

She threw a knife at me when I was 17 years old. Her eyes still haunt me. I was looking into them and they were so full of hate and anger that it was not my mother I was looking at. I hurt me so much and I felt so torn. She has been committed twice and both times I was ignored and she was released. It really hurts me because I am a psychology student and I know that she can get help, but she blames me for everything and denies she has a problem. She's put a knife to her wrists in front of me and I walked away and said nothing because I was angry. I still see her holding that knife yelling at me and putting it to her wrist, like I was the reason she wanted to do it, and I did nothing because I didn't care.

Since then I have remembered that I was sexually abused by her, but because it was a repressed memory I am unsure of its truth. However, more recently I was able to get her committed again and at that time I asked my father if there was anything he wanted to tell me. He told me that she had tried to drown me in the bath when I was little, that she had put a knife to my throat, that she had tried to strangle me. I asked if there was anything else. He could not make eye contact with me. So I knew the answer was yes. A week after that I moved out.

Both my parents are teachers. I don't understand how she could treat me like a piece of trash one second, and then want to hug and kiss me the next. More to the point, I don't know how my father could stand there knowing that she was molesting me, knowing that she was beating me for no reason. I was six years old and I was protecting him, but no one was protecting me. She still tries to hit me, and she is still verbally abusive to me, but at least I know that I can get away because I don't live there anymore. She has taken so much from my life and I am trying so hard to piece it all back together, but all my friends have gone long ago because they got sick of it all. So I have my psychologist, but apart from that there is no one. Some days, I want to talk to my mum and have her hug and kiss me, for her to make me feel happy and to take away my pain. She was meant to protect me and she took everything away, and I want her to pay, but I can't bring myself to do anything about it.

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