Child Abuse Story From Andrew Richards Part 1

by Andrew Richards
(Sydney, Australia)

Well, as ASCA (Advocates for Survivors of Child Abuse¹) teaches us to do at meetings, I guess I'll start off this way. My name is Andrew Richards, I'm 29 years old and I'm a survivor of Emotional Abuse from the age of 6 to the age of 25 (and in the case of one family member, the abuse still occurs although the next time I see her things are going to be VERY different).

I'm not sure if I come under the heading of a success story yet- maybe I'm just a work in progress. All I know is that my life is changing and it will never be the same again.

My mother and father were both damaged people themselves but that's not my story to tell, but the end result of how it affected me was that for the first portion of my life, my father was disconnected from my life completely.

My mother was a different story altogether. Her child abuse had always made her feel like she had to be "the good little girl" and never caused anyone any trouble. Here was me, their only child with what would be diagnosed as ADD, and a questioning nature and naturally the two clashed. I remember flashes of things from early on and what as far as I can tell was a really happy childhood.

But all that started to change when I was 3. I remember sitting in my bedroom and hearing my parents screaming at each other. As a 3 year old I sat there unable to process everything but knowing that my happy and safe little home wasn't really all that happy.

As I got older, as an ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) child, I'd act up and at the slightest thing. My mother would be at me, trying to make my invisible as every other "normal child" disciplining me for the slightest thing. Before I knew it, I'd gone from loving my mother and feeling so close to her as a young child to resenting her by age 9 because I felt completely repressed whenever I was with her in public.

School became a place of bullying by teachers and students in primary school and by students in high school- as they either saw me as an easy mark or they couldn't understand my problems, or they didn't want to understand them.

Around the same time, when I was 6 and my oldest uncle and his wife, who'd kind of become the unofficial grandparents on my mother's side of the family with my grandparents dying the year before I was born. Funnily enough I don't remember it, but apparently at the time I'd said to my mother "Why don't my uncle and aunt love me any more?" and apparently I wasn't the only one.

What had happened that year was that their first grandchild had been born and suddenly he was the centre of their world. My first real nasty experience of that came when I was 10. I'd been given a couple of hand-held games that year for Christmas when their grandson took it off me and when I chased him to give it back, hid behind my aunt, who glared at me and screamed at me as to why I was picking on HER GRANDCHILD. When I pointed out that he'd taken the game and it was mine, she slammed it down on the kitchen bench screaming "Well take the bloody thing!" My parents were furious and wound up going home over it but that day would prove to change everything.

From then on in my family saw me as an annoyance to be silenced and shoved in the corner out of sight. Any dreams I mentioned were bitchily shot down. Any opinions I voiced were screamed down. It was so bad that at a family reunion i dislocated my foot during a family soccer match and when I said I couldn't walk, I was just told to deal with it. My cousins used to play a game of "Let's run away from Andrew". All through it, whenever I'd go to my mother who was there at the time for support over it, she'd turn on me. My father was so disconnected that half the time I don't know if he ever even knew what was happening. I quizzed one of my aunts about this once and was told, "It's not that we don't love you Andrew, it's just that we're trying to bring you down to earth."

And so all through my childhood this would happen, with the emotional abuse by my family on one hand and the schoolyard and teacher bullying on the other.

At about 14, my parents used to start to use me to bitch about the other person and so I kind of wound up being sounding board for both of them. Around that time The Parent Trap (movie) was on so I got the "brilliant idea" to try and bring my parents closer together. I just had to wait for the right opportunity. A while later we were at the wedding of one of the daughters of a next door neighbour, when the music came up and I suggested they dance. Dad was against it but I kept pushing the point at which point my mother strongly told me to "butt out!" This was about as push pull as you can get, and made me feel apprehensive about relationships for a good 5 years afterwards as a result of it.

When I was 15, two key things happened: I was diagnosed with ADD and my mother was diagnosed with kidney failure. Not only did I suddenly feel like I didn't know who I was anymore but on top of that and with all of that going on, I had to face losing a parent- much like everything else alone. They gave her 5 years before needing to go on haemodialysis. She was on it in 2. I'll come back to the developments of that shortly.

When I'd just turned 16 I went on my year 10 school camp for the Catholic high school I attended in Sydney's Upper North Shore, which would turn out to be memorable for all the wrong reasons.

It was a school camp that literally involved camping, and there were 3 of us in the one tent for the half of my group of friends that I shared a tent with. One of the guys in the tent I knew had "problems" in terms of boundaries with girls, but I'd never have guessed that the same thing could have applied to guys too.

We'd been in the tent maybe 20 minutes with his sleeping bag next to mine and we were lying down talking about, I think it was video games. At the time, I was lying facing outwards. Next thing I know he's up against me rubbing his inner thigh against my outer thigh and giggling while he was doing it. I keep pushing his leg away and snap at him to "cut it out" but he keeps at it and finally wound up just lying there and putting up with it after shoving his leg away. After all, my family had taught me what happens when you fight back too hard. At that point, it definitely felt wrong, but it was more annoyance than anything.

See Part 2 and Part 3 of Andrew's story on this site.