It took me a long time to break away from childhood home. I left home at age 19 after my father beat me and not for the first time. On a Saturday night, I locked up the men’s clothing store where I worked and came home to my enraged father. He was angry over a lie that my younger sister had told him involving me and he hit me full on in the face the moment I walked through the front door. He was waiting for me, as he often waited for me, and started pounding on me the minute he got his hands on me. He proceeded to beat me as I lay on the floor with my raised hands shielding my face and as my mother and sister looked on. After he had hit me to his satisfaction, I escaped the house and took the bus back downtown to my workplace, unlocked the door, and switched off the store alarm before I used the shop’s olive green wall phone to call my boyfriend at the time. He had been transferred to Toronto a few weeks prior to that, and when I told him what had happened with my dad, he told me to call his former housemate and that person would let me stay with him for as long as I needed. I did as he said and I moved into that house the following Monday. Instead of attending my classes at university, I moved into my boyfriend’s old room. I got two waitressing jobs to pay the rent, which was a substantial burden during my final two months of university.

I had resolved to leave my hometown forever once I wrote my last university exam, which is what I did. I wrote that final university exam at 9 AM, and I left my hometown that same afternoon. I rented a van, packed up what little I had, and drove to Toronto. I wasn’t going to Toronto to be with that boyfriend. I was just going to get out of that hometown and away from my family forever. I never saw that boyfriend again.

After living in Toronto for three months, I met the man that I would later marry. With him in my life, I called home to let my family know where I was and to tell them that I was safe and was working full-time. I was hoping my mother would be proud of me for having found a full-time position in Toronto with my university degree, and there would be no more anger, but even then, I was screamed at on the phone by my mother. My older sister was about to marry and I was told to come home for the wedding. I wasn’t invited by my sister to her wedding; she had always deeply resented me. I was told ‘to get my arse home for this bloody wedding’ by my rageoholic mother and I did. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had been strong enough to stay away from them for the rest of my life, but I wasn’t. I just wanted a family’s love.

At the wedding, my sister sat me at a back table with people she and I had worked with as teenagers at McDonald’s while she sat non-family members at the family table where I should have been seated. She didn’t want me there, and could not have treated me worse had she tried. My future husband was my date to my sister’s wedding. That was our first date. He was shocked at how poorly I was treated by my family.

In my marriage, I asked my husband to move farther away from both our families. I wanted us to go teach in British Columbia or Scotland. He was a teacher too. He always said that he didn’t want to live and die in his hometown, but he never had the courage to leave it. Had he truly loved me, he would have taken me away from my family when he saw the hell they put me through. When my marriage broke up six years later, my former husband asked me to promise him that I would not return to my hometown and to my family. My husband’s mother used to say of her gentle son, “Blessed be the peacemaker.” He saw the good in everyone but he saw no good in anyone in my family. He hated my sisters and my mother for how they treated me.

I didn’t go home right away, but two years after the divorce, I wanted to go home to be near family. I needed someone. I needed to be loved and sheltered and I looked to my own blood. I should never have gone back to my hometown, but I did. I stayed in my childhood home with my parents and living in that house again was hell. My mother could never let anyone live in peace. She was like her own mother. My maternal grandmother was also an abuser and a nag. My mother left Scotland to get away from her toxic mother. I moved out once I had full-time work and could afford to rent a place on my own. My mother nagged me about the rent I was paying and told me that I needed to have a house. I listened to her and moved back into the family home again to save for a house though my father made it clear that he did not want me there. Each time I moved back into that house, I felt like a huge failure, which I was. I was also beaten down and controlled by my mother. My father more or less ignored me in disappointed, passive-aggressive silence except when he lost his temper. One night, he threw me across the room and I shattered my right hand in several places when I landed on it. My mother quickly told everyone that I broke my hand by hitting my father but that was another of her lies about me. I could never hit my father. He was too fast and too strong for me to ever fight back though I tried. At the end of the school year, I left that town again and drove out to British Columbia, shifting the gearshift of my standard car with my right arm in a neon-pink cast.

It wasn’t just my hand that was broken. I wasn’t strong enough to stand on my own two feet. Adults who have been abused as children don’t have roots or wings. In British Columbia, I couldn’t find work, but it was the summer and I was looking for a teaching position. I felt traumatized and was unable to rationalize the situation and talk myself through the uncertainty and into staying. I still had my teaching position in my hometown. Without giving British Columbia a real chance, and in part because I didn’t know how to pick myself up at that point, I turned my car around and came home again, back to my mother’s control, raging temper, cutting remarks and my father’s bitter, judgmental silence. I was trying to be loved by someone and I turned to my family still unable to accept that they were never going to love me.

Perhaps one of the reasons that it took me so long to leave that childhood home is I had a great deal of fun with the other children growing up on that street. The children on our crescent were a big gang and together we played night and day especially during the summer holidays. We were out on our bikes, we played in the back field, we played baseball, went swimming, and played hide and go seek at night. As a little girl, I had also adored my father. He was my hero. Once he told me that I was ‘the apple of his eye’. I was a real daddy’s girl and went wherever he went in part to stay away from my mother’s unpredictable, hair trigger temper. When I kept going back home, I was trying to return to that time of childhood innocence when another took care of me, and when I was lovable. I was trying to feel safe and loved. I was retreating from the world, which I found to be threatening as a young, beautiful woman and as a survivor of sexual assault. I needed a haven. Unfortunately, my childhood home wasn’t a safe place. It never was, and when I went home as an adult, all of those people with whom I had grown up had moved away. In truth, their families had moved away while we were still in school. Once their families could afford larger homes, they moved from our crescent. My family remained on the street that we grew up on. My mother is still there. When you are broken, you can’t heal in the place that broke you amongst the people who broke you and continue to mistreat you. You have to leave and you have to leave for good. It took me many decades to find the strength to do that. After my father died, I finally left for good. I went out west to British Columbia again, but this time I had a job waiting for me. Having work meant I also had a community. I wasn’t alone. That was the beginning for me.

I did go back home one more time. Six years after I moved to British Columbia, I got a teaching job not in my hometown but in my home province. The idea was that I could be closer to my widowed mother as she aged. She often called me crying and told me that my two sisters and my nieces and nephews – all of whom still lived in the same city as my mother – never came to see her. I knew what it was like to be alone and heartbroken, and I wanted to comfort my mother in her time of aloneness. I accepted a teaching position in a fly-in, northern, Indigenous community that paid $20,000 less per annum than the post I had in British Columbia. I don’t know what I was thinking taking it. I was putting her needs ahead of my own as I always did when, in truth, she was fine. She was a rich, old widow. She didn’t need me. Once I was working in my home province again, I flew my mother to Montréal that Thanksgiving where I took her to a Montréal Canadiens’ game; however, nothing I did for my mother was ever good enough as it wasn’t during that trip to Montréal. There was never any pleasing my mother. The harder I tried to please her, the more she hurt me with constant cutting remarks.

When I traveled home for Christmas that year, no one met me at the airport. I saw two mothers embracing their daughters as we all waited for our suitcases to come off the luggage carousel. Those mothers gushed over their daughters who had arrived home for the holidays. They smiled and hugged and kissed. I stood alone. I took a taxi to the family home to find a darkened house as my mother was already asleep in her bed. I wondered why I had bothered flying home and sat alone in the family living-room and wept. I was left alone again that holiday as my mother and younger sister were invited to my older sister’s home for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, as had been the case for the past 30 years, but I was again excluded. The only time my older sister included me in her life, was when I was married. When I was single before marriage and after I was divorced, I was not welcome in her home. Of the three of us, she alone had children. My parents let her exclude me at every holiday and at every family event because had they not, she would have deprived them of seeing their only grandchildren.

That Christmas was the last time I was home. My mother started in on me straight away. Abusers will lure you back and when you give up your independence and have nowhere else to go, the abuse will suddenly escalate. My mother accused me of eating two apple pies that she had made. The more I denied eating them, the more she called me ‘a bloody liar’ and told me that I ‘disgusted her’ and screamed at me to ‘get out of her bloody sight’. She had always called me a liar. Even when I was telling the truth, I was called a liar by my mother. I believe the popular word for this behaviour is ‘gaslighting’. When I found the pies in the downstairs freezer, I presented them to her, put snow tires on my car and drove fifteen hours in a blinding snowstorm to return to my horrible teaching position in that horrific, northern, fly-in Indigenous community. As I put my life at risk white knuckling my way through that blizzard, I told myself that never again would I turn my life upside down to try to make my mother happy. There was no making her happy, and I was done. I needed to try to make myself happy if it wasn’t too late.

After Christmas, I got a position in the Northwest Territories for more money than I had made teaching in British Columbia. I moved back across Canada on my birthday in -55 degrees Celsius temperatures, away from my mother but this time it was for forever. I was done with all of them. I was a wonderful, kind, loving, funny, intelligent, educated, thoughtful, generous, and creative woman, and my family didn’t deserve to have me in their lives. I would not have treated a dog the way they had always treated me and continued to treat me.

When you grow up with siblings, your experience of that family will not be the identical observations of your siblings. My older sister has a unique experience of that home and of our parents as the eldest child. Never wanting her to feel displaced by the second born (me), she was given priority treatment in the family like being given her own bedroom and a car when she turned 16. My younger sister has her own experience of our childhood home as the baby of the family. She was eight years younger than my older sister and five years younger than I. She, in many ways, grew up as an only child. As their last child, my parents cherished her in a way that was different as well. Often the oldest child and the youngest child share a unique bond as was certainly the case in my family. Further apart in age, there is often not the same sibling rivalry or any sibling rivalry between an oldest and youngest child in a family with more than two children. Together my two sisters always vetoed any vote I might cast in an attempt to select a television program or choose a restaurant. My singular voice was silenced by their collective voice. I was erased by them, which is what my older sister in particular most desired; she wanted me not to exist. I was certainly left out. Even my childhood bedroom was a makeshift room in the basement without a closet or lighting, while my sisters each had a finished bedroom upstairs next to our parents’ bedroom.

I was also a typical middle child. I was fearless, spirited, rebellious, reckless, curious, and I was always looking for a good laugh and a better time. My sisters disapproved of me and accused me of acting as I did for attention. Maybe that was true. Perhaps I felt unseen as the middle child and acted as I did to be noticed by my parents. I’m not sure about that since I naturally always attracted attention wherever I went. From an early age, heads turned when I walked into a room. There was female jealousy when it came to me and my sisters. I was taller than my sisters and slender. I had a lovely figure. I was beautiful, blonde and had my father’s beautiful, big, blue eyes that everyone complimented. I was athletic and played basketball at school. I was on the swim team. I won the Academic Award every year in my class. I was class president and class valedictorian. I was popular in school. My high school sweetheart and first love was the quarterback of our school’s senior boys’ football team and captain the senior boys’ hockey team. I had many boys ask me out throughout my life. I was kissed and I started dating before my older sister did. I went to dances and parties with boys before she did. My younger sister never went to any parties or dances. My sisters were plain. They were wallflowers. They had freckles, were short, not athletic, overweight, and invisible to boys. My sisters hated me. It was really themselves that they loathed, but they thought that they hated me. Regardless, the outcome was the same. I was shunned by them.

I was molested by a teenage female cousin visiting from Scotland when I was seven. My elder sister refused to share a bed with that cousin though they were closer in age. As the eldest, my sister was given priority and what she demanded was granted. I was sacrificed again because I didn’t matter. I had no voice, no say. I was thrown into my parents’ bed with that cousin, and she proceeded to molest me every night for the duration her thirteen-and-a-half week stay in Canada. I never spoke of it. I buried the shame and the pain of that molestation deep within me. Had I spoken of it, I would have been called a liar anyway. The rage and reckless behavior that emerged in me as a teen was connected to that sexual abuse and to the daily screaming, berating, verbal battering and physical beatings that I suffered as a child living with a short-tempered, stressed, abusive, narcissistic, immigrant mother. When we moved to Canada, my mother had no family support. It was a very stressful time for her, I’m sure. I bore the brunt of her anxiety while my older sister was at school and my father was at work. My younger sister had not yet been born. I was alone with my mother’s temper every day and she made my childhood a living hell. I was corporally punished for normal childhood behaviour and curiosities. When, as an adult, I tried to speak of the abuse I suffered growing up, my older sister screamed at me that if I was hit it was because I was “bad and deserved to be hit!” No child deserves to be hit. Children are innocent. My older sister was the mother of four at the time she roared that at me when I attempted to speak to her of my experiences of abuse growing up. I expected her, as the mother of four children, to understand that a child was not to be hit. I think she did understand that, but her blind hatred for and jealousy of me prevented her from viewing my pain as an abused child as valid. In her estimation, I had it coming.

When a person who has grown up in an abusive home works to heal, they will speak of their experiences of abuse. We are only as sick as our secrets. We want to find our voice and speak our truth so that we can be well, and perhaps even experience a little joy in our lives. The other family members will often deny that those things occurred in order that they may continue to be in relationship with one another. If they delve too deeply into the truth of their familial relationships there is a risk that they will stop being in relationship with one another. The person striving to heal and live an authentic life in their own bruised and scarred skin, will be labeled as the ‘prodigal’, the ‘black sheep’, and the ‘problem child’ as I was. The family will drive whom they perceive to be the family troublemaker from the family. In ancient times, when a village experienced difficult times, the community attached all of its sins to a goat and drove the beast from the village so life could be blessed once more. That is what happens to the abused person trying to heal in a family steeped in denial and desiring only superficial relationships with one another and with other individuals outside the family. That individual needing to speak of their suffering becomes their family’s scapegoat because truth and depth terrifies the abusive family. The victim who refuses to stay silent is gaslighted and shunned by their blood. That broken individual who should be surrounded with the love and compassion of their family are instead driven from the family. They are on their own. That is what happened to me.

My mother said to me once, “I hope not all the memories you have of your childhood are bad.” They’re not. I grew up in the 1970s and I still listen to 1970s music every day. Longing for nostalgia, those tunes trigger some sweet memories for me. When I hear a song like ‘Sunny Days’ by Lighthouse for example, I often think of lying on the shuffle board court at East Park Golf Gardens with my best pal who grew up across the street from me. My little red Radio Shack transistor radio between us, we’d lie on our beach towels facing one another, our long, slender limbs touching the heat of the cement shuffle board court. Fresh from the swimming pool, we’d lie there and let the summer sun beat down our wet backs bronzing our skin and further bleaching our already blonde hair. My tongue still tastes the tang of the blackcurrent Fruitellas that I always bought at the East Park Pro-Shop mixed with the sweetness of the Strawberry Twizzlers that she and I shared as we sipped ice cold Coca-Colas and talked about the boys that we liked and laughed together about how to further tease and torture them. I can still smell the sunscreen, sweat, and chlorine on our skin, and I see myself squinting at her in the sunshine, laughing with her. My life was sweet in moments like those and it was to those moments that I attempted to return whenever I went back to my hometown as a broken adult. Instead of making a new life for myself and creating my own family away from there and away from my dysfunctional family, I was unconsciously clinging to those fleeting moments of sweetness from my fractured childhood and I was holding on to something that wasn’t real or healthy for me to cleave to.

I remember visiting East Park Golf Gardens when I went home the last time, but it was all changed. East Park Golf Gardens was unrecognizable. It is a water park now. Nothing about that city is as it was when I was a child growing up there. To go a step further, I’d say that Canada, as a nation, is not the country that we immigrated to in 1966 as a young family full of hope and dreams. Maybe that is what is meant by that old cliché ‘you can’t go home again’. Of course, you can return home, but you’ll find that it’s all different. What you remember of it is gone. The people that you once knew and may have loved have all but vanished. All that remains are the memories you have of that time in your life and of that place, and some of those memories are good. Certainly, some of mine are. Just not all of them. You take memories with you wherever you go. They live in your heart. You don’t return to a place that you purposefully left and a place that is now lost to you, to revisit memories. I think that was what I tried to do each time I move back to my hometown. I clung to the good memories and thought I could change the bad things about my family and childhood so that I could be loved and appreciated as part of my family. I wasted so much time and energy doing that. I almost destroyed myself in the process and I missed out on living a life as a result; I ended up alone and with nothing.

I am praying to God to help me change that now. I pray it is not too late. I ask that all that was taken from me in sorrow may be restored to me in love, Christ’s mercy and His peace.