To be seen and not heard: A girl who fought against all the odds

To be seen, and not heard.

Written by Ms. Hahle

"Do not ask which creature screams in the night, do not question who waits for you in the shadow. It is my cry that wakes you in the night, and my body that crouches in the shadow.

I am Tzeench and you are the puppet that dances to my tune." - Karanzantor

Acknowledgements:

Gene, my rescuer may you rest in peace.

Aileen, your unconditional love

Rachael, family

Sam, friendship

Vanessa, witnessing and supporting.

And to all those special people along the way

You were my crutches when my legs gave way Thankyou.

She is used in reference to the writer, the previous version of herself. I am used in reference to who she is now, or who she identified with during that time. Her is used in reference to often the female figures within her life, the figures they used to be and the representations of the parts of themselves that were the darkest and at times the lightest influencers for her.

Scattered within are poems, written throughout her childhood. Little snapshots into her child voice, during those times. She has written for most of her life and finds comfort in her ability to expel as much poison as possible through the written word.

Read on a girl, that for whatever reason, was never fully accepted or loved in the ways she needed. Never able to fit within a category or gain an overall sense of belonging, regardless of how far and wife she searched. This story is not linear, it is messy and at times may be hard to follow. The timelines do not add up and it is not until the very last word, that all pieces of the puzzle will make sense and an overall understanding will be gained. This is deliberate. This is a physical representation of the life in which she has lived and continues to.

Come take this staggered journey within the story, a story full of twists and turns. A PTSD episode structured piece that depicts lived experience through the eyes of someone living each day with trauma. Come witness life through the eyes of her parent with PTSD and the effects that had on she, the child who never understood why she couldn’t be loved like the other children. Why she grew up to not be appreciated and seen for the adult she was, and the fights held to gaining the respect and love she deserved.

I grew up in a time where I was told that nothing, I ever did was good enough. I grew up believing that I was substandard to everyone else in my family and my social networks because that was how I was treated. I grew up with no self-esteem or self-worth because I was not taught or shown that I had any.

For many years I accepted this treatment not understanding that it was wrong or that there was something better. For too many years I stayed in bad friendships and bad relationships that served me no purpose, other than to hurt me- because that was what I believed a normal relationship was. Throughout the years and through observations, study and reprogramming of myself I learnt what to expect and what I deserved, and what I did deserve, was opposite to what I had grown up with and what I have been subjected to.

Fast forward 20 years and I am a multi- degree holder of both pre and post graduate programs. One day I will be a doctor of the behavioural sciences. I have worked in many professions dealing with the country’s most high-risk as well as the country’s most vulnerable children, I have given back to the organisations that failed me so greatly in the hopes of providing other children with hope and light in order to see that it does in fact, get better.

I am not who I was told to be, I am not who I was treated to be.

I am Clara and I am my own being, I am a product of my own hard work and resilience. I am a product of determination, grit, strength and undeniable vulnerability.

I am not my past and I am not my future. I am not my degrees nor my accomplishments. I

am a being that has experienced a multitude of different things and in experiencing these things, they have shaped the person that I am, but I am greater than anything that has been before me and will be after me.

Through my vivid attempts to create a picturesque world, all previous admissions have been blatantly disregarded.

When I was very young, I was taken in by an amazing family who I would later come to label as my first foster family. These people took me in, nurtured me and showed me unconditional love for a period of 12 months before the placement concluded. I was then thrown back to my biological mother as this had been a voluntary placement, and this had meant that she now had full rights to request that she resume her role as my fulltime carer. As the years passed, I learnt to look back on that period as one of the happiest, purest periods of my life.

After what was to be many years of suffering as a result of emotional and psychological abuse caused by the ripple effect of parenting from a mentally unwell mother and her possessive, unhinged lovers. My mother did not have the ability to parent me, and so she enabled her partners to take control in ways they saw fit. As a child, I thought my mother just didn’t love me and didn’t want me around, I didn’t understand that she didn’t possess the skills. My mother had been severely abused by her stepfather that she could not stand men and as a result, chose the company of women. I assumed the future could only get better. After I had been given the news that we were to move from Ballarat to Melton- I was both somewhat pleased and heartbroken. In Ballarat I had escape routes, emergency plans that had been rigorously tested in order to rule out any minute, potential flaws in the plans and Ben, my aunts long standing partners son. Ben and I had grown up together. Our relationship was much like that of best friends. Our main similarity was our upbringing as we were both from unstable, harmful homes: malice lined the walls and contempt constituted for carpet.

Ben’s father was a physical abuser: to each and every individual unlucky enough to become entangled in his web. My aunty, Kendra had suffered. Oh, how she had suffered. Raped, Perforated ear drums, broken ribs, black eyes. A concussion last time he had, had his fun with her. This occurring much to the horror, when Ben and I whilst we were present. A scream, one single scream was all it took for our hearts to race and us to drop everything, ready to step in like little warriors that knew even at that age, that we had no real power over this monster. It always started with a bottle run. Alcohol always started the cycle, but no matter how much we begged- they would never defer from the plan to drink. The automatically formed human nervous system fight or flight response was programmed on a hair string trigger at any noise. I relate it to as if some acidic poison, capable of causing a series of mass fatalities throughout the world; trickled down into each and every limb within our bodies and eliminated the possibility of any orifice within the body receiving even the most minute amount of oxygen.

This parasite is no more a man than a Pedophile is a carer to children. He tortured my aunt for 16 long years, taking every bit of resilience, independence, drive and spark she had and left her a shell of a woman. He even took 3 decades worth of family inheritance after killing her dog, for good measure. Just to make sure that she did not have any chance at recovering.

My home life was not that much better. A Typical day consisted of attending schooling where I was ridiculed and bullied for the actions of my mother, returning home to an empty house and a long chores list followed by a forced power walk, up a steep hill straight after. Dinner was also a forced task eating of steak and vegetables repeatedly.

The walk was completed with my mother’s lover, driving beside me, yelling come on you fat brat ,you don’t make it back in 40 minutes you are doing it again, you will be dead by the time you are 20 because you are so fat, or my personal favorite: you are the reason I hate children out of the car window as I walked.

I often counted down the time until I could go to school, this was better than home, however only slightly. I remember feeling indifferent and awkward at school, as if everyone else had their place and I did not fit the criteria for any of the sections. Just like at home, my peers would call me names, mostly those surrounding my weight or little sneers about my mother’s sexual orientation. I had been to 6 different primary schools and after being removed from the first, the only one I had held fond memories; the rest just got harder to swallow the more I moved.

I had one friend in the whole of my 2 years I was at that primary school, and together, we pulled each other through each day. His name was Jake, and he was the first person to ever tell me that I deserved to be treated better and was the first to show concern towards me, which at the time was such a foreign concept for me. Jake was the first to verbalize that what was going on at home was not okay. What a beautiful soul. Thank you.

I remember feeling mixed about the end of a schooling day. I was happy to be away from my nasty peers and sometimes also nasty teachers, but I was also filled with a feeling of dread as returning to my ‘family’ home didn’t instill the same kind of excited feelings that I saw within my peers. My residence felt like hell. It was cold, dingy and lifeless. Situated only a block from school. I would often return to an empty house, where I would anxiously commence mopping and vacuuming, then homework or the forced jog/ walk. It was only then that I could go to my bedroom for the rest of the night. Television would be permitted for an hour, given the delegate was in a generous mood and the wine was flowing. Never allowed to watch with them though, always in a room by myself.

These tasks, when in the company of either my mother or her lover were completed with either the intent to keep them happy, or the want to be accepted and loved. Unfortunately, neither of these outcomes ever eventuated, much to my confusion and heartache as a 11year-old little girl.

I recently was forced to return to this area, within the day-to-day workings on my job and I was taken right back to these feelings. Within this moment I could taste the loneliness, my suicidality that I was unable to verbalize or understand as I prayed to a god I didn’t know existed, to take me in my sleep. 20 years on and these are memories that still haunt me, still hinder my life and hurt me so deeply.

You see, my mother managed the physical side of things- she would often snap into an episode. In brief, this is defined as: a series of frequent flashbacks or memories associated with the various forms of torture she fell victim to as a child. My mother suffered / suffers an emotionally debilitating mental disorder- Complex Post traumatic stress disorder and unfortunately, when these episodes arose I would become (in her mind) the abuser from her past and fall victim to her physical attacks: although with no recollection whatsoever of her actions and a partner who possessed not even the slightest slither of morality , there was no way to confront her about such things. This later, proved to be hard not just for her but any individual remotely connected to her.

My father was absent from my childhood. My mother made no excuses or spared no feelings when she told me that he had chosen to be absent from my life. Her line ‘you have all you need here. He knows where you are and has my number, he could contact if he wants but he doesn’t want to’.

Despite this, I often wondered where my father was, if he wanted to know me, and months after tirelessly coordinating a plan to bring it up with my mother I finally decided to ask. This equated to a lot of yelling, aggressive behavior and finally a confession. Something I was not in a million years expecting- My very creation to be defined in two words, an involuntary conception. An affair, a mistake, a burden, a rape: she spluttered through her stained teeth. This due to her daily consumption of copious amounts of cheap red wine and cask chardonnay, both of which she articulated in her put on, cringe worthy accent CHARDENNEY and RED WHYYNNE. The fact that a DNA test was done after my birth in order to confirm I was his and to enforce child support fees upon him, was known to me a short time after her drunken confession. I honestly do not know what I preferred. My mother- merely a shell of a human being, spluttering mistake and rape inches away from my face or my father- a stranger I had spoken to once in my life blatantly admitting that I was indeed a product of his affair.

When this information was delivered, I remember painfully gasping for breath, as I pushed down what felt like an ocean’s worth of tears, as he (oblivious to my distress) self- righteously tried to justify his actions: she told me she was over age, she told me she was on the pill. Years later his resentment towards my mother and my existence remained prominent.

This probably had to do with her attending his house, with me as a newborn on hip and informing his wife.

Lilith, on the other hand (my mother’s lesbian lover) was more skilled in the psychological abuse. Her specialty was to ridicule me in front of her friends, this always done with the intent to bring me to tears. The faster this happened, the more power she believed she had over me. I would often be bought clothing 2 sizes smaller as an incentive to fit into them.

I remember being gifted these bejeweled jeans, they were very in style, and I