We were having dinner. Everyone was enjoying themselves, laughing and telling jokes. Boys will be boys, or so they say, and one of my friends picked up a knife and pointed it at me, pretending to be a pirate. Little did he know that pointing that sharp object in my face would trigger memories that I had buried deep, long time ago.
You see, my father was an abusive alcoholic (I say was,..he still is), who would regularly beat my mother up. For no particular reason…we used to call it “he’s in the crazy mood”, which meant that we were supposed to be as quiet as possible. I’d cringe every time the phone rang and avoided leaving my room, so as not to make the old wooden door screech and remind him we were there. But fear was always present. I had even learned how to identify whether he was drunk or not by the way that he walked between the elevator and our front door- scenarios were being created in my head in those 10 seconds and panic would take over. In hindsight, what I find most heart-wrenching is the indescribable joy I had as a little girl, when it turned out he was in fact sober. No toy or present could replace the feeling that, at least for that day, we were safe.
But a lot of the times we weren’t. I was sometimes collateral damage, trying to put myself in the middle, for him to stop hurting her. As a 10 year old, I once saw my father push my mother through a glass door, it shattering into a few big pieces that looked like guillotines. Another time, I watched from the back seat of the car as he hit her in the face with one hand, while driving with the other. I felt helplessly strapped in the back, screaming for him to stop.
This “pirate friend” at the dinner party reminded me of a scene that I experienced when I was about 7 years old. My parents were having an argument, with my mother telling my father not to leave to get drunk, to stay home and try to sober up. He’d never listen and start hitting her: she was making him feel guilty, so the only way to make that go away was by shutting her up with a fist. Usually, he’d eventually leave, leaving us crying for hours and dreading his return. But not this time. After chasing her for a while, he went into the kitchen and madly started opening drawers. I knew he was looking for a knife and that he would try and kill us all. I even passed out with fear. He didn’t pick up a knife. He was just looking for some money and the car keys my mother had hidden.
As he left the house, my mother picked me up and gave me my first anti-anxiety pill. It was pink. I don’t take them very often, but sometimes they help. I still get anxiety attacks. My heart starts running wildly as someone raises their voice suddenly or touches me from behind, without me seeing them.
I don’t mind talking about my experiences, but I feel that a lot of people don’t understand. They can’t. Maybe that’s a good thing: it means that they haven’t lived them. But it also means that they can’t empathize, that they don’t realize what domestic violence can do to someone who has been affected by it. It’s not just the physical pain; the bruises heal. For years afterwards, domestic violence affects every core of your fibre, changes you as a person, making you more vulnerable, fearful, distrustful, feeling unworthy of affection and love and grateful for those who treat you with respect.
But maybe in time people will understand. Let’s un-taboo “domestic violence” as something that belongs to the private sphere. We need to start conversations and go beyond statistics (which by the way tell us that 1 in 3 women in Europe will experience domestic violence at one point in their lifetime).We need to listen to people who have stories to share without putting our heads down in awkwardness. We need to educate our men and women about the long-lasting effects of domestic violence.
So do it; take the time to talk to your friends about it. Take the time to listen to your friends when they talk about it. Don’t brush it off and hide it under the rug, because silence facilitates abuse. It will always be there if we keep hiding it and protecting its perpetrators from the shame they deserve. If we want to eradicate violence against women, we need to first start talking about it.
If these lips could talk... 