One family's history of violence -- CathNews NZ Pacific

One family’s history of violence

Friday, August 8th, 2014

It’s a “national tragedy”, a “dirty secret”, an “outrage”.

But within the hyperbole surrounding the issue of domestic violence in our country are countless stories of individuals and families who have felt its impact first-hand.

My own family has such a story – but we’re ‘lucky ones’, who ‘got away’.

My sister and I escaped the cycle of violence when our parents made a conscious choice not to raise us within the culture of violence in which much of Dad’s childhood was steeped.

I grew up knowing about the psychological and physical violence inflicted on his mother, first and foremost, but also his younger half-brother and him by his stepfather.

But I always had the sense that Dad had stored the details of it away in a tightly-sealed box – and while this was at odds with his natural tendency to articulate (everything from the philosophy of Bob Dylan to the finer points of his digestion), I knew enough to know that there was a lot of pain that Dad simply preferred not to revisit.

Then, one Sunday, Dad took a tight corner on a rural Hawke’s Bay road a few kilometres an hour too fast on his motorbike.

He ended up in an induced coma, followed by months of rehabilitation.

The dark joke in our family is that the accident knocked about his brain and sifted his “issues” to the top – that, or the cocktail of pain relief drugs.

Either way, at some point during the early stages of his recovery, Dad decided to write down some of his thoughts and memories in a ‘memoir’ to be shared with family and close friends.

The lid was well and truly prised off whatever internal storage unit he’d shut his memories of childhood in, and our family was thrown into a unique period of self-reflection. Continue reading

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