Adina’s RJN-Chapter 4 “I Escaped to a Fantasy World”

After we moved to the new town, things went well for a while. My dad had a well-paying job as the head of the laboratory for a fertilizer manufacturer and my mother continued being a housewife, she didn’t want to go back to teaching and didn’t need to. We were a middle-class family staying in a new four-bedroom house in a good neighbourhood. My brother and I were still in primary school at that stage and we quickly settled and made new friends. Everything seemed normal on the outside.

Sundays my dad would take us on field trips to museums or sightseeing, he loved teaching and showing us new things, always expanding our general knowledge. Those were the good times I remember and treasure in my heart because at some point things changed again.

My dad befriended the company’s representative and he went with him to visit farmers to sell and get feedback about the fertilisers the company produced. Afterwards they would go to pubs and my dad started to drink again. First only during these visits, but later at home over weekends as well. I used to dread weekends because my dad’s drinking would lead to fights between my parents. Later these fights became physical, with him hitting my mom, and later she started fighting back. Over weekends I locked myself in my room, escaping into a fantasy world where I played with my Barbie-dolls. My brother disappeared over weekends, playing outside or going to his friend’s house.

Then something happened that I couldn’t really grasp or understand at that age, I was about 10 years old. One Friday we went to visit my dad’s friend, the representative, which turned out to be a drinking party as always, I stayed over that evening because I was friends with their daughter. The next morning my dad phoned to say he was on his way to pick me up because something happened. On our way home he just told me that my grandparents came to visit and he hit my grandfather. I couldn’t understand why but when we got home things started to unfold.

My mom and my grandparents (her mom and stepdad) all sat in the living room and I could see everybody was crying. They called my brother and me in and then started to tell us what happened. My mother’s biological father died in a car accident when she was about 3 years old, my grandmother married again very quickly to a man I got to know as my grandfather. I knew him as a Christian man, but it turned out he was not always like that. They had two more children, my aunt who is my godmother and my uncle. When my mother was still a child, he abused her, but not his biological daughter. My mother didn’t tell anybody what happened, not even my dad, and that weekend they came to visit because my grandfather wanted to ask my mother’s forgiveness, although he repented and became a Christian some years before. That was the day my dad found out what happened and in his anger he hit my grandfather. I never knew abuse even happened in real life and couldn’t really grasp the extent of something like this happening to somebody. I have heard about it, but as a 10-year-old I did not understand the impact it had on a person or the hurt and pain it caused the victim of this horrendous act.

Within a year after this event my grandmother passed away suddenly, I took it very hard because she was my rock, the only normality I knew. Over school holidays my brother and I went to visit them and that was my escape from what happened at home. That was also the day I lost my mother, not physically, but she changed after that, it seemed like my grandmother’s death threw her off the deep end and she started to fall into depression, and started to use antidepressants to cope with all her hurt and pain.

Things continued like always with my dad drinking over weekends and the physical fights. Soon it was time for me to go to high school (secondary school). The weekend before the school started, I stayed at my best friend’s house who lived down the street from us. That Monday the two of us would go to town to buy school supplies, but we had to stop at my house to get money. As I opened the front gate I could see something was wrong because some of the windows facing the gate were broken. I thought somebody tried to break in because when I went inside there was blood everywhere. It turned out that it was my parents fighting the previous evening, my mother had a black eye and somewhere in the process my mother pushed my dad and he fell into one of the bathtubs, hitting his head on the tap, cutting open the skin on his forehead, at that stage he was at the hospital getting stitches. I never felt so embarrassed and angry in my life; here I was standing with my best friend, two days away from starting high school, witnessing what happened the previous night. We just turned around and walked out. Outside my friend told me that I did not have to feel embarrassed, that she understood because the same kind of things happened at her house, which I never knew because things like this are kept quiet. Later that day her mother took us to buy school supplies, she and my mother were also best friends, I guess they comforted each other being in the same situation. This is one memory that I can still recall vividly because of the impact it made on me.

That is how my high school years started, and things didn’t really get better. My dad went to rehab a few times and eventually, he did stop drinking, he also stopped visiting or going out to see clients with the representative, but at this stage, my mother started to drink on top of her taking antidepressants.