By Lakhram Bhagirat
I have known Ricky (not real name) for over two decades and we are great friends. When I first approached him with the idea of sharing how violence in the home affects the children, he was more than willing to assist, but his mother was not that enthusiastic. So in order to preserve her identity, we have changed Ricky’s name and this is his story.
“She would scream while we watched helplessly as he would cuff and kick her about her body. It became a norm because we expected it every Saturday night when he came home drunk. But it got worse as the years went on and the number of us increased. It was bad and I try to bury those memories,” Ricky tells me during our chat.
Ricky is now almost 30 and he says the scars caused by witnessing his mother being abused runs deep. Now he battles his inner demons, finding it hard to love anyone; much less have a relationship, get married or even have children of his own.
Taking me back to his younger days, Ricky said he would pray that his mother does everything right and that his father would not notice if she slips up, especially on a Saturday. Being the middle child, Ricky was often neglected by his father and there was only so much his mother could have offered.
His mother met his father when she was only 19 years old and he was 22. They quickly fell in love and could not wait to be married so they eloped and within the first year, they had their first child and shortly after came the second one. His father was not an educated man and his mother was forced to drop out of school because of poverty but she had the potential to do exceptional things if the opportunity was there.
His father worked as a gardener for a number of years and shortly after Ricky was conceived, his father’s life started to go downhill. He became hooked on drugs and the abuse intensified. The number of children also increased by two.
Ricky says he would still ask his mother why she stayed and the answer remains the same to this day. “I had to stay. I never wuk a day in my life and I had five children, so where I coulda tek them and go? I stayed with he because I had to depend on he,” she would say and that was exactly what she told me when I asked her.
However, everything came to an abrupt end about one year after Ricky’s youngest sibling was born. Their father emptied the house, took everything and moved back home with his mother. When he left, Ricky’s mother was forced to immediately begin job hunting to take care of the children and she did exactly that. To this day she is there for them financially and emotionally whenever they need her.
I asked Ricky to give me one good memory he had with his father and after a long pause he began to say “I remember one time, it was my birthday and it was a Sunday so he drink up good the night before and come home and cuss up and fight up but the next day he called all my cousins to celebrate my birthday. My mother wanted to be happy for me but she was sad because she knew we had no money to cook anything nice or even bake a cake. She told him that and by that time, he was already drunk again so he took the kero stove and throw it out the window and she had cooked pumpkin and rice, he took that and throw it away. The cussing started. She cried silently. I was shattered and I cried not because I wanted a cake but because I knew what was coming next.”
Ricky said after that incident his father left home and came back later even more drunk. This heightened drunk state forced the mother and her children to flee the house through a window, so as to protect the children and herself from the impending beating.
When I asked Ricky how this affected him, he smiled. He told me that to this day his single status tells so much about him. He related that he knows nothing about a relationship and certainly lost faith in the institution of marriage.
“Quite often the children of domestic violence is not so much talked about. Because I am a male, society does not expect me to be affected but I slipped into depression. I lost faith in love and I am lonely but society doesn’t care about that,” he said.
Ricky says he was able to battle with the violence but engrossing himself in his books which saw him excelling academically. He also created an alternative family in his head where the parents are loving and life is good.
He is now grown and afraid to start a family of his own because he cannot get over the psychological trauma. He is in therapy. He wants to be a father and a good husband.
“I am broken in ways that are hard to mend but I am trying real hard to fix myself. I will be fixed and life will be better,” he assured me. (Guyana Times Sunday Magazine)
