Violence in my life

Among patchwork images of childhood memories, I remember standing at the top of the stairs looking down on my father assaulting my stepmother. Perhaps it had been my mother’s fate before her, but we were too young at the time to have memories of that. I am too old to want to have the conversation now. My parent's past is their own and not mine.

What returns me to that memory as an adult is not that it was horrible or terrifying, but remembering how I stood observing the scene with emotional indifference. Clearly it was a scene I was accustomed to observing. Another violent day in a violent world. In an age when a ‘hiding’ was a perfectly acceptable thing for an adult to give a child, and being a divorce-kid added extra adults to the equation. The hands that struck me could just as easily strike an adult, and sometimes they received it in return.

Like a Dickensian orphan, childhood was mostly about enduring. My brother had it much worse than me so one day I owned up to something he had broken in order to spare him the punishment. I remember wrestling with that decision, wishing he hadn’t done it, internally debating how caring I really was, and then the agony of biting the bullet. I couldn’t have been older than six years. Proof I did have a heart? A moment of my ultimate vocation showing through?

Sometimes I boldly ventured in the pursuit of joy. Like the time I stole a Pound note and went to the fair with my school friend. An afternoon of pony rides, fairy floss and lucky dip was sure worth the price paid later.

Twenty years later I found myself fighting bigger battles. Once, trying to get out of the house I got as far as clinging to the door frame, my partner pulling me back by my ankles. That transition point between instinctively fighting to survive and the realization that all is lost is an instant, but seems an age, like anticipating the impact of a car crash. Long enough to see the scene from outside one’s body and think how funny it must look to be completely parallel to the floor. Then fingers give way and one retreats into the shell of emotional indifference to get through. That was just about the end. As an adult I was well aware that I had the power to make my life safe.

But why not sooner? Why is it not like the movies where a single misunderstanding, harsh word, bad mood, or raised hand! is sufficient to end things on the spot? For me it was all the usual reasons - love, relationships, safety, money, shame - and it was my house. Because there didn't seem any safer place to go to. Because harsh words, coldness, arguments and violence didn’t strike me as unusual or out of place in a loving relationship. Because perhaps I didn’t know what a loving relationship really felt like.

Maybe because somehow I was not indifferent to the broken, troubled other human being in this relationship who needed love and care. In faith, I also saw him as my 'neighbour,' and hadn't fully appreciated that the call to love our neighbour sometimes means recognizing we are not the right person to care for them. Walking away frees the other person to find a better life too.

Life has not made my heart hard. Through the darkness of pain my blessings and fortune in life, love and faith shine very bright indeed. My life is the joy of one who has miraculously lived to see another day on more than one occasion. Now I know that every minute of life is a precious gift. Perhaps it is what makes me brave enough to work in some hazardous places. It makes me brave enough to be a female priest, which will always be a narrow path, both within the church and out in the secular world. In this vocation I see the Lord was with me all along.

One day I stirred from unconsciousness to see step-children close by and emotionally indifferent to my plight. My gift to them was to walk out the door and break the cycle.