Showing posts with label dysfunctional families. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dysfunctional families. Show all posts

Friday, October 21, 2016

Why I cannot ask for Help even when I need it

Our table had a lot more than this picture
We were a large family of 5 children before my parents got divorced.  My baby sister, Gizelle, was only 4 years old.  I was 10 years older than her.  We were a staunch Roman Catholic family and went to Mass every Sunday, confession every Saturday afternoon and Catechism lessons on Friday afternoons.   One day, when I was about 13 years old, we asked our father to please buy us an icecream at the Lounge Tearoom (the only place open on a Sunday) before going home.  To our amazement, he drove to the Lounge Tearoom and told us to come inside with him.  My mom stayed in the vehicle.  He ordered two 10 litre tubs of icecream and asked each one of us what sweets we would like.  We each chose a sweet and then he went to where the sweets were and took another 11 packets, making them 12 packets for each child.  We were deliriously happy.  These kinds of things just did not happen in our family. Then he filled his arms full of biscuits and baked jam tarts and paid for it all.  You can’t imagine the excitement in that van;  children at the back with all this food, and mother in front.  

When we got home, he put all the icecream and sweets on the dining room table and gave us each a spoon and plate.  There was no place at our table to fit another thing on it.  It was a layer of sweets and buckets of icecream.  And then … he turned.  “You will not leave this table until every single thing has been eaten, and you will also eat your lunch.  I want to see if you ever ask for sweets and icecream again”.  Can you imagine the pile of sweet food that we had to consume before lunch – giving us 40 minutes to eat it all?  We started eating, and eating, getting more satiated as the minutes went by.  He was standing there watching us. What a cynical sadistic look he had on his face.  “Hurry up, eat – you have 30 minutes left”.  What a sad and sick way to treat children who were not used to abundance in anything, let alone in sweets and icecream.  But this satisfied the devil within him and he did not fight or beat my mom that day.  We were all sick and vomiting for the rest of the day, while my father laughed, telling us not to ask for things because you never would know what you were going to get.   Maybe this the reason why I ask for nothing from anyone now that I am old and actually needing help? 

When it is Safe to Sleep

Front:  Gizelle, behind mom (Joyce), me and Yolanda
It is instinctive to want to rationalize disaster or suffering and put them into a framework so that we can cope emotionally.  This may seem like a silly thing, but I can’t go to sleep unless there is perfect silence around me.  This became even more of a profound and troubling situation once I got married, because he could not sleep without the TV going.  I spoke about it, asked about moving the TV, I begged and I got nowhere until the day I just moved out the bedroom and into one of my own where I could have quiet and could sleep.
This started in my childhood.  Pubs closed at 11pm in those days.  My father would come home when the pubs were closed either alone or with some of his drinking pals, mostly the police from the mobile unit.  He would make my mom get up and rustle up food for everyone at midnight, but I knew then it was safe to sleep because there were strangers in the house.  He would be too tired by the time they left to exert the devil within him.   If he came home alone, I would like awake until there was silence in the home.   I listened to all the fights and was vigilant because I thought that if it got out of hand, I could always run down the stairs to save my mother.   I had four younger siblings, the youngest was 10 years younger than I was.  I would have the youngest in my bed and the smaller ones in my bedroom and in the second bedroom which was upstairs.   When they would wake up from the noise of the fighting downstairs, I would tiptoe to their beds and bring them quietly to me, whispering to them to be quiet and trying to comfort them.
One night something bad happened.  I was, as usual, lying awake, waiting for my parents to go to sleep.  The fighting started and it escalated to a physical beating.  I heard my mom scream, “Do that again and I will kill you”, with more noise of bashing and beating. 
My father was screaming, “Tonight I will fucking kill you, you bitch”.
 I jumped out my bed so fast and flew down the stairs.  My father was standing looking at me while my mother sat crumpled up in a chair crying. 
“If you want to listen to us fight, you may as well watch us.  Go and fetch your sisters and bring them down here”, he said.   My brother had a room outside so he was not in this mess with us.
I fetched my sisters, they were awake and crying…and brought them downstairs into the lounge.
“You can now watch us fight”, my father thundered and with that he lifted his hand and beat my mom so hard across her head that the chair she was sitting on toppled over and she was on the ground.   I ran to her, but he pulled me roughly back, all the while screaming “You want to interfere; now you are part of the fight”. 
My memory is a bit hazy after that but the sadistic bastard made us all stand in a row, my mom included, while he went to fetch his camera.  We were all crying and in shock, but he took his photographs of our misery.  When he was finished, he sent us to bed.  At least this time we did not have to strip and have photographs taken of us in the nude.  I still lay awake listening, straining my ears for the slightest sound.  I was sure that that was the night he would finally kill her.   The photograph pinned to this blog is one of the photos taken that night. Look at my little sister's face.  I don’t recall where my sister, Joy, was that night.   He truly was a street angel and a home devil.   

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Shattered - The Story of the Wrong Kind of MD


To the doctors I see, I have this advice for you.  Please retain some humility.  If a patient says “Something’s not right”, they are usually right.  If you don’t know the answer, ask for the opinion of another colleague.  Swallow your pride and make your patient the priority.  Think carefully about how your orders affect the patient and the way the patient is nursed.  Your orders or the way you give them can easily contribute to the suffering and discomfort.  Be mindful of the way you speak to patients, their families and the nurses.  Your arrogance and superiority are not becoming of a caring human being.  You also make mistakes but your mistakes can be deadly or at the very least can do more harm than good.     
Shattered is a deadly honest look at what it means to be at the mercy of the wrong kind of doctor.   You can purchase the book from this link:  http://megabooks.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Shattered.jpg 

 (Copy and paste the link into your browser)

Friday, October 9, 2015

Shattered ... some stories are too true to tell; this is one of them.


The incredible strength and resilience of the human soul is told in this true story of how a rare disease, a dysfunctional family and an uninformed medical doctor collided to create devastating chaos that would leave a family ruined forever.

A snippet: 

When you give someone a book … you are not giving them ink, paper and glue.  You are giving them the possibility of a whole new life.
We have all been the betrayer and the betrayed.  If we cannot acknowledge this, we will find ourselves unforgiving and cruel, unable to grieve for the times that we have betrayed ourselves.
Sometimes to choose life, we must break agreements with ourselves and with others.
The separation of spirit and matter leaves us with a spirituality that lacks the fire of the physical expressions of our hearts and souls.  To devalue the physical perpetuates the split between matter and spirit.
To insist that my truth or your truth have no meeting place, that we do not need to look or consider someone else’s perspective … to be unable to imagine that I could be wrong about what I think or see or feel … is to invite narcissistic chaos into our lives.

To purchase this book go to highlight this link, hold down the ctrl button and click at the same time  http://megabooks.co.za/shop/shattered-4/

The book is also available on Kindle.