Thursday, June 3, 2010

Tower of Babel

It's not that I hate my family. I just can't seem to communicate with them. It's as if certain words had different meanings for each of us.
I recently travelled to my home country, the one I left many years ago, at dawn, promising myself to never look back.
The return has been emotional, but not overwhelming. I saw people and places that I knew. It was weird to revisit places where I have been brutally abused and tortured for many years, praying to God for survival. It was like visiting Auschwitz, the concentration camp, with its grim records of death and horror. Green grass has grown over those places, nature has continued its course, people smile and the sun is shinning. Nothing would reveal the atrocity I had known, the despair and malfunctioning of several families. Nothing told the story of humiliation, shame, neglect and rejection I and a few other kids suffered at the hands of my father, uncle and a few other "good men". I realized the abuse is a place in time, not in space.
I refused to see my alcoholic, pedophile father, although my enabler mother tried to convince me he stopped drinking and lost a lot of weight cause he thinks about the past. My cousin, on the other hand told me she saw him at my aunt's house and he started drinking at 3am and fought a fence by noon. Who to believe?
I also met a few zealot Christians, who preached me the love of God threatening to stab me with the cross if I refused to receive salvation. My father is also a fervent Christian and never thought twice about raping me since the age of three. See my side of the argument?
Also, speaking with certain members of my extended family, who seem to have known about the going ons of the pedophilia and such, I realized that they all more or less knew. They all judged me at some point or another, yet neither of them did anything to save me. Neither of them tried to talk to me, be my friend. It would have been enough if I had gotten a shoulder to cry on, it would have been enough to know I could talk to someone. All of them pointed fingers at me: I was the damaged, no hope child. They pitied me, yet never hugged me. Never hug a leper, I guess. All Christians, ready to preach about Jesus and regurgitate Bible verses at the drop of a hat.
Many of them were curious to hear about my life. I received a lot of attention. Too little, too late. It's as if they were saying: you turned out alright; who would have thunk, a runt of a child, like yourself?
Again, it's not that I hate my family, it's just that communication is not there. They all care now, when I don't need them anymore. They all remembered me for once.

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