And No One Stopped Them | Part 2

How Toxic Seeds Become the Twisted Roots of Abuse

So easy to plant…so difficult to kill…

I’m not sure what age I was, just a few months old; no one would bother to remember exactly. I just know I was old enough to sit on the sofa, my thumb firmly planted in my mouth, my only security, poor thing, plunked into yet another new family situation.

“Oh, Lord, you’d think they could have given us a pretty baby,” my mother said to my father. “This one’s fat and ugly! And look at that eczema on her cheeks. I hope no one wants to come and see her. We don’t have to tell anyone about her right away, do we?”

I frowned at my mother that day; I frowned at all of them, my parents and my new brother, Paul. I must have known What Was To Come.

Years on, my mother told me this story on several occasions, chuckling each time. I was astonished by such ignorance, that she was incapable of comprehending what it did to me to hear this story, let alone have her laugh about it.

She loved to show family and friends a particular photograph of me and they always howled with laughter, although I will never understand why. I was still a baby, just five months old, and in this photo I am standing in the corner of my crib, pressing my little back as tightly into the wood as possible. My chubby little arms are up beside my head as I lean backward, as far away as I can get from my mother’s outstretched hand.

I look like a deer in the headlights.

“Look at that! A baby, scared to death of her mother and trying to get away!” she laughed.

Somewhere inside my little soul, I knew just what I was in for, her dislike for me apparent the moment she laid her eyes on me and I would feel it every moment of every day for the rest of my life.

I was so small. Just a little girl.

I tried so hard to be good, to do as I was told. Except when anyone wanted to take my picture. I wanted to hide my ugliness.

Smack! Hard on my bottom. “You’re so damned stubborn!” she yelled. “Why do you have to be so bad?”

“I don’t want my picture taken!” I cried. You say I’m ugly; why do you want to take my picture?

Smack! “Stand there!” She shoved me into place. “Look at the camera! Smile!” she barked, angry and frowning.

I plastered a fake smile on my face, appeasing her for the moment, but the tears would always remain, perched in my eyelids in that photograph and all the others just like it.

I should have been forgotten. I was forgettable. I wanted to disappear and I was certain my mother wanted me to disappear, too. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t paying attention when we were at the lake near Regina, Saskatchewan, where we lived.

I was just a toddler. I loved the water.

“Where is she?” my parents asked each other as they looked around. But I was nowhere in sight.

“She was right over there on the pier a minute ago,” said my dad.

Suddenly, there I was, coming out of Katepwa Lake, by some miracle and I did not disappear, sorry about that, Mummy. And I was terrified of water forever after.

I was three. My mother was standing at the table, mixing and measuring things. Quiet as a mouse, I crept into the kitchen. Nervously, I climbed on a chair beside her.

“What do you want?” she snapped, her rapid fire words almost creating just one syllable in her sharp and pointy voice, her steely blue eyes squinting and scary.

“Nothing, Mummy. I just want to watch.” I knew enough not to tell her it was really that I just wanted to be with her.

“Stay out of my way and be quiet!” she barked.

“I will, I promise.”

I knew the rules.

But in a little while, I had to ask. I was young and very bright, and therefore, very curious.

“What are you making, Mummy?”

“I told you to be quiet! You’re always in my way! Go away, I don’t care where, I just want to get rid of you!”

I climbed down from the chair and pushed it back up against the table. Hanging my head, I went to my room and closed the door. Seeds long since planted had begun to take root. In time, they would develop into the thickest of toxic weeds, their roots twisting and snaking their black and poisonous way through my heart, my mind and my soul, choking the very life out of me.

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