The Childhood We Never Talked About

There are things from childhood that you never forget. For some children those memories are about birthdays, school trips playing with friends or sitting with their parents at the end of a day.

For us, some of our childhood memories are of our mothers crying at night because our fathers are beating them. We grew up witnessing violence in our homes. We saw our fathers become angry and violent toward our mothers. We watched our mothers try to survive it, 'they stayed because of us'. We were children. We did not understand everything that was happening. We understood enough to know that something was wrong.

We knew when our fathers mood had changed. We knew when the house suddenly became quiet. We knew when we should stop playing and stay in our rooms. Sometimes we would hear shouting and just sit there hoping it would end quickly. Sometimes we wanted to run to our mothers, but we were afraid. Times we did not know what to do at all.

That feeling of being helpless is something I still remember. You are a child and the person you love is being hurt, but you have no power to stop it. You cannot fight. You cannot fix what is happening. You cannot make the person who is hurting someone you love suddenly become gentle, for some reason, you'd be included in the fight.

So you wait. You listen. You pray.. You hope tomorrow will be different.. Tomorrow often came and everything continued like it never happened. Our mothers would wake up. Carry on with their lives. Food had to be cooked. Children had to go to school. Work had to be done. Nobody talked about what had happened the night. That was one of the things that was hard to understand as a child. How could something frightening happen at night and then everyone could wake up in the morning and act like everything was normal?

We learned to do the same. We learned to keep quiet. We learned not to tell people what happened at home. We learned that some things were considered family matters and were not supposed to be discussed outside the house.. Children carry what adults refuse to talk about. We carried it to school. We carried it into our friendships. We carried it into the way we saw relationships. We carried it into the way we understood love, they said a man is the one to discipline a wife.

When you grow up watching someone hurt the person they are supposed to love it can become difficult to understand what love is supposed to look like. Is love supposed to make you afraid? Is love supposed to make you walk carefully around someone's anger? Is love supposed to mean forgiving the hurt again and again? As children we did not know the answers.

We only knew what we saw.. What we saw was violence. There were also moments when we wondered why nobody could do anything. Maybe someone knew. Maybe someone heard. Maybe someone saw the signs.. Nothing seemed to change.

As children we did not understand the reasons adults stayed silent. We only understood the result. Our mothers remained afraid. Our fathers remained angry. We remained children trying to make sense of it all. Sometimes we blamed ourselves. Maybe we had done something. Maybe if we behaved better there would be fighting. Maybe if we stayed quiet things would not get worse.

Children can take responsibility for things that were never theirs to carry. It took growing up to understand that none of it was our fault. It was never the responsibility of a child to protect a mother from violence. It was never our responsibility to make peace between adults. We were children who deserved to feel safe. Unfortunately, some grown into becoming the violent one's, because they thought it was normal

Looking back now I realize that the violence affected us in ways we did not understand at the time. It taught us to stay quiet when we were afraid. Sometimes those lessons followed us even after we left childhood behind. However we survived. We could choose something. We could learn that love does not have to hurt. We could learn that anger does not give anyone the right to harm another person. We could learn that speaking about violence is not disrespecting a family.

For a time stories, like ours stayed inside homes. People were afraid of what others would say. They were afraid of shame. They were afraid of breaking families. What happens to the children who grow up inside that silence? They carry the memories. They carry the fear. They carry questions they were too young to ask. There are still children today who know the sound of shouting coming from their parents bedroom. There are still children who hide when their parents fight.

For years I thought our childhood was simply something that we had to forget. Now I understand that we do not have to forget. We can still heal. We can talk about what happened without allowing it to define the rest of our lives. Our fathers violence became part of our childhood. It does not have to become our future. We can choose a kind of home. A home where children do not have to listen for footsteps before deciding whether it is safe to speak. A home where a mother does not have to hide her tears. A home where love feels safe. That is the kind of life we deserved as children.

That is the kind of life we hope the next generation will know. Maybe we cannot change what happened to us, We can change what happens next. We can speak for children who're still afraid to speak. We can remind survivors that they are not alone. We can make sure that the children growing up today do not have to learn the sounds of violence before they learn what safety feels like.

We were those children once.. Sometimes talking about it is where healing begins.