Welcome to the WIN house (11/73)

For weeks after Easter I felt horrible. Like I wanted to be able to crawl out for my own skin. I felt dirty and gross after what he did to me. Before I knew it the weeks turned into months.

The incidents of sexual abuse would continue weekly for a couple of years. Everyone act more horrible than the one before. I felt as if I had no escape from the ghastly nightmare that had become my life. What could I do, if I said a word to anyone, people I love would die. Every time he made me touch him I would remove my self from my body as I was forced to perform these horrible acts and would dream of the day when I would be free and old enough to make him stop. I never thought that there was anything normal with what was going on. For being so young I already had a good sense of right and wrong. 

In between the bouts of weekly sexual abuse and as the months passed through winter, spring, fall and winter again I would also witness my mother being beaten by Jack when ever he drank which back then was really quite often. He was an alcoholic after all, especially around the holidays. From fall of 1982 till the middle of 1984, every moment that should have been fun and enjoyable for a child was plastered with the memory of the day ending with my mother being smacked around. Birthday and Christmas presents would go flying in the air as the verbally attack each other through their bedroom door. I learned at a young age that there was no Easter Bunny, Santa Clause, or even Tooth Fairy, but I stilled tried to believe in the magic of them all just in case I was wrong.

It began to become normal to know that at some point on weekends the police would come to the house and remove him for the night. My mother even began to fight back. She liked to kick him in the knee’s when she was wearing her high heal leather boots because this would make Jack fall to the ground instantly and that would be the signal for me to run and get out of the house.

“What kind of woman stays with a man like that? I could never understand that. How could a mother continuously put her daughter in that type of danger and through such extreme trauma? I was always scared as a child, always ready to run if I needed to.”

I remember a time during those years when my mother was beaten so badly that not only did the police come but also an ambulance and quite a few victims support workers. The house was over run with people there to take care of us and trying to help. They took me into a separate room as they had my mother undress and place her clothes into evidence bags. The paramedics then proceeded to check out her injuries, this time a lot of the blood was hers. She had a lot of lacerations all over her body from the struggle. Cuts and scrapes across her cheeks and face where Jacks fists had been in an attempt to keep her down. Her hair was all matted with blood and sweat with chunks missing that had been pulled from the roots. They took their time stitching up a few areas that obviously had been smashed off the broken pictures hanging on the walls of the room around them. Some where in the darkness of the middle of the night we were removed from the house and taken to the to the WIN house here in Edmonton. The WIN house was a safe house that provided emergency services and shelter to woman and children fleeing domestic abuse.