Certain details in this story, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.
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First published by HarperElement 2017
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© Taylor Edison and Jane Smith 2017
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Source ISBN: 9780008148027
Ebook Edition © February 2017 ISBN: 9780008216603
Version: 2016-12-20
Contents
I used to feel angry with my mum because she didn’t intervene in what was going on when I was a child. But I realise that she’s got problems of her own and I just feel sorry for her now. What made me look at things differently was becoming a mum myself: I try really hard to do what’s best for my child – it’s just a natural instinct; so I think my mum must have been trying hard too.
I would have liked to have told my story without mentioning Mum at all, and especially without saying anything negative about her. But because most of it deals with abuse that occurred during my childhood, that would have made it seem as though she wasn’t there while I was growing up. And that isn’t true. So I’m just going to tell it the way it happened.
There are lots of reasons why people fall victim to abusers. In my case, it was partly because I have a type of autism called Asperger syndrome, which means that I have ‘significant difficulties in social interaction and non-verbal communication’. In other words, if someone tells me they’re my friend, for example, I believe them, even though the way they’re treating me is anything but friendly.
Friends have been a significant factor in my life – because I desperately wanted them as a child, because I didn’t know how to make them, and because my ‘social interaction and non-verbal communication’ problems meant that, for a long time, I wasn’t able to distinguish between my friends and my enemies.
I can’t change what happened to me from the age of 11. I know that some of it will continue to have an effect on me for the rest of my life. But I do try really hard to remember that I am not the bad person I believed I was when I was a little girl.
What’s crucially important when you have experienced abuse is to try not to define yourself in terms of ‘bad things happened to me as a child because I was a bad child’. That’s why I want to tell my story, because I hope it will help other people to realise that what is done to you isn’t what you are.
I was two years old when Mum and I moved into the flat that quickly became a doss-house for an assortment of her weed-smoking friends. I didn’t have a bedroom of my own in that flat; my bed was wherever I happened to fall asleep each night, which was usually on the sofa or floor in the living room. Fortunately, Mum’s friends were nice to me and there was always someone who was willing (and able) to feed me when I was hungry or put me in the bath when I needed a wash. So I was perfectly happy, as far as I remember. Until I started school.
Because I had assumed – as children tend to do without even thinking about it – that what happened in my own home was ‘normal’, school came as a complete shock to me, for many reasons. As I hadn’t really mixed with other kids before I started school, I didn’t know how to make friends or even how to play with other children. And I wasn’t used to being shouted at the way my teacher shouted at me on my very first day when I didn’t do something she had told me to do.
I wasn’t being deliberately disobedient or naughty. I just didn’t understand what she meant. I was used to being given simple directions by my mum and her friends – ‘Stop it’, ‘Eat it’, ‘Go to sleep’ – and I was bewildered by the teacher’s collective instructions to the class, which became even more incomprehensible to me when she said things like, ‘Unfortunately, we won’t be able to go outside at playtime today as it’s still raining cats and dogs.’
It didn’t matter how hard I tried to understand what I was supposed to be doing,