It was always the same story.
I don’t remember much about my childhood but an event will always stay with me. One thing for sure, I can’t totally forget the constant beatings from my father. We didn’t need to do much to get in my father’s way. The same scenario over and over again. My mother was kind of the coach in this. She would find herself alone with us most of the time and with seven kids running around a house that wasn’t fit for a big family, well, you see the picture. We were very often over the edge of her so little patience. So she’d loose it and start screaming and do her own share of the beating until the real thing when my father came in. We usually manage to not be around because that would be the time when my mother would cry and exhaust my already exhausted father with her complains of how bad this one and that one was. After she drilled him well, he would come out and call us back into the house and would catch the first one around and beat the hell out of him. Then my mother would try to stop him before we get killed. Oh yes, the same for many years.
But one day I remember clearly I got beating very badly and I escaped out of the house into the streets. As a walked, everything so sharp around, the houses, the street so busy with cars and people, the grey sidewalk. It was almost like an out of the body experience. Through the tears and the pain, like the sun through the clouds in the morning after a storm, a smile, rising.
I could see so clearly and never forget, no matter how much beating I would get, he could not reach me, I was untouched. I was and would always be free … inside.
