A Happier Song
This is a diary that I kept updated from 1998 till 2005. Every time something happened I would vent my feelings down.
15th July 1998
The journey of love, life, adventure, mystery and misery well that’s what its been so far and I’m only eighteen imagine if I live to the great age of 100 what more does life have in store for me.
I mean my earliest memory was of pain I wonder what my last memories will Intel. I know, I know this sounds all amazingly depressing but its life your born you live a little or a lot and then you die, Life’s what you make it, so my explanation is make it a good one.
Anyway back to this memory, the bad one, its quite hard to explain but I know I am in safe hands because I’ve written this for people who have had to survive through what I now call a bad patch in my long life and to try and help you get through the different obstacles in life that need to be tackled before you can put the past in front of you and face up to reality and live your life now and decided what you are going to make of it.
I remember sitting up straight in bed and feeling a nothingness that something that had belonged to me had been taken away and a feeling that it wasn’t going to be the last time it happened and it wasn’t.
People you trust can hurt you and sometimes what they are doing seems right because you put your trust in them to love and protect you. In my case it was my father who hurt me one of the two people that you trust most in life. I don’t know what it feels like to have a normal life the feeling of really loving your father, going to the park letting him swing you backwards and forwards on the swings, playing football with you, spending quality time with your Dad on days that never end because the fun just keeps on coming.
I’m not writing this to go into detail about the things I miss and to tell you how bad my life has been for me but to give you the strength by saying in some ways I’ve come through it and so can you.
I’m not going to give you excuses on why the people you trust feel that they can poison your self being with their overactive imaginations I hate my father with great vengeance he doesn’t deserve forgiveness or the title of ‘Dad’.
I think that everyone goes through with the healing and dealing with the past process in their own different and unique way in a way that their can cope with what has happened to them.
My abuse started at the age of seven when a normal kiss goodnight turned into a crime and a string of events that I will never forget or forgive my father for.
On and off these events happened without being noticed by my Mum so in some ways I did resent her but I have come to understand that you don’t go around looking for sexual abuse by your own husband towards your first daughter in fact I suppose its the last thing that could enter your mind.
These events went on for about 6 years, by now I was a teenager and starting to learn more everyday about the human race I knew that he knew that I was becoming stronger, wiser and was gradually becoming my own person with my own unique personality which he couldn’t handle. I had my own life depending on him wasn’t an option I could survive and speak up for myself I had finally learnt to say No and I became an evil bitch in the eyes of the rest of my family…
I was horrible to him, but tell me he didn’t deserve it and I’ll laugh in your face I’d love to laugh in his and tell him that he has lost a daughter and a friend.
I broke the bad memory chain, feeling like my head was on the verge on spontaneous combustion I decided I needed to talk to someone, it had all been kept inside my little head for too long.
I found the address of a Sexual Abuse help line at the library and finally worked up the courage to phone and make an appointment to see someone. But when the day came I chickened out and a couple of months later there I was sitting as the back of a solicitors in a small-secluded office with a Counsellor. It all seemed to come out at once and we spoke for quite a while. Without my counsellor I think that millions of pieces of my head would be scattered all over Cornwall she has helped me more then she will ever know and more then I can ever in this lifetime thank her for. Over the past ten months we have got to know each other really well and I think its great that she knows when I’m embarrassed or when I’ve lapsed into one of my deep concentration thinking stages and when i'm having a good or one of those bad days.
Another thing that has helped me a great deal is meeting another special person who has gone through some of the stages that I have and understands how I feel and can relate to what I’m saying and feeling. Isn’t it amazing that you can meet some really great friends through something so terrible?
I could sit around all day depressed and upset and feel that my life is over. I could be bossed around and taken advantage of again but then there’s the other option of survival.
He took six years of my life no way is he taking the next hour or come to think of it the next seventy or so years there’s so much to do.
You might be thinking oh she’s cured you can never forget it but you can live your life now the way you want to, make your own choices which route to take and what you as a person what to achieve. You are a stronger person then he will ever be you’ve come through what he has to live with for the rest of his sad lonely life.
I predict a life of misery for him, and a life of success for you in becoming a stronger and one of the most amazing individual in the whole wide world.
I have a lot in store for myself including finishing off my three year college course in 1999 then going onto to get a degree and hopefully becoming involved in advertising in the future. I also have the obstacle of telling my Mum the facts of the past and why I was so rebellious over many years and why I pushed her days on end to get a divorce so that we could all lead a better life. And then my final wish is to see my mum sitting in the crowd with a proud smile when I collect my degree.
Well I do it, of course I will I owe it too myself I am something and someone and so are you, in this life you can do whatever you want ‘Good luck’. Remember you may have had a bad past and some of the years, months and days of your life have been lost in bad memories but always remember that the future is all yours….
The world is lucky to have you, you have knowledge, strength and courage your are proof of a better life after pain you can teach the world to sing a better song….
I am reading back over this as I have avoided looking at it since I completed it last year but every time I turned on the computer it just stared right back at me so I thought a sort of update was in need.
February 18th 1999
Well the date is February 18 and you will not believe the anger and pain whizzing through my head…you ask why well here goes…It was the beginning of the year and mopping around the house one morning looking at things I shouldn’t be looking at made me feel a hurt different then any other, My sisters diary, big mistake or was it fate…My sister Sue is 11 and I thought her to be special, caring but with an angry streak that sort of made me feel that she acted this way because she was the youngest child of the family therefore the spoilt one…..how wrong!!! I’d been.
I always thought he’d learnt by his mistake and that he had destroyed the father daughter relationship between him and myself and would do nothing to harm the relationship between him and Sue. Wrong again!!!
Reading the diary I found myself writing my own dairy and the description almost the same the thoughts and confusion like my own the pain and the hurt and the child came back to me then a feeling of support someone else someone the same as me…Sue had been through what I had been through all those years ago the going to other peoples houses and wishing that you would wake up the next morning with their Dad instead of your own, scared of being alone with him, crying yourself to sleep every night, hating those little chats and visits. Wishing you were in a coma and this was a nightmare you would wake up one day and that night nothing would be expected for the present your Dad gave you or the money he gave you for sweets and that he was just giving it to you because he loved you and you were his special daughter but it never happened…. Still wish for it every day and I’m sure in Sue’s special way she wishes for it too.
I hated him for putting her through that…and I hated him even more for making me as a child believe in him. I hated him for hurting my mum in this way for making me tell for hurting my brother, my grandparents, my cousins and the rest of my family what was wrong with him!!!!!
Why couldn’t we all have a normal life he had to be punished…what if he did it again I couldn’t let that happen.
But I will be believed!!!
I panicked and rang my friend who rang my counsellor who then rang me, we met at my friends house and that is where I told them something that they just as me had never expected. Why, because of the relationship Sue had with both Mum and him it was something much closer then that of myself. A different bond…I thought she would tell Mum anything she was always with her and always had her attention I never seemed to grasp it in the way she did.
When I thought It was just myself suffering I could deal with it telling my Mum would be in my own time and if I wanted to hurt him and make him understand the pain of a stolen childhood I could but now, now my sister how could he, I’d been so careful I’d watched his every move how dare he take another I hated him more then ever before I didn’t ever think I could hate him more…I wish I’d done more. I blamed myself.
The look in my counsellor’s eyes when I told her was a look that I new it wasn’t my choice anymore by the time the year was over I would have to hurt my mum, my brother, my sister, my grandparents, my cousin my uncles, unties and friends in a way that I would never have done if it was just me.
I thought I could keep it all locked up in side and then the pain would stay with me it felt like it was knocking yeas off my life through stress but why ruin their live making them different from others when I could keep it all to my self.
I didn’t want mum to go through this and I didn’t want her to feel blamed and I know she will who wouldn’t but I don’t blame her the only person I blame is him its not he fault she fell in love and trusted who doesn’t want for the perfect life.
I have everyday since the age of seven I don’t blame her and I never will she hasn’t hurt me abused me she’s done the one thing that no one else has done in the whole world and that is love me un-conditionally and she has taught me the right values in life and I know that my Nan his poor mothers must of taught him the right vales but somewhere along the line they became muddled and he turned into what I described as a disappointment to the human race.
In his dictionary love values and respect don’t exist but in mine and my sisters their printed in capital because we follow our mothers loving footsteps and if you ever want an example of a strong loving amazing woman then just take one look at her eyes and you will see the moonbeams of love and respects that only special mothers have and that’s why I don’t blame her.
We decided that something had to be done and it’s not long until that time i’ve tried talking to Sue but she blanks me out…
I have to keep reminding myself that she is after all only 11 I wanted a Dad then too I was ready to forgive everyone else had a Dad and I didn’t want to let go, but then I grew up and was taught right from wrong, and I new he was so wrong if it was right like he kept telling me then why did I cry myself to sleep every night and sleep in terror.
And now I had the knowledge that Sue had been through that same pain at the hands of him I hated more then any one will ever know an indescribable feeling.
I wonder what everyone will think of me when its all over because they don’t know me the real me they know Lily the one who hates her Dad, Lily the one they think has a problem with forgiving, Lily who speaks with such disgust about the one person she is meant to cherish the one person who at the end of the day should be there for her, Lily the confused they don’t know Lily too scared to tell because of hurting others Lily the strong, Lily who has spent all the years trying to work it out for herself. It’s the same for Sue, but now they will know us and they will know the real us….
Why I acted like I did why I didn’t think he deserved a chance why I bored everyone with the same story of I hate my Dad and when they asked why I didn’t really have an answer will now I do I hated him because of this and tell me you don’t hate him now too. Do you still think he is the good father, tell me that same quote that I have heard so many times before
“At the end of the day Lily he is still your father”
You don’t believe it anymore do you and now you know the pain the hurt and the hate I have for the man that took away not only my childhood but my eleven year old sisters as well not the sort of man that deserves the title of a love, trust and so much more because he never lived up to the title of a Dad anyway.
We are Lily and Sue not the abused but the survivors who in the end survived the real Lily and Sue always and forever.
When it is all over and people look at both Sue and I, I hope that they look behind their sorrow and pain for us and don’t think of us as the abused or ruined but as stronger and wiser and looking forward to the rest of our lives in a free world…We have suffered but we refuse to suffer anymore life is for living and without him we can live it to the full.
7 July 2005
Well he has been sentenced to 7 years in jail for what he did and there are no words to explain my feelings not at the moment anyway but there will be very soon and I will be writing all about it.
There is only one word that I would say and pass on to everyone who has ever had anything sacred taken from them, JUSTICE!