Lisa Hill,
Perth, Western Australia
…poison and waiting for the other person to die
Name me a person who doesn’t fit into some discriminated against group – I for one am white female and middle-class – very privileged you might think. Scratch beneath the surface and you find that my father beat up my mother, drunk all the money & left us poor. My sister was a serial bully and still is. My Grandmother married a man who stole all her money – she was quite wealthy after her parents died when she was 14 and left her a fortune. This same man drank, gambled and ran off with a much younger woman. My Auntie married a policeman who she loved enormously until she found he slept with anything that moved. My Uncle was good-looking & intelligent, but at age 21 got crohn’s disease, was discharged from the navy, fitted out with a colostomy bag and spent the rest of his life smoking fags & sitting in a chair reading books – he died from the asbestos he breathed in whilst in the Navy for a short while. My Dad was fostered out at 5, his mother had 8 children by 2 different men, the first one wouldn’t divorce his wife so she lived in shame, and then he left her as she was about to pop out the 5th baby. She then had to work all hours under the sun to look after her family whilst her elder daughter looked after the kids. The war then broke out. All kids were fostered out and she never reunited with them all. She had 2 more by another fella who was a drunk. She fostered these out too. I have had severe mental health issues all my life, and because I go for man like my Dad have been luckless in love and been badly abused in these relationships. I also was alcoholic for around 20 years. So where does all this leave us, it leaves us in one place and one place only – we can allow the past to inform us, but we must not allow the past to make us resentful. I know own my own farm which is an animal sanctuary. I have a good job working from home and I am extremely happy. I was lucky though – I did a lot of personal growth work that told me it makes no sense to dwell on the past and it is not until we take responsibility for our own actions that we can move past our past and embrace our future and the possibilities this holds for us.
