Lights Off!

The only thing that has her not fully withdrawn is the fact that she still attends school. She has cried now too many times for a girl of her age. She hides from most of her family and her grades that were once stellar, are now down to zero. She is even taunted by some family members about that. She remembers them telling her that she was not that bright a child anymore in a gloating way. The members of the home were exhausted, they were reduced to almost shambles trying to figure out what was wrong with Patsy.

Lilah still keeps her mother's secrets and barely answers to the family when they pose questions to her about her mother. At this time her mother would make her turn the lights on and off, on and off for sometimes up to ten or more times if the lights were turned on in her mother's opinion too early or too late. When Lilah asked her why she would make her do things like that, she would just insinuate that something had made Lilah a bad child, the worst child in the family and that she was giving her training so that she could be more obedient.

With glossy eyes she relives the experience of having to share a bed with a sick-minded person such as Patsy. She recalls a night when she was ready to go to sleep and took off the light. Though her mother was not doing anything, she told her that she did not want the light off yet and she made Lilah put it back on. Lilah did so with reluctance and went to lie down complaining about why she had to try to fall asleep with such glaring lights.

Trying to sleep, a half hour past and her mother who was sitting up as Lilah lay, indicated to Lilah that she could now take off the lights. Frustrated, Lilah refused. Her mother got up and stomped up and down the length of the bed proclaiming that she will make her get up and take off the light. Refusing to move, Lilah is scared at the thought of her mother's rage, she begins to cry covering her face from the light with the pillow.

Patsy now becomes adamant, wild and takes up a knife: one of the many utensils that she keeps in the bedroom. She threatens Lilah with it demanding that she get up and take off the light. Lilah says at that point not wanting to give in to her mother's irrational behaviour made her not move. She reasoned to her mother that she was the one that wanted the lights on and when she felt she was done she should take them off. Her mother is enraged and tries to scare her into getting up. Lilah tells her if you are the one standing, why can't you just take off the lights? With that comment Patsy takes the knife and sticks it under Lilah's hip as she lay on the bed frightened. Lilah, with the pillow on her head and tried to stifle herself, just to get away from the fear. She prays to God for the strength to kill herself. The strength never comes.

What's Cooking!

Her Tuesday, a time when she is twelve years old and attending high school. She awakes not to the scent of eggs being poached or Trinidadian bake and smoked herring, but to rotted urine. She curses memories of this. To live in a time when most people had forsaken the use of the latrine and welcomed indoor plumbing. Other children like herself enjoyed the use of this luxury as well as their parents, most of them having grown up after that not having ever seen any of their parents' body waste.

Lilah was not that lucky, though her mother had a bathroom facility adjoining the bedroom they shared, she could not understand why her mother lay in one place all day and used a potty when it was time to go to the bathroom. When asked if she was sick she would refuse to answer madating to Lilah that it was her duty to throw out her waste, which most of the time consisted of days old urine and menstrual blood intermingled with bathroom tissue. The potty would almost be tumbling over with this fetid mess. Sometimes to avoid having to throw it out at that stage, Lilah would try to get rid of it when it was fresh or at least a day old. Her mother would spitefully demand that she not throw it out at that stage, sometimes aggressively cursing her. She was always to wait until it was past its rotted state before it was thrown out.

Why Lilah did her mother's bidding? She said that she was confused by her mother's self-proclaimed godliness and would get the feeling that she was sinning if she disobeyed her mother's orders. She was constantly criticized and put down or made to believe that she was like her barely known father when she disobeyed. When she asked her mother why she was being made to do such things her mother told her that she had done the same for her mother and could not complain, which even to me had no basis in common sense because in the times her mother would have grown up, they had used latrines or outhouses. In my opinion rational people generally want their children to have better experiences than they did growing up.

Lilah said that she even came to the point where she refused to throw out the waste and her mother bluntly told her, 'You have to do it because I wiped your bottom when you were a baby!' 'I never asked to be born', Lilah retorted. Patsy promptly told her that that was an evil and ungrateful thing for a child to say. Lilah would go on living with the belief that it was not worth telling anyone because she was being punished for her mother letting her be born. Her mother either directly or indirectly told her that almost all the members in the family did not like her, she began to believe that and that if she had told on her mother, that she would tell the family what a bad child she was. She feared that she would have nowhere to live. Wow!

People often look at the father as the parent capable of abuse, when we hear of such cases as Lilah's some might even feel that Lilah's mother was just a victim of single parenthood. When the father is the perpetrator of the abuse, they call him sick and sadistic. A systematic and abusive mother should be called the same, especially in this time of gender equity.