It may seem silly to rant about this. I know I said I would delve a little more into my personal life and maybe this does affect me because there are elements to this, that I feel are personal. Rihanna and Chris Brown are performing a duet. The first thing that came to mind when I found out about this was, are you serious? I saw it all over Facebook and had to google it because I honestly thought it may have been a prank or a joke or something.
I dont get it, and for some reason I take this to heart. Why is it ok for violence to happen within a relationship? Why is it ok that this man beat his girlfriend to the point where bruises covered her face?
Why has Chris Brown come back on top when he did this to another human being?
My mother had this face. My mother carried these bruises. Maybe not to the degree these pictures show but she certainly faced abuse at the hands of a man who promised in front of God and the state, to love and cherish her. I remember my mom constantly having to face my father when I was a child, I remember having to sit in a room and play with my little sister or hold her while i heard screaming and yelling and crying and hitting in the other room. I remember closing my eyes and hearing something break, wondering, what did he break this time? I remember standing and watching because he'd yell at me when my mother told me to go to my room, and feeling helpless because I was never able to do anything.
I was recently asked by a very close person to me what kind of a kid I was, and after some thought I remembered. I was an extremely insecure child, I was lonely, I felt ugly and fat, and never good enough. I still feel many of those things today. Not all the time, I've worked very hard to grow past that, but old wounds are some of the hardest to heal.
Forever I felt like i didn't fit in with people my age, that I was an adult living inside the body of a child, of a teen. I hated myself and everyone could see it but me. I lived that way because of abuse. I felt that way because I never had a safe place to go, except my very vivid imagination. My home was filled with turmoil, therefore I was too. I couldn't forgive myself for never having been good enough. Good enough to stop him from drinking, from hitting, from very nearly killing my mom. To be honest I sometimes think he couldn't forgive himself either.
He's sober now and has done many things to make up for those years. He lives and breathes to take care of my sister and I. He's the kind of dad who'll read my 3rd year advanced stats textbook, because I cant do math to save my life. He'll drive 4-5 hours from Ottawa to Toronto every weekend for a month, so my sister can take a class that will guarantee her to pass her Nursing licence exam. He drives my mother anywhere and picks her up, because she's honestly a terrible driver. Seriously, her friends tell her they're afraid of her driving. Rather than risk her getting into an accident he'll do the work. He's a wonderful father whom I love dearly, even though we disagree on God knows how many topics. I dont want this post to be about making my life out to seem like it was tragic. Like every other human being on this planet, I've had ups and downs.
All I'm trying to say is that abuse happens to more than the people physically involved in the cycle. Children everywhere see this, and the media's unbelievably positive spin on it and think, my idol Chris Brown raised his hand to his girlfriend, his partner. He's rich, good looking, very talented, why not hit me too? So you get tweets like this:
This is what happens when we dont talk about the long lasting effects of abuse. When we don't educate our children and tell them that abuse is about much more than the physical wounds one has to bear. It's about the long lasting, heart wrenching pain someone suffers when their wounds have healed but their souls haven't. It's about a little girl or a little boy like the kid I was, who felt so alone. Will seeing something like this normalize the behaviours? Will it make them think it's ok to hit and be hit? I can only hope not. So here we are, these are my thoughts on the lastest celebrity gossip. I think out of it came one of my most personal post yet.
