Forty-eight-year-old Mary (not her real name) has had a pain-filled existence for most of her life, as a result of abuse in all forms that started from her childhood days. But she has finally managed to break the shackles and in her own words has now “started to really live”.
Twenty-six years of being cuffed and kicked around by her husband along with marital rape and verbal and emotional abuse only ended for Mary when she finally summoned the strength to take him to court and subsequently got a divorce.
In fact, even though her husband had eventually moved out of the house she only really felt free when he left this earth exactly one year ago. He never really faced justice because just one day before one of the several matters that was before the court was set to conclude he fell ill and was hospitalized. He died in hospital and Mary said his relatives now blame her for his death.
“The abuse went on and on and every day it was a fight no matter how I try to be nice it was still a fight,” was how Mary described her years of marriage during a recent interview with Stabroek News.
Her eventual move to the court was made possible through the help she got from Help & Shelter following years of being a hotline client of the organization.
“I thank God for Help & Shelter and especially Miss Margaret [Kertizous]; she always encouraged me to report the matter and to seek help.”
Now that she has freed herself, Mary wants her story to be told but is not brave enough to make her identity public and requested that it be done anonymously. While she is not ashamed as she believes she did nothing wrong, she wants to protect her two adult children – aged 24 and 21- who, according to her, suffered enough while growing up.
Mary said her husband was not a man she had loved. She had fought not to marry him and only did so at the insistence of her parents.
“It was a match wedding and I deh want please me mother and father even though I didn’t grow with them. I thought maybe I woulda get to love he but he never give me the chance,” she said.
Her husband had started visiting the family’s home and expressed an interest in her, and at age 20 her parents indicated that she should settle down with him. He was 23 years old.
The abuse started, “the day before the wedding. We had a argument on the back steps and he slap me and I slap he back and we start to fight… I tell me mother that I don’t want marry he but she cry and beg and say she done bake cake and buy a dress…” So the wedding was held.
But it was a cuff, kick or slap for anything even simply not putting something in the correct place.
“In the morning before he go to work was a fight when he come home in the afternoon it was another fight,” was how she described it.
Childhood
As far as Mary could recall her life was never free of abuse. She was raised by an aunt who physically abused her. Then a cousin started sexually abusing her from the age of 10 up to when she was 13.
She still does not understand why her parents sent her to live with her aunt and seldom checked on her well-being. Less than three years after she returned to their home–at age 18–they forced her to marry her husband.
“I went through abuse with my aunt from for a very long time. I use to get a lot of hit in my head and I use to bleed through my head,” a very emotional Mary told Stabroek News, weeping sometimes during the more than two-hour interview.
When she complained to her aunt about the sexual abuse, initially her aunt quarrelled with the boy, “but was cover down and from then, every time he come around me he use to abuse me even if I try to get away.” She said she complained to her aunt over and over again and eventually the aunt became abusive and told her that she liked it.
“I had it real rough. When I tell my aunt she would kind of abuse me and call me a whore…
“At the time I was so stupid and scared because like telling her was like telling no one. I would be in pain for days and bleeding and I can’t show she nothing and I had to take care of myself.”
When she was 14 years old, Mary said, her aunt forced her to become engaged to a 22-year-old man, who was then invited in their home and had a forced sexual encounter with her.
It was at that point that she sought the help of another aunt who took her in, but she was later returned to the abusive aunt and only escaped when she secured a live-in domestic job. At the age of 18 she travelled to her parents’ home where for the first time she met some of her siblings and never returned to the city where she had spent her formative years.
Two years later she was married, and it was back to the daily abuse. Mary’s husband worked and she was a housewife. She said she tried her best to cook, wash and clean to please her husband but it was never enough. “I felt if I do them things he would be happy but as soon as he come home he would just bark at me.”
She was five months pregnant with her first child when she attempted suicide after a sound thrashing. “A tell me self that a couldn’t take it anymore. I had enough with me life…,” she said sadly adding that by that time her mother was dead and she had no one to turn to.
However, she did not succeed in the act and gave birth to her first child one week after her 24th birthday. She later lost a baby during which she almost died and she later had her second child, but the abuse continued.
“I was still being physically and sexually abuse all the time. And up to now I tell my children they came through rape because it was never good sex he always force he self on me.”
Mary had a second miscarriage, which she said happened because of the abuse.
And it was not just the abuse; Mary’s husband was unfaithful. She recalled one incident where she had travelled out of town with the children for a sister’s wedding and returned home unexpectedly to find a woman with a child in her house.
But she remained in the marriage even though as she looks back she is not sure why, but said she reasoned to herself back then that she was doing it for the children. She eventually started to work as a domestic and even though she was bringing in money to help, it never pleased her husband.
Help
When her son became a teenager he began encouraging Mary to report his father to the police, but she never did until 2002 when she came into contact with Help & Shelter. She had heard about the organisation and made contact through the telephone directory, as she felt at that point in her life that she really needed help.
She was desperate, as she had begun to realize how affected her children were by what they saw every day in the home.
“At one time my daughter tell her father she hate him for things he did to her. When she was 16, she jump in the middle of us when he was beating me and he hit she and buss she mouth and this was on Mother’s Day,” Mary said.
Her husband drank and when he was intoxicated the abuse got worse. But Mary said he needed no alcohol to be “a beast, he was abusive all the time.”
It was after she was attacked with scissors that Mary finally made a report to the police. By that time, both of her children were out of the home and she lived alone with her husband.
It was a Saturday morning when he attacked her, she recalled. She was sewing when he approached her and they had an argument. He picked up the scissors “and mark all me face and neck and so on.”
But even though he was charged the abuse continued and Mary said she started making reports to the police on each occasion and the charges before the court kept piling up. They eventually got divorced four years ago, but there was no division of property and they both remained in the house until he moved out following the slew of charges that were made out against him.
When he died, he was living with a relative while Mary lived in the house by herself, but she did not rejoice.
“I feel it. I wouldn’t lie to you I feel it because though he was doing what he did I did not want him to die,” she told Stabroek News as she cried.
Today, she shares the home with her daughter and looks forward to tomorrow as she feels she has now begun to live.
“I would share my story with anyone and if it could help women out there to get out I would do it over and over,” she said.
