NICK
Just for today I don't give a flying f... about anything.
I don't care if I pay my income tax, or if the carpet needs cleaning, the garden needs tending, the food needs buying, the bills need paying.
I don't care about my health, my addictions, my past, my abuses, my advocacy, my activism, my writing, my work.
I don't care if I eat or not.
I don't care what I look like.Or even get dressed.
I don't care if it is raining, cold, miserable.
I don't care if the pope still exists or the narcissistic church is still abusive,
I don't even care that I was one of their victims.
I don't care what day it is or even if it is.
Because today is the day thirty years ago that my wonderful son Nick was killed, and there is NOTHING in comparison to the pain of losing a child, and living a life without them.
It has been thirty years of grief.
When you first lose someone, your grief is obvious to everyone, you cannot hide it. Thereafter it continues , just as painfully but more invisibly.It is still there, but you have to navigate around it in order to function.
And it unfolds over time, the initial devastation is replaced every day with new senses of loss. Stuff I couldn't have envisaged, the fact that he didn't get to his siblings graduations, weddings, he never met their partners, his niece or nephews, I didn't get to see him settled and happily married with his own children around him.
Every milestone in all of our lives, no matter how joyous reminds us that there is one of us missing.
And grief changes you, I am a different person to the one I was before Nick died. His death made me into somebody, something else.
Someone he probably wouldn't even recognise.
He was only 19 , and this year we would have been celebrating his 50th birthday.
So forgive me if today I just can't care about anything else. Tomorrow I no doubt will put my facade back on and best foot forward, but today I just don't f....ing care.
I went to a funeral yesterday, I nearly didn't go, in fact it got down to the last minute and Gez tossing a coin for me! Heads I went tails, I didn't = I lost!
No "biggy" going to a funeral you would think, she was my father's youngest sister, had a full life and was 90. I hadn't seen her for years but always had nice memories of her and that side of the family.
My Dad's side of the family the "Paines" were actually all very nice people, very kind always and all of them had nice kids and grandkids etc.
Problem for me is, they are VERY catholic! Not in the same bigoted manner of my mother's family, in fact very much the opposite, genuine and simple, if not somewhat naive. Walking their walk, while my mother talked a good talk!
And they don't know about me!
They do not, as far as I am aware, have any knowledge of my abuses, or the role I have played in trying to bring their dreadful church down!
They live a long way from me, we tend only to meet up at funerals, and that has been my doing really. I have always felt it was better to be thought badly of than be exposed.
They could have seen me on the television I suppose, but I do really think they are the sort of people who simply would not watch that stuff, and might even have turned it off if the subject came up at all. My surname wouldn't automatically have registered.
This has always been my dilemma, and ultimately my dreadful burden, this terrible secret I had to keep at all costs.
When my mother caught the abusive priest and did nothing, although I never trusted her again, and my life spiralled out of control, I still had a strange desire to protect her secret too!
When trying to talk to a cousin once, I lied and said my Mum didn't know, because I knew it would have hurt her!!
There always seemed to be someone who's hurt would be far greater than mine if I told than if I kept it all inside. This is surely one of the things that wretched church relies upon, they fuel our guilt from birth, and being abused compounds that guilt, so we are always ready to "take the hit"
That isn't a quality, I take no credit for this, in fact it has been a curse, and even yesterday, sitting with all of the "Paine family" I felt I had to be someone I wasn't, because to show them my damage would have caused so many problems for them. Opened up a can of worms, and not helped anyone.
It has always been a very painful impasse, damned if you do- damned if you don't.
Which is why I have chosen to just have an arms length relationship with everyone, despite in many ways wishing it could be different.
I have often talked about feeling like an alien in the world I so badly wanted to belong in, and once again that was the raw reality.
The other problem of course was the requiem mass!( I avoid churches like the plague!) Having to sit in the church for over an hour, being triggered right left and centre by the familiar hymns, and the rituals, and worse than that , it was in the church where my parents were married, where I was baptised, and where I married to my first very unpleasant and violent husband!
The churchyard is full of reminders, Grandparents graves, a stained glass window to an uncle who died in the war, the dreaded confession box where the grooming still goes on.
The arrogant, didactic, priest spouting lies and more lies, to these very nice people who hung on his every word.Obsequiously grovelling his thanks as they gave him "offerings" at the end. It was hideous!
I met a distant "cousin" who I had never met because after my father died, my mother wouldn't have anything to do with her mother because she had married a non-catholic vicar!
The cousin was very nice, and so pleased to chat, telling me all about her happy childhood with her vicar father and she asked me if I had a happy life? What do you say to that sort of question? Well I did what I always do, laughed and said "It certainly has had it's moments!"
We all left swearing that we would keep in touch more, but of course that is not going to happen.
It left me feeling sad and tired and a bit more battered, but over all I am glad I went.
The church is just bricks and mortar, the priest a twat, the words I know to be nonsense, but I felt I had gone to honour my father who died when I was twelve, and his family who have never hurt me.
And among my Aunt's photographs they had found a really old photograph of my Dad,
Lewis, in his early flying days aged about 30. I had never seen it before, so it had all been worth it just for that!
I cannot help feeling that had he lived, my life and that of my own family would have been very much different. I have never missed him so much.
I woke up this morning ready for the new year at work, but with an overwhelming need to do something MEANINGFUL!
Of course, I do see my work as meaningful, and my support of survivors, the writing I do, my family, etc. But this is something different!
I can't explain it specifically, but it is a very strong FEELING!
I don't want to wash the net curtains, or paint the bathroom, neither do I want to watch the television or read a trashy magazine, or go and have a facial or window shop -
So I am asking you all if you have a meaningful cause that you think I could contribute to in some way (I don't have any spare money though I hasten to add!) Then please do let me know about it!
This is almost certainly a "selfish" request, there's no doubt that as human beings we are all a lot happier when we are making a useful contribution, I know I am!
Many of you are passionate about a variety of commitments, perhaps I could make a small difference to some of them! Please let me know!
A very Happy and Meaningful New year to you all
XX
I have heard it so often said that the way to judge a society is in the way it treats it's weakest members , it's vulnerable people, the elderly, the children the mentally ill.
The lovely Michele Obama added her voice to that concept.
I would extend that further to suggest that the way we should measure religion, any religion, is in the way it creates victims of abuse, and the subsequent treatment of survivors of that abuse. Apply that rule of thumb to all of them and you will see, there is not ONE religion that would pass that test, not one of them that has got it anywhere near right!
None of them!
They all play the same game, it begins with denial, "It didn't happen" "Those stories are all anecdotal" "And if they did happen , it is not like that in OUR religion ", "It has all changed now" "its a long time ago" blah blah blah.
Then they love to move on to "victim blaming"
"They probably asked for it", "seduced the priest", "were promiscuous" etc" "Are just looking for compensation"!!
Then swiftly on to prevarication, "We are forming a focus group, commission, inquiry, fact finding body, etc" " we have made significant changes" (absolute rubbish, but has got to enable another few years avoidance!)
Then come the obsequious, meaningless "apologies" dragged screaming out of them ,and utterly condescending.
Then the "horror" when survivors not only dare NOT to accept their grovelling apologies, but are unashamed at their refusal to grant them "forgiveness"! (Back to blaming the victim!)
If they do accept any blame for any of their millions of abuses, they have no comprehension of the severity of that damage, nor do they care.
They do a nice line in kicking survivors when they are down. They offer pathetically inadequate amends, preferring to do as little as they can possibly get away with rather than as MUCH as they can do!
It is a great dance, this dance with the devil, round and round and round we all go, in this ridiculous merry go round.
Then as we are getting old, and some of us are dying off (Thanks to the damage done by our abuses) the whole bloody dance will start again, with new partners, new victims.
When are we going to get off this ride? stop the dance? the feeding of the narcissists? When will we start to apply that rule of thumb to each one of these man made organisations?
Get out our measuring stick, because there isn't one that won't be found woefully lacking.
To hell with the focus groups, inquiries, fact finding missions! They are getting us nowhere, and these churches, these purveyors of lies so incapable of change, can have no place in the solutions, THEY are the bloody problem!
They do NOT measure up!
