By Survivor Jammie
The fact that the abuser creates a climate where the other parent is forced into submission is a form of child psychological abuse in itself. Moreover, some children can also be directly targeted by the abuser in a bid to hurt the victim. For example, they may be threatened or assaulted when the abuser tries to force the other parent into submission.
…..The Deadly Results.
In my case it was these words “I hurt the kids to hurt you.” This is abuse by Proxy.
I am writing this for my son Merlin, who died aged just 17. I am writing this for anyone who ever finds themselves so battered they feel they must keep appeasing their abuser, isolated and lost that you feel that you can’t walk away. You have to, because nothing is worth more than those babies you are trying to protect,
I met him young, I was 20, and he looked like Jean-Michel Basquiat, he was also lost, his parent’s having recently revealed their marriage was a sham and the perfect twenty year marriage cracked to reveal affairs and half siblings. He had turned to cocaine and whiskey. I had propensity for trying to fix trying to help, I had been my Grandmother’s best assistant and friend from young after she was widowed. I had myself come from a broken family and had been helped and helped others. So I took on the formidable opponent of cocaine, with natural warm things; I made him exercise gently, cleaned his family home which was full of his Mother’s items gathering dust a “mausoleum” he called it. planted flowers, danced, cleaned his dogs, we fell in love. I got pregnant, this wasn’t part of my plan at all, but fueled by a feeling of us against the world, we moved into my Father’s home and began saving for a place of our own. He was clean, I used my corporate skills to call round for jobs in advertising for him pretending to be from the star recruitment agency. He was a Cambridge Graduate of political sciences so he didn’t really need me. We were happy. Then I went to the hospital and met his Godmother a wonderful Matron of the hospital, she said she would look after me during the pregnancy, and as time moved o she told me she was concerned about Jerry, said he had so much pain from the divorce I would have to get him to release it. I am obedient and so I followed her advice, she said get him to explode. So I questioned him about his pain. He exploded, screaming at me within inches of my face and my heart fell. The next day he said he had had a dream I was his sister. He never stopped screaming. I became his favourite go to the person he said ” it didn’t matter what he said or did to.”
We moved on without boundaries, he worked and began taking cocaine again, his world revolved around politics with his political family and his career was solely influenced by campaign times and using his position in advertising to buy media favours for the longer term. I never slept much and raised our two boys, yes we had a second, as I had been a model and struggled with the weight gain of pregnancy and fell completely in love with Alex my son and knew I had to give him a sibling. I thought Jerry would calm down. But he gave Merlin a hernia squeezing his stomach. I should have left then but I had my Father and I spent more and more time taking my babies to him, escaping getting some sleep, and then Dad got cancer and my goals became to show him I was ok and make his life happy. Home got wilder, ” I make my own rules.” My life shrunk, each day along with my confidence. I built us a home on an old chicken coup on my Dad’s property, I thought this would help as we had been renting. Dad and I built it together, from his hospital bed designing it. It was beautiful. I made my family home cooked meals of extreme health proportions, landscaped learned to be a Montessori teacher, cared for everyone. The more I gave the more he took.
My Dad died in 2006. I barely saw my Husband he came and went as he pleased. We were a team of my little boys and me. They were my life. When Jerry would come home a fearful silence would grip us. With dad’s death came more drama and more isolation, I was left without family and gave up all I inherited to appease my new family, his family.
I kept thinking if I do this, it will stop.
The more you give the more you become isolated.
He would roar at me. Dinners meals were always terrifying. He would enjoy creating chaos out of our home. there was no cohesion he proudly encouraged more and more chaos. I would collapse and be hospitalised and return to feed him and his family with a trays of food wash them up, and slip shaking onto bed.
The children were always yelled at, inches from their faces, beaten, we lived in perpetual fear. Don’t wake up too early, don’t do too well in school, never say the wrong thing. The boys had voices like whispers’. A witness later wrote of this, If they were unwell I had to beg and face physical attacks just to get him to let me go to the hospital. All he had to do was open the door. I would be on duty all the time at the hospital for however many days it took. My son was so terrified to go to the Drs he once told a Dr he was ” fine”and vomited on the Dr’s shoes.
I had lost my Father. I felt this insane self imposed (plus societal pressure) to stay, that in time my partner would calm down and we would look back and laugh. He felt he was God. He would say, sneeringly “who is your God?” To the children. He was as his ex called him the perfect Jekyll and Hyde. The boys would go into the store room and dust off each other and say “this is Dad bringing us out of the store when we go visit people.” He would scream at them violently all the way in the car to someone’s house and then as the door opened he would be charm personified. When he screamed he would hold a child against the wall so their faces were an inch from his. I should have left him I just could barely talk I had no confidence, my life was on auto pilot; wake up protect, create, watch destruction/ be destroyed, act as a human shield, try, make as much magic and beauty and happiness as possible when we were free of him, repeat.
He would literally rain hell for social evet attendance; Fever worn nothing interfered with his politics, if there was an event you attended it.
There were countless days I went to bed shaking with exhaustion. If I worked the house was chaos, more shouting more violence, if I didn’t work more money was needed, there was no way I could make him Happy. I took to walking alone or he would make the little ones walk faster till they tripped and carry the heaviest of picnic bags pushing me away.
In 2012, I had a daughter, Ella, my current partner just questioned me rightly so, as to why? If he was so violent would you have another child?I answered him truthfully I would do all I could for my babies and having discovered I was pregnant prayed not with a girl. I had bonded with my boys beyond compare my life was them and falling pregnant again meant that the baby was part of me and somehow I would figure it out. Ella was a girl, and when I discovered I was devastated I knew she could never have this wild Father, but determined to meet my daughter and determined to figure it out for my three little people.
I think it works like this: Entrapment, You Fall in Love with your children, You endure survive protect against the Attacks, you are paralysed by Fear, you become friends with Isolation,the consistency of the attacks despite every bandage you try leads to a huge loss of confidence, you try appeasement
Finally they moved us into positions of less and less funds of our own.
Then it became really deadly.
During COVID they moved and moved us.
Merlin got weaker and weaker, he had never been very well born with a virus, a cousin of COVID, coxsackie B Virus, but he was my pride and joy, my living miracle, I had never left his bed side as a baby and as he grew each step and move made me delightfully proud. Moving us over and over during COVID hardly helped his health though. Neither did insisting the upon their paternal Grandfather a politicians death Merlin attend the funeral, legally supposed to be thirty people, announced as soon as my son left my Coast home for the funeral as 1000 people. Merlin collapsed just after the funeral of his Grandfather and was covered in a blanket and sent back to the city. No medical care given, Jerry never took one of the children to a Dr, ever.
My mind is jumping to the day he died.
To the recent questions by the UK police: “did he ever try to strangle you?” No, not me I had answered but my sons, and my mind goes back to Ella speaking to her Father ( it took him a year to call her and only after child court ordered it), he was swinging politics at her saying it was all me who had lied, she looked non plussed and asked him to leave me alone, what of Merlin she asked, he told me how lucky I was never to have lived with you two weeks before he died, how you would hold him up against a wall by his throat?” Her voice indignant her body jumping as she recalled. “He hit them with drum sticks, he destroyed their birthday parties by throwing tantrums, we
ducked and dived, I should have left I should have left. I could still have them.
Ella and I were on a beach with our dogs and Merlin the day he died. His Father had moved him to up country we were living apart I had been tricked into moving away from our home up country as he was planning to sell it and then we could move back to the UK with our Mothers. I am loyal. I wanted to be with my Mother in her old age, I wanted my children to have Europe as a part of their childhood. But it was only a rouse. He sold the home and all our assets. And we my three musketeers and I were left at his mercy. Merlin had had to show face by going up country to study. Studies publicly wre what mattered to my Husband plus international schools were a great political ground for networking and my family money kept paying for that. Merlin my angelic beautiful one had been housed alone and fed by credit card, he’d been studying online whilst keeping his older brother company, he had gotten lonely and joined a gym and taken steroids’. All unknown to me. Until later. living at the Coast had been revealing our funds had been taken and we had lived hungry and infested with malaria and no hot water treated as pawns, but free; for so long I had been told I wasn”t capable, I recall the being truly alone as easier to cope when we first moved our home was filled with laughter and song, I got almost electric jolts of being able to do something.
The day Merlin died, we were walking our dog Summer and her puppies on the beach, Merlin ran ahead long beautiful legs, with Summer, and he lept in the air suddenly pulling Summer up with him. He twisted in the air, said ” oh I have never felt a pain like this.” He fell into the sand face first. I ran to him and we were laughing thinking he was joking. I turned him over and saw his purple face under a thick thatch of blond sandy hair. There was a purple mark on his neck. I cleared his airway and began to administer CPR. Ella was screaming, the beach was empty a rai8ny day. I screamed at her to run for help. Fisherman an up to us. People ran up to us. A car me I kept giving my son CPR all the way to the hospital but he had died instantly and I had been giving CPR to a dead person.
My dead son.
My beautiful miracle child.
I have tears streaming down my face.
The rest of this if you can believe it became worse.
Alex came to me and told me how his brother had had migraines and begged his Father to take him to the hospital to a Dr. His Father had been with his new partner and wasn’t about to change his habit. My mind runs with hernias, with times of his pushing Merlin so hard he would fall, with the warning of I hurt the kids to hurt you. I had to fight for an autopsy. It was conducted behind my back, but the pathologist indicated the migraines were prewarning signs, precursors.
At Merlin’s funeral his Father handed me the urn, our son. ” Take it.” he said.
It is also postulated that revenge filicides mostly occur when the killer sees the child as an object rather than a human being, who is of significant value to the other parent (Carruthers, 2016). Due to this distorted perspective the killer experiences the child as an object ( Ms funeral take it , the urn )rather than a human being and can therefore not elicit motivation or logic to protect the child. Consequently, the killer is unable to understand the long-term gravity of the situation and the impact their behaviour will have on the family and society. They are focussed on hurting the spouse that caused their grief and distress. Revenge filicide can also be associated with Schadenfreude, the sense of pleasure people derives from the misfortune of others. Dehumanization is at the core of Schadenfreude. Dehumanization is the process of perceiving a person or social group as lacking the attributes that defines what it means to be human. A propensity to experience Schadenfreude can be linked to personality traits such as narcissism, sadism, and psychopathy (Emory Health Sciences, 2018).
Ella, Alex and I are surviving, though when we are together people can see the haunted looks on our faces and the tightness of our group. We look like survivors of war, because we are.
I don’t want this to be you, there was so much more torture so many awful things that happened we live with death threats, we had to survive with no help from corrupt courts, we were moved from our home and have half a suitcase, but we have each other and this is why I write this; get out forget society you can reestablish, you will always knows the truth of your intent and you can find the strength..
In my case it was these words “I hurt the kids to hurt you.”
Hold their tiny hands in yours,
Remember that now is all you have,
it won’t get better if you stay,
Society doesn’t matter, you will find a way.
Be brave enough to walk away. For Merlin.
