The Mother Always Knows: A True Story of Abuse, Family Patterns and Unconscious Beliefs.

By Mary Saint

I was prompted to tell my story after the person Id loved for most of my life had betrayed my trust in the worst possible way. In sharing, perhaps a little light will be cast on the darkness of sexual abuse in families. Because its in the telling that the fear, which assists the deception and secrecy, is dispelled.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: May 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781452597089

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Copyright © 2014 Mary Saint.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-9708-9 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 04/23/2014

Contents

My Father

My Mother

My Childhood

Our Marriage

The Beginning of the End

The End

I said, Did somebody hurt you?

She screamed at me, Daddy did it.

I recall being horrified and thinking,

"God I hope he didn’t hear that.

He’ll be devastated. He loves her."

I said, "Oh don’t say that darling.

Daddy wouldn’t hurt you. He loves you."

He did, he did, she screamed.

Dedicated to my children Nicholas, Christian

and Keira with love and in truth.

Abuse in all its forms is a crime against humanity. It causes so much pain and turmoil and it often prevents its survivors from becoming who they could have been. This story had to be told in order to help others understand the suffering caused by sexual, emotional, physical and psychological abuse and the lack of honesty between human beings. Without these our world would be a far better place. When each of us is permitted to follow his or her true path, lives flow smoothly. Order and purpose can be achieved if each of us can learn to truly love God, love ourselves, live for the benefit of others and pass on the knowledge that we know as truth.

This is the story of my life. It is the story of how I have become who I am. It is a story about human beings and the ways they abuse each other. My purpose in writing this book is to share my story in that it will help others to solve puzzles in their lives and to dispel the commonly held belief that mothers know, but choose to disregard that their children are being sexually abused by their fathers. I was Mrs Average, living in a house in the suburbs with my husband and three children. Dishonesty and secrets eventually caused the disintegration of my family. In seeking truth I have uncovered family secrets that will be revealed as the story unfolds. There are some that will be upset or angry about this story being told. This is unfortunate but it is time for the secrets to be out in the open.

My Father

My father’s parents were Mary and Barry. They died long before I was born. My father didn’t ever talk about them. The little I knew about them came from other relatives and through my mother who didn’t know them either. Several years ago, my brother and I began researching our family history. It was this research, which gave me the knowledge to write a little about my father’s early life.

When my grandmother Mary, was aged 17, she gave birth to a baby boy. Because of the times, his mother’s identity was kept secret and he was slotted into Mary’s own line of siblings. His name was Walter. My great-grandmother, who was also named Mary, had 11 children. To the casual observer little Walter appeared to be just another member of this large family but his birth certificate states the younger Mary was his mother and his father was unknown. Walter was raised as Mary’s brother and he didn’t ever know she was his mother.

Mary and Barry married in 1916. They were 21 and 23 respectively. Barry was a stonemason and was from all accounts very ambitious. Mary was a milliner and continued working after her marriage. This was unusual in those days as it was expected that a woman would cease paid employment after marriage. The young couple decided to postpone a family until Barry’s business was well established. Every Christmas Mary and Barry would take a holiday at the south coast and Walter would go along too. After my father Thomas’ birth in 1924 Walter didn’t go on holiday with them. I have often wondered about how my grandmother, Mary would have felt to be a mother to her child only for a week or two each year. All mothers can appreciate the ways in which the loss of a child could have an effect on the rest of their lives.

When my father was born Mary and Barry had been married for almost eight years. My father was a very tiny baby. I do not know his actual birth weight but his aunt told me when I was a child that she had carried him about on a cushion. Mary after waiting so long for a child to acknowledge as her own, and as my father was a delicate baby, doted on him. Barry was equally ecstatic about his son’s arrival. I have a photograph of my father, taken when he was about twelve months. He sits in the centre of the photograph surrounded by all kinds of large ride-in toy cars, teddies and toys. He was much too young to play with most of these toys. It seems these doting parents wanted to give their young son everything.

When Thomas was five, Mary and Barry had a daughter and eighteen months later another baby girl joined the family. The girls were Erica and Sheila. My grandfather’s business was doing well and the family led a comfortable existence. Mary was ill much of the time. She suffered from asthma, for which there was little treatment in those days. However, her mother was a great help to her and cared for her grandchildren whenever necessary. The family stories relate that Mary and her mother were great friends who spent a lot of time together.

Then all of a sudden Barry wasn’t there anymore. He was killed when he was thrown through the windscreen of his car. It ran off the road ten miles outside Bathurst one Saturday afternoon in 193l. My father was not quite seven years old and the girls were both still babies. From then on life became difficult for Mary and the children. Finances were stretched as a large sum of cash, which Barry had been carrying, had disappeared and there was some problem with the business, as he hadn’t left a will. However, Mary’s parents helped out. Mary rented out her garage to a local business and her mother took Sheila to live with her permanently. Mary had lost another of her children to her mother. When she was well enough, Mary, Thomas and Erica would catch a bus on Saturdays to visit her family and see Sheila and of course, her secret son, Walter.

One Saturday, during a visit Mary heard Sheila call grandmother mother. She picked up her little girl and took her home. Sheila, now five went back to live with her mother, brother and sister. I guess Mary took Sheila home with her because she didn’t want to lose another child to her mother. Sheila would have found life very different from her grandparent’s house where so much attention was given to her. Grandparents, aunts and uncles were always around to pay her constant attention.

I have been able to discover very little information about Mary and John, my father’s maternal grandparents. I know they were married at Paddington in 1892. Great grandmother Mary was a Catholic whereas John was an Anglican. Great grandfather worked as a labourer, one of the most common occupations back then. I’ve been told he liked to write his name in the dust on the mantelshelf to indicate that here was an area in the home, which had been neglected. He also apparently had a habit of purposely breaking chipped china at the dinner table. I don’t know if he had a problem with alcohol but it appears he liked to control those responsible for household duties in subtle ways as well as showing anger if everything didn’t meet with his approval. The information I recall being given as a child about great grandfather indicated he was a wonderful husband and father. However, it was my mother who told me this and she’d never met him. There are no family stories about my father’s paternal grandparents as Mary cut all ties when Barry was killed. My father and his sisters said they didn’t know anything about their father’s side of the family.

During the Depression years Mary had many of her relatives staying with her. She owned her home so when relatives couldn’t find work they stayed with her to save paying rent. Mary’s secret son Walter married. He and his wife and two children came to live with Mary and her family. I’ve been told Thomas, my father was unhappy about this. It caused a strained relationship between him and his half-brother Walter. Of course, my father wasn’t aware of the true relationship and he thought the young family was simply more people taking advantage of his mother’s generosity. An argument occurred one afternoon, between Thomas who was about twelve, and Walter. As a consequence Walter told Mary he would leave her home. Mary became very upset and told Walter the house was his home and she wanted him to stay. I have often wondered how she would have felt about these circumstances. She could never acknowledge her son, nor could she acknowledge her two grandchildren. Her mother had taken her baby, Walter and raised him as her own. Later, her mother took her daughter, Sheila and raised her until she was five years of age. Honesty or truth didn’t exist in my father’s childhood home. Mary would have carried a great deal of unconscious anger toward her mother. Since I have discovered all this I have often tried to imagine how my grandmother would have felt. I could never have given up a child I’d given birth to but then I was born in a different time.

Not long after Mary brought Sheila home, Thomas my father left school to begin full-time work. He’d always helped financially by doing odd jobs as a child, and was treated as the man of the house. That was how Mary referred to him and he basically did whatever he liked. He wasn’t well liked by many relatives and friends of the family because of the way he behaved. He was cruel to his sisters but was rarely reprimanded for this. His mother was very sick much of the time and probably couldn’t be bothered with discipline. My father wore tailor-made suits during this time. My Aunt Sheila told me she recalled being sent to the butcher to buy steak for Thomas’ dinner. When she arrived at the butcher’s shop it was closed. Her young mind made a decision to purchase some sausages from the delicatessen because she feared returning home without anything at all. She arrived at home and presented the sausages to her mother.

Mary’s reaction was to exclaim, You can’t expect him to eat those and to throw the sausages out the door. She then picked up a stick to threaten Sheila and continued to verbally abuse her while my father looked on, laughing.

Erica and Sheila, my aunts, have told me quite a lot about life during those years. Erica, from the time she was about eight years old, was responsible for running the household whenever her mother was too ill with her severe asthma. My father the man of the house who worked was placed in a very important position, which also carried an enormous responsibility. How does a young boy cope with having to earn a living to support his mother and sisters?

Erica was kept home from school often for six months at a time. Her role was to cook, scrub floors and clean the house. She was also responsible for laundering her brother’s shirts and starching their detached collars. Aunt Erica told me she would be sent back to school towards the end of the year just to sit for exams, which she would fail. She would then be called dumb. Well, everyone knew that women didn’t need to be educated. After all, they would only marry and have children. Mary wasn’t a permanent invalid and when she was well she ran the household herself. I’ve been told she was a wonderful cook.

Thomas joined the army when he was eighteen, which was about halfway through the Second World War. He was home on leave when Mary died in 1943. Mary had left a will, which stated that on her death, her house and possessions were to be sold and the monies split three ways for her children. Erica and Sheila were fourteen and twelve. Thomas had organised a loan and wanted to buy the house so his sisters could stay there. An aunt and uncle had arranged to live with them. However, to get the loan he needed the permission of his guardian, another uncle who was named in Mary’s will because in those days, one wasn’t considered an adult until the age of twenty-one. This man refused my father permission to purchase the house and my father never spoke to him again. I recall attending a family funeral many years later at which, I heard that uncle speak to my father. Dad totally ignored him.

Mary pawned her jewellery several times during the depression. My Aunt Erica told me the last time Mary did this she couldn’t afford to retrieve it. My father rescued his mother’s wedding ring and a gold bracelet from the house because he wanted his sisters to have them. He also took a marble chess board his father had made. His guardian uncle sold the house and furniture and the monies were placed in trust for the children as Mary had requested in her will. Several members of the family wanted the girls to be sent to an orphanage after their mother died. However, one of Mary’s sisters came to the rescue and took Erica and Sheila to live with her. Thomas went back to the war and life went on. After the war he came back and met my mother. They married in their early twenties because, as my mother says, they were both orphans and there was no one to stop them.

My father had an unconscious hatred of women caused by his mother placing such a huge responsibility on his shoulders at too young an age. He would also have carried society’s belief at the time that women were inferior to men and an education for women was unnecessary. Children need limits and boundaries. They need to be told how far they can go. My father had very few limits placed upon him. He did what he liked. He was cruel to his sisters and was rude to whoever displeased him. His mother indicated he was more important than anyone else in the household and he grew to believe this. In my childhood home this belief was continued. It seems other patterns also continued, including the belief that women were inferior to men and didn’t really warrant respect or equality. They certainly didn’t need to be educated and it was best that they were thought of as stupid.

My Mother

My maternal grandparents also died long before I was born. My mother can’t remember her mother and has only limited memory of her father. I know quite a bit about my mother’s childhood though as she used to talk about it all the time. My mother liked to talk about her Grandmother and her Auntie who together, raised her and her sisters and her brother. She’d tell me her Auntie, used to say such things as, Two wrongs don’t make a right and we should, Turn the other cheek when people were nasty to us.

Grandmother was born in Germany. She had arrived in Cooktown in North Queensland during the 1870’s gold rush. At this time she was married to a German man who was a tent maker and later a publican. After he died of Ross River Fever, she continued running a hotel in North Queensland with the help of her children. I don’t know exactly how many children there were but there were two sons and several daughters. In 1897 she married another man who operated a business in the town and subsequently had two more daughters. My grandmother Penelope was the first of these. Cooktown was severely damaged by a cyclone in the early 1900’s and the family moved to New Guinea.

Mum’s parents were Gregory and Penelope. Gregory was an accountant working for a company, which operated in the islands. Penelope worked in a hotel run by the family, as did her sisters. My grandparents married in New Guinea in 1917. Penelope was nineteen and Gregory was twenty-six. Penelope gave birth to six children, my mother Brenda, being the youngest. Like Mary, Penelope was also very sick much of the time. She suffered from a kidney complaint known as Bright’s disease. Apparently, she’d been told not to continue having children, but she did and consequently she died when my mother was about three. Penelope’s mother came to the rescue. Though Gregory wanted to take his children back to the isolated part of New Guinea in which he worked, Grandmother wouldn’t hear of it. She said she’d promised her daughter she would care for the children and that is what would happen. She wouldn’t even let Gregory take his son Jacob with him.

Grandmother continued to raise the children on an island, which lies off the tip of Papua New Guinea. She owned some houses, which she sold off over the years to help keep things afloat financially. One of her daughters lived across the road and she helped with the children. My mother Brenda, always said, Granny was a wonderful woman. I have heard other family members refer to her as a God-fearing woman and as a self-sacrificing woman who gave up much for her grandchildren. The children were always cleaned, pressed and shiny for school and Sunday school. There wasn’t a great deal of money but Christmas and birthdays were made special for the children. The Easter Bunny came on the right day but the children weren’t allowed to eat their eggs until after church. My mother says they had a wonderful childhood.

My mother’s brother Jacob told me Grandmother couldn’t really communicate in English. However, my mother says this wasn’t the case. My Uncle Jacob says his grandmother spoke in broken English. He told me a story about how he and my mother used to