Surviving a Revolving Door of Trauma: A Light in the Darkness

By Corina Sinclair

Who doesn’t want to wear a pretty dress to her first day at school? I decided that I would, and that choice, from that moment on, seemed to set the tone for my life; a life full of trauma and abuse.

Before the pretty dress, my life as the daughter of Greek migrants had been relatively normal. My mother was a seamstress, and she spent long hours at her sewing machine or in the kitchen. My sister and I would sit at the kitchen table and read or write. Sometimes Mum would help, her hands leaving our pages dripping or smudged. She was always busy, and never smiling; ever serious.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Sep 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669831952

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Copyright © 2022 by .

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 09/16/2022

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

CHAPTER 1

Corina Sinclair: Her Story

Story style first person

W ho doesn’t want to wear a pretty dress to her first day at school? I decided that I would, and that choice, from that moment on, seemed to set the tone for my life.

A life full of trauma and abuse.

Before the pretty dress, my life as the daughter of Greek migrants had been relatively normal. My mother was a seamstress, and she spent long hours at her sewing machine or in the kitchen. My sister and I would sit at the kitchen table and read or write. Sometimes Mum would help, her hands leaving our pages dripping or smudged. She was always busy and never smiling, ever serious.

Dad was mostly absent. Even in the evenings we three—I, my mum, and my sister—would be the only ones in the house. Our warmth came from a kerosene heater, which was commonly used in the seventies. I suffered terribly with bronchitis and asthma. Although my older sister seemed unaffected, I still think the kerosene heater was the cause. I was continually given cough medicine until my teens. A common ingredient in cough medicine in those days was alcohol. I often wondered in the years to come whether that was one more reason for my drug and alcohol dependence.

In my memory, those days before school were ordinary, and life was mundane. Of course, it might not have been, but I don’t remember. I knew Dad got angry and that he and Mum fought, but he was not mad at me, not specifically. And then there was my first day of school and the choice of the pretty dress.

Dad is a man who values education, and he insisted on taking me to school on that first day. He took one look at the pretty dress, and my life changed. He dragged me by the pretty dress into the backyard of our inner-city house in the Melbourne suburb of Markland, broke a branch off one of the fig trees he loved to grow in the garden, and began to beat me with it. As he did so, he berated me for the choice of the dress. It was inappropriate; it was the wrong choice for a cold day; it would make my bronchitis worse. His accusations were punctuated by blows from the