Changing into gym gear at primary school one day a teacher noticed a deep, shoe shaped welt on my upper thigh. He asked me where it came from and I told him that my mother had kicked me as I was walking past her. She was wearing those cheap canvas kung fu shoes which left the waffle sole imprint on my leg. At that point his interest stopped. He didn’t hear, “Please see that I am being hurt by my carer”, he didn’t hear, “Can you help me?” I think he heard, “Don’t get involved.”

What is parentification?

Parentification is often referred to as growing up too fast. Typically, it occurs when a child takes on parental responsibility for their siblings or even their parents, taking care of a sibling or parent physically, mentally, or emotionally. This can damage a child’s mental well-being and lead to long-term mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety. 

This was my childhood. Being swept down a river. Home was the rapids, getting tossed and tumbled, bloodied and afraid. School was the calm stretches between…but there were always rapids.

A beautiful day so the family goes down to the river for a day out. And the drinking began. We ran from the river that day. We hid behind trees in paddocks beside the road as dad called out for us. 

Only my siblings and I can truly understand how powerful this image is.

My sister came to visit while I was painting this one and I saw her visceral reaction to it. I knew then 2 things.

1 I had managed to capture what I was trying to. The joy of hearing dad's bus rounding the corner. Running out to jump on the bus before he pulled up the driveway, a kiss was the cost of the fare. The heady smell of the diesel motor. 

The anxiety of the atmosphere inside the house before he arrives. Sitting and waiting for him to arrive, not playing, not messing up the house, our clothes or our hair. 

The excitement of showing dad anything we had achieved since his last visit. The silent threat not to tell him about mums drinking, the men who came in and out of our house, the times she went missing, the fear for our lives. 

The knowledge that the pattern of how the night will play out never changes. 

And 2, that no one will understand but us 3. 

House rules.

You did not talk about what went on in the house. You left perfectly groomed and if anyone asked you if you wanted anything you politely answered, “no, thank you”. 

I recall visiting our Grandpa and an afternoon tea of cakes and biscuits and drinks laid out. I was dying of thirst and desperate to bite into one of those cakes but to every insistent, “Are you quite sure you don’t want anything?” the answer was, “no, thank you”.  

The cone of silence and the myth of nice children was preserved.

Im a breath holder.

When things are painful, scary, heavy to think about or talk about I hold my breath.

When I was a kid I would try to breathe so shallow. Trying to hide any sign I was there.  

Why does no one believe me that I could fly?

I leave the ground and fly over the town. I can see all the houses and the people. I feel so good. I feel amazing. My friends don’t believe me but they are wrong. I really can fly.

The clinical term, so my counsellor has told me, is “dissociation”…I disconnected from my lived experience to endure stress. 

Fuck science, I could fly!

Can you see it on a child's face when her head is full of horror, fear, pain, confusion,  self loathing. And if you could see it....would you do anything to save that child?

I thought there was something fundamentally wrong about me that drew this attention. I thought that I was less loveable than my siblings, not appreciating that they were getting pretty much the same treatment. It wasn’t till years later that I realised how much abuse my brother was getting until he left home and the focus fell on me and I fell into drawing abuse to save my younger sister, which left me feeling, not heroic but deeply unloveable. 

Some nights, after the pub shut, the party moved to our house. It wasn’t safe to sleep when strangers confused your room with the toilet.

One particular day we were walking home and, as we approached the house, we started to come across various items of women's clothing. We quickly recognised the handbag as mum’s, and the clothing, and when we got home found her naked,drunk and unconscious just inside the door. We children had to maintain the pretense of a happy, healthy home and she was a disgraceful drunk. My blood boils at the hypocrisy.

My counsellor always looks for the meanings I made about myself in these paintings, and he noticed how the emotion plays into the paintings. When I am painting my fear I hide in the Marylou doll but when I paint my anger everything gets very tight and precise.  

I couldn’t stand up for myself but I would put myself between anyone and my little sister…often to no avail.

And I have carried a sense of failing her my whole life.

I now have a better understanding that this was not MY failure. 

The first rule of the house was, “don’t talk” Even as I paint these paintings 40 years on, the crushing sense of guilt I still feel about telling the story is indescribable. So I can’t paint the raw horror, the disgust, the shame. What you see is what went on, a mask of a child enduring abuse and neglect and coerced, threatened, and compelled into silence.

A photo showing two children playing, my little sister and I. A memory of a bruised and cut woman taking a photo of her children playing.

But that's the basis of this whole exhibition…what you see versus what we saw.

This story fills me with rage. It is the middle of the night. My brother, sister and I are woken and pulled from our beds. We are taken to the kitchen and presented with three coloured wires and asked to pick which one our mother should hang herself with. I get now that she was probably feeling very depressed and alone but to do that to your children is unforgivable.

This was actually scary…looking back on it now I can't imagine it from the neighbours point of view. 

It's the middle of the night and you hear rustling in the bushes in your front yard. You peek out the window and see your neighbour, naked, crouched behind a bush with her two young, nighty clad, daughters.

Mum decided people were coming to ‘get’ us so out of our beds, out of our house and into the neighbours bushes. That neighbour ended up having to break into our house for us because mum had thrown away the keys.

The time I had friends over for my birthday sleepover. 3 girls from school. I was so excited and so happy. My father had come, driving the bus he lived in.

Whenever my father came to visit, which was every ‘special’ occasion like a birthday, he and mum would drink, get drunk, get abusive, get violent. 

We were in the lounge. I can't remember what we were doing as I was so focused on pretending the sounds of screaming and the sounds of fists hitting flesh weren’t happening, while my friends became increasingly uncomfortable. And then mum appeared, carrying my birthday cake. Blood, from where Dad had split her lip on a tooth, was dripping down her chin onto the cake. My friends screamed and cried. They went home. No more birthday parties. No more friends. I became the child that no parent wanted their children to associate with.

Suffice to say, there are some doors that children should not open…or if they do, the adults inside should send them away, not invite them in. I heard strange sounds coming from my mothers room. I went to investigate.

I had been sexually abused before this moment and I felt damaged, dirty, grotty, unloved and worthless. But this time was different. This time I participated. This took me to a new low as I added guilt and shame and a deep sense of self loathing to my repertoire of emotions and sensations.

Counselling notes= Often, as an adult, abuse victims blame their childhood self for actions they took that led to the abuse…”Why did I accept that lolly?”, “Why did I allow that to happen?”. In Karlie’s case (the painting, ‘Curiosity’,) “Why did I go into that room?” The answer is simply that you were a child at the time and children do not know the same things adults know. I witnessed Karlie blaming herself, convinced that she knew she was going to get abused, before the abuse happened. The intense guilt and shame that comes out of abuse often distorts things for the victim.  

I suspect that because we feel guilty and shameful for things we know we shouldn’t have done but did anyway (eg. stealing money from mum’s purse), we associate guilt and shame with foreknowledge…”I knew it was wrong”.  

That assumption of foreknowledge makes the guilt and shame over abuse feel like we did something wrong that we knew was wrong. I have worked with clients who acknowledge that they did not feel shame until years after the abuse,when they learned what it meant, but they quickly connect shame to the abuse and create a sense that they felt it at the time.

One of the healing parts of abuse therapy is shifting blame from the victim to the perpetrator, and relieve them of the shame that never belonged to them.

This painting, this ordinary, boring, uninspiring painting was the hardest for me to paint. It sums up my story. To look at the house from the outside all you see is a house. Plain and simple. You don't see what caused goosebumps on my flesh walking up the driveway. You don't see the fear of the unknown and the known. 

I spent hours upon hours going over and over every inch of this painting trying for perfection because, even at this point of my healing , I need you to see it as my mother wanted people to see it. 

When I had it as perfect as i could I took up my brush once more, in an act of defiance I hope the fucking Warrior would be proud of, I unmowed her lawn.

When I was thirteen something snapped. The one sided abuse turned into a full on, feral fight. I got hurt too but I beat the crap out of my mother. This moment gave birth to “the Fucking Warrior”. Gone was the little girl who tried to be invisible, while desperately hoping to be noticed and cared for. Gone was the little girl who strove to be polite, was always impeccably dressed, hid in the background and never asked for anything. 

In her place was every teacher’s nightmare, dressed in torn clothing, sitting in the back of the class smoking, telling teachers to “fuck off’, when they told her to leave. She didn’t just stick two fingers up to the world, she got up in the world’s face and snarled, “Do you want a piece of me” She was troubled and, unfortunately, she attracted trouble. The strong girl that you see expressing herself here is the same girl curled up in a ball in, Being in love with Stacey’.

Counselling notes= This is something we refer to as “parts”. Karlie essentially divided when she took power back from her abuser, her mother, and the new part took over.  

When Karlie became pregnant at 19 she realised that Fucking Warrior could not raise a child and so Karlie re-emerged and took over. Fucking Warrior was pushed away and became a source of shame and guilt for Karlie. Fucking Warrior hurt a people who didn’t deserve to be hurt, and some that did. Fucking Warrior emerged during a counselling session and I was so pleased to meet her. She got Karlie out of that cycle of abuse. Who knows what might have become of Karlie if Fucking Warrior hadn’t turned up. 

It has taken some time for Karlie to appreciate fucking warrior, learn to love her and hand her the brush. She is awesome and has plenty to say that we should all listen to, rather than simply treat as “too hard”. She transformed this exhibition from just Karlie's story to a message of disgust at all the people who, through inaction, endorsed the abuse in the ‘nothing to see here’ house, and a hope that we can, as a society, stop doing that.

We all have these parts. They emerge in moments of stress to deal with things. Some of us have parts we wish we didn’t have and are ashamed of. We might be ashamed for yelling at our children when they disobey us…that is a part that deals with disrespect. Learning to, as Bessell Van der Kolk, the author of “the body keeps the score” notes, love and appreciate all our parts is key to recovery from trauma and general mental health.

Pretty self explanatory.

That kid and how many more are not alright? 

In primary school we were told homes sporting the safe house sticker meant the home was safe to go to if you were in danger. 

Not all were. 

The social worker assigned to keep an eye on us who became my alcoholic mother’s drinking buddy.

The doctor who dealt with the sexual assault injuries and told me they were psychosomatic.

My father who failed to protect us from our mother and exposed us to the violence that went on between the two of them.

All the teachers who saw this girl and must have known something was making her a feral animal.

The principal who informed me I was a shit magnet.

The police officer who told me “You can always talk to me”...but left it at that. If he could see something was wrong, why didn’t he do anything more than extend a fingernail.

The lawyer for child that…I don’t know? submitted invoices for the work he didn’t do?

The arsehole who turned up most weeks to get my mum drunk, have noisy sex, that I had to endure, and then go home to his happy family.

Fuck them all.

Don’t be them.

Stacey was mean. He was strong and took no shit from anyone. I was just 15 and that was attractive to me. But he took no shit from me either. If he wanted sex, “no” was not an option. He had control in his home and ruled his mother with fear. So when she witnessed the degrading way he used me, she said nothing. 

I went on a weekend trip to see some friends against his wishes, so it was MY fault that he raped a 14 year old girl who did speak up, ending up with Stacey going to prison. I visited him in prison. It makes sense to Fucking Warrior, but it dosn’t make sense to me, or probably you.

I felt like I didn’t belong in the light, I don’t deserve good things because I’m this broken person.

There’s no point in crying. No one is coming. Give up hope, harden up and handle it. Get through another day.

This is a new experience. You cannot feel it while the overwhelming feelings are shame and guilt. It’s a liberating feeling.

I got an F for school C (NZEA1) art. The reason was that the teacher didn’t like the “themes” of what I was painting, dark and melancholy. From time to time my principal would haul me into his office to tell me I was a “useless shit magnet.” He wasn’t wrong (at least about the “shit magnet” part - see ‘living with Stacy’) but I took those words as a challenge…not to improve, but to get an ‘A’ in useless shit magnet.  

F is for fail. What about all those people who failed me like the teacher and the principal? Do they get an F?

The monsters aren’t hiding under the bed, they are getting drunk in the lounge and you don’t know if you are safe tonight. 

I wasn't allowed to get a haircut so by the time I went to intermediate school it was down to my butt.

Cutting my hair became my coping mechanism whenever I felt stressed and out of control. It gave me a sense of control as it was something my mother had always controlled. It also acted as a warning to others…stay away!

When my life starts going well I get a sense of impending doom and I cut my hair off…it’s a reset. 

It's a sign of my healing that my hair is now the long, full, wild lions mane it is today.