The gift of me

The images from my childhood Christmases play like a super-8 film. They are grainy and disjointed. A sad child with a crooked fringe is in the corner of the frame. She pokes a stick in an ant hole and watches them scramble. She doesn’t make friends easily. She is quiet and remote. Her inner life is vast. She dances with a mop in the front yard. She pretends she’s a single mother and she’s run away to join the circus with her baby tossing act… 

I was a weird kid. It’s hard sometimes to recognise that child as me. But at Christmas, lurking behind the happy memories that came later, there is always this. Like a stone in my heart. When I think of this child, I think of children who have lives like mine then.

I was a child of violence. Christmas was a time of hope. It was this moment in my childhood when I believed a kind, fat man in a red suit gave gifts to good children. I always wondered if I was good. My little life was hard, and in my child’s brain it was impossible not to think it was because of me. 

In the rural Queensland town where I lived Christmas Eve was magical. A local farmer would dress as Santa and take children on a bullock-drawn dray around the town. We’d sit perched on hay bales looking at the stars, laughing, seeing our town in a whole new light. The adults drank beer in the park and tried their luck at winning hams on the carnival wheel spinner. 

I have two distinct memories of Christmas at this time. One is of putting out my teddy to meet Santa. I dressed him and propped him up on a chair on our verandah. When I awoke to see what a good girl I had been, it was carnage. A dog had taken my teddy and torn it to pieces in the front yard. It was like a Tarantino film. Bits of my beloved bear lay scattered like teddy confetti. His fluffy innards a kind of rolling snow blowing in the dust. Of course, I didn’t think it was a dog, I thought Santa had done it – like it was a sign of my unworthiness. I not only lived with a violent father, Santa was a psychopath as well. Perhaps this is where my feminism first took root.

The last Christmas before my father was killed, was perhaps the most poignant of all. I awoke to no presents under the tree. My father said ‘go outside’. And tied to the fence was a brown and white pony. A pony that also turned out to be a psychopath, but a pony nonetheless. I will never forget that moment. It was a signpost to me of better things to come. It wasn’t just a pony, it was an escape vehicle. A gift for my little girl agency to be able to escape. Perhaps it was more magical for me because of the despair and sadness that I lived with. The fact that I loved and feared the same man who was my father. Who was also my Santa.

I don’t mean this to be depressing, because it is Christmas and all that. But I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the children living in domestic violence. To think about their powerlessness, their fear and their hope. 

For me, things got better. The quiet girl with a crooked fringe became loud and brassy and confident. She was safe and loved. It was the best gift of all; me. 

I hope, one day very soon, other children living in violence receive that gift too.