Part 3: There's No place like home.
We enjoyed it at the Lismore Womens refuge for the main part, although sometimes mum was too much of a space cadet to fit in normally which embarrased us a lot.
Sometimes it didn't seem safe, as all the other women had emotional and finacial issues and/or difficulties which pretty much goes without saying, because if you're in a refuge it's for a damn good reason, people don't usually choose this life over a stable one. In fact you can't, you must go through the right channels, be in just the right amount of shit, and then there has to be enough beds available.
It's a hell of a battle getting into one of these places, lucky for us mum always found a way. I guess it was easier for us because we quite obviously had it pretty bad and our story was so sad that people found it hard to turn us away. Two young kids and a mother with mental problems and a victom of child abuse and domestic violence.
Really this is a very common tale among refuge women, but mum has a way of reeling people in with every trick from morbid details to tight lipped suppressed anger to manic explosions with no rationale at all. Real or not her stories will inevitably bring even the toughest person to their knees. Personally I believe her stories to be mostly true, with some parts tainted with confusion and misunderstanding due to her illness.
Something had to make her the way she is though, so I wholeheartedly believe her childhood was very fucked up in deed. With domestic violence just throwing her over the edge.
Another thing that can be said about mum is that she is not a proud person. Basically I conclude that she has no shame at all. In fact this could quite possibly be an understatement and also my biggest hang up with her in every way, shape and form.
Which brings us back to the womens refuge in Lismore. I don't think it really ever bothered mum that we were there, wrung out and tired of having nowhere permanent to stay. But it bothered me. I knew very early on what being "underdogs" was all about and we were "it"!
I was contantly in a state of embarressment for our situation. I hated it and there wasn't a God damn thing I could do about it. Where mum went, we went also.
One thing that really pissed me off about Lismore and has permanantly scarred me for life, was an incident that happened during our first stay there. I don't know my exact age, maybe 7, and I had recently had a birthday and received a whole lot of cool lego from my dad. I had it in a box (an empty stubbie carton) and I loved that lego. It was all I really had back then.
Someone within the refuge took it apon themselves to take my lego down to the kiddies play area and let the children play with it. Apparently, as the story was retold later to my horrified little face, a small child tried to swallow a bit and then my lego was deemed unsafe for children to play with, so it was thrown out, or so they say.
Now looking back, there is no way that lego was thrown out, it was worth more than one hundred dollars and I can only presume it was hocked off for cigarettes, drugs or alcohol. Who knows, it could have been my own mother, but i'll never know the real truth. The sadness was so great for me and it still hurts to think about it. It might seem silly to some, just lego, but for a child with nothing else but hope and faith, it was world shattering.
My world just seemed to get crueler by the minute.
