moi

It is unbelievable how the Internet can let you express feelings that otherwise would stay locked up in you.

I was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1957; I am 44 years old. I have three sisters and three brothers. Another brother died when he was 6 months old because of my father. We lived in a small dwelling, in an old part of the city. There was only one bedroom for six children and we shared two beds. My father was an alcoholic. He would beat up my mother every second days and sometimes twice a day if his meal wasn’t hot enough or if she had said a word he didn’t like… Sometimes he would beat us up too because we made too much noise or simply for no reasons at all.

At that time we were very poor and my mother had to hand-wash all our laundry and hanged it outside to dry. I have vivid memories of this because during winters, here in Quebec, it is terribly cold and sometimes for weeks, as cold as –25 to –30 Celsius. Every days, my mother’s hands would freeze till they bled and when she brought in the laundry, it was as hard as wood. Our clothes came from the Nuns of the congregation “St-Nom-de-Jésus” and I often remember the stern faces of these sisters in school. On my site, in the gallery section, there is a painting titled: “La ferme de jesus-marie” that I made for this reason.

My father was a carpenter and he drank all the time. His hate came from an excessive jealousy towards my mother that probably started at the beginning of their union.

When my sister Francine was a teenager of sixteen she had to leave home because of the fighting with my father. Then it was my sister Micheline’s turn to leave and she fought my father for reasons better left unsaid.

At the age of 4, I used to flee from home, barefoot on ice and in snow, to get the policemen because my father was breaking every thing in the house. Sometimes my mother would be hurt seriously. The policemen would calm down my father but after they left, I was the one he then hit with his fists and kicked…I learned very fast to harden myself but I would still go get the policemen when I could not endure it anymore. After my eldest sister left, there were five of us hiding every night under the beds because we were so afraid. The worst memories haunting my life are the cries and painful sobs of my mother when my father was hitting her with his fists and kicking her with his heavy work boots. The neighbours heard everything, but nobody called the policemen or tried to do something to help us.

During my first year in school, I used to run away late at night and I spent that time outside with the homeless, in the streets of a city of two millions souls. So I began to spend my entire nights in the streets and to come home in the small hours of the morning, before my mother would get up…the reason was simple…I was so hurt and there was so much sorrow in my heart that I was branded for life…During these first years in school, the teachers often called my parents to tell them that I defied their autority, that I fought with the other students or that I simply did not attend classes…Homeworks… forget about it, it was impossible to study or to do the assigned works in our house.

<<<<<<And then came the day when my father was put in an institution for a nervous breakdown because a policeman used is connections to this end.

One morning, not long after this, a man came to get me, my little sister Lyse and my sister Micheline for a car ride. My two little brothers stayed home with our mother. I found it strange that my mother, crying, asked us to go with this man and that there were bags full of our clothes.

So that ride was one way only in a car driven by a phlegmatic social worker. He brought us to a dairy farm in Louiseville, a 125 km away from Montreal. On that farm, there were other children placed in that foster home and also the children of the farmer.

As soon as the social worker left and from that day on, it got worse; the bad treatments from the farmer’s wife started right away and I can still remember each strokes I received from the whip during the next three months. I remember feeling abandoned in life and missing my mother so much that it hurt but I had to look after my sisters because they were weaker than I was. On that farm, we had to stay near the house or underneath the veranda. The farmer worked in the fields and looked after the cows. That man loved children and when he was in the house, we were safe from his wife.

And then one morning I could not stand it anymore; with a wooden stick I broke 250 small windowpanes from a second house on the farm. I though it was the end of my hardship. The farmers wanted to be paid for those windowpanes. The next day my grandmother came to get us. So we went back home and my father was out of the institution, completely healed according to some bloody fool of a psy and it started all over again.

I lived my childhood in violence, one I did not want, and it came out of me by fighting in the streets, alleys, parks and in school… My father often had to meet the director of the school and I remember him telling one of my teachers that he did not understand my lack of discipline and my violent behavior in school. Then one day, my father registered me for Judo classes in order to curb my desire for fighting. I took those classes for two years. A home, it stayed the same, my father regularly beating my mother and me still running for the policemen. Then I took karate classes for seven years and it brought me complete control over my desires to fight.

When I was sixteen, I bought a riffle and one night I loaded it with six bullets and I hid it in a corner of the house. I wanted to kill my father that night because I did not want to see my mother suffer anymore. Later on that evening, when my father started his raging and ranting, him the perfect father, I sat in front of him at the table. I hit the table violently with my fist and told him that he had five minutes to get out of the house and to never come back. When you are sixteen, built like an adult with many years of martial arts behind you, it makes one’s father think fast, a father just strong enough to hit a woman.

In front of my crying mother, he left the house right away with his clothes. I did not have to kill him because he was gone within those five minutes.

After 25 years of marriage, my mother asked for a divorce and started to live again. Myself, I married at the age of 23 and I am still married after 20 years of union. Never was I physically or verbally violent towards my wife…and I am the proud father of two wonderful children. So this is a small part of my life…

Warning

Some members of my family may not be happy with these written words.

Please excuse me for being happy.