Dear, Dear diary....

Diary Entry 11

August 25th 2011: Christmas 2009 (Part 1)

Christmas! The most wonderful time of the year. Full of happiness, food, presents and family, oh family!

Yet since that fateful day on the 4th July last year I have actually learnt a lot about domestic abuse and apparently, despite what the world tries to make people believe about Christmas, and what a wonderful time of the year it is, for around 15,000 children in the United States alone, it is the shitest and most miserable time of the year!

This number blew my mind when Dr Carter told me, especially when he went on to explain that this number is just the known cases of child abuse, the ones that were reported. But like JJ, myself and a thousand others, we wouldn't even be included in that number because we flew under the radar, were never picked up or were just 'missed'.

To be honest, when I look back, I knew we weren't the only children.  We knew of other kids in our town whose fathers or mothers ragged on them, or only ever screamed at them or simply neglected them in one way or another but I had never taken the time to think about what exactly they might also be going through or even how many of them were also suffering the same way JJ and I were.

Then to realise that the supposed quality family time given to most families at Christmas leads to an increase in the number of child abuse cases, because families are forced to spend time together and those who can normally escape somewhere have nowhere to go because people are away or simply spending time with their families and no-one wants to gate crash someone else's Christmas. Then throw in the extra booze and time off, to drink that booze and you have the perfect storm of a very shitty Christmas for well over 15,000 children.

JJ and I knew all too well about the joys Christmas could bring.  Especially when he got Christmas off and we were forced to spend it not only with our father but with our Grandparents too and if we thought home was a bad place to be, our Grandparents with our father at Christmas was hell on earth.

Unfortunately Christmas 2009 was exactly where we had to go spend it, in hell, with our father at his parents, our Grandparents, for almost a week.

JJ and I had never understood why our father insisted on spending this time with his Mom and Dad when he hated his father as much as we hated him. We wondered if maybe it was to see his mother but then he was never that nice to her that we saw, so who knew, we certainly weren't about to ask.

We hadn't seen too much of our father leading up to his time off, which wasn't unusual as he spent time with his friends more after work and always seemed distracted by his own stresses of having to go see his parents for Christmas.

The three hour drive to theirs, mostly through forests was done in almost complete silence.  JJ and I both sat in the back and other than glance at each other occasionally we didn't even speak to each other.  Our father didn't stop once and other than smoking, drinking a few beers and singing along to songs on the radio, he didn't even acknowledge our presence until he pulled up at our Grandparents.

It looked exactly as we remembered it not that we expected it to change but if it wasn't for the hell we knew came with visiting this place, it was actually quite a quaint and beautiful wooden house, set in the middle of a beautiful forest, surrounded by huge tall trees and not far from a lake. It was so different from where we lived that had it been under any other circumstances or anyone else's home, it would have been amazing to visit but JJ and I tried to make the most of being out in the forest and loved nothing more than to explore and go out on the lake, which was always frozen over and meant that over the years we had taught ourselves to ice skate, something we wouldn't have had the chance to do otherwise.

Their house looked like something on a postcard, painted bright white and light blue, surrounded by pretty winter flowers and immaculate lawns.   The inside was just as immaculate as the outside but then our Grandmother seemed to spend most of her time while we were there cleaning and cooking, so we guessed that's what she spent most of her time doing even when we weren't there too.