When things started to become bad with your father, you were only six years old. I paid to get you into a private kindergarten near the place we lived, with the money I had saved from writing reviews for baby wearing companies. Three months after you started school there, the pandemic, and the quarantine episode began.
You had loved school so much, always coming home with a joke your friend made (that you retold in your own words so I would laugh like you did) or a new fact you’d learned, about squirrels and horses and sea animals who “were actually enamels” (your word for mammals that I found funnier than the jokes). You were very sad when you had to be at home, away from your friends and teachers.
I made a schedule for us to learn basic French, to learn how to tell the time (oh how you were so amazed when I told you that there existed clocks for left-handers!) and we made art, and counted, and played with flour explosions. I took pictures of everything then. It was my way to remember you in case I missed anything. That few months before I got heavily pregnant with your sister, when your father would not come home a few days at a time, when it was just me and you, was peaceful and bright. We would take walks around the neighbourhood, learning the names of dogs that belonged to our neighbours, learning the names of plants that they’d also planted in rows of pots behind their houses that we would trace, you on your little pink bicycle (you still liked pink then), me waddling behind slowly, trying to catch up.
When your father started not buying food for me to cook, when he started leaving us for weeks at a time, at home, locked in without a key, you were seven, and your sister was a few months old. I would force you to sleep when you complained of being hungry, when the rice I had saved from three days ago would have been too dehydrated for you to eat, and breastfed your sister so she wouldn’t cry.
When he started to come home an hour at a time, only to shower in the early morning, rummaging through the rooms to find his belt, or his pants, and you would wake up from the noise, you hurried to him like a long-lost lover. I wanted to give you time with him, so I left you and him in the room to wash the dishes or the bathroom downstairs.
I would hear a shout, a cry, a slam, a thud, and my heart would stop, and by the time I ran upstairs to see you, he would have already left, and you would be sobbing, with a bruise or a cut or a dislocation of the bones to nurse in your arms. You would look at me and your eyes would say, how dare you let this happen, Mama! Where were you?? and my stomach would jump into my throat. And yet, when he would come home a few days later, and you thrilled at his sight, excited to share the paintings you’d made the day before or a story you’d read that night, I would leave you with him, and those burning eyes would pierce me over and over again. On one occasion, he had slammed you to the floor and locked you in our bedroom. I was holding your sister and he shoved me out of it before locking the door. You pled with me, with him, and I didn’t know what to do. I called my mother to tell him to open the door, pressing the phone on the wooden frame so her words would reverberate into the room you were in with him. I was terrified for you. I wanted to grab you and run away. I wanted to hold you in my arms and never let go. I wanted to hit him, hurt him, make him bleed, so he would understand my anger, understand my fear. He was now an intruder, a stranger-danger that I couldn’t save you from. I was angry and disappointed with myself for not being a mother to you then as I held your sister close and tried to calm her by rocking my body, all the while repeating the same words to you from behind the locked door, Mama’s here, you’re okay, Mama’s here, you’re okay, Mama’s here, you’re safe, without believing them myself.
I am a photographer. I take pictures of you and your sister and have been doing so since the day you were born. I used to tell people whenever they asked, that I take pictures of the two of you growing up so I wouldn’t miss a thing, just as the ones I hold dear in my heart of us spending our time together during the pandemic quarantine, oblivious to the crumblings of our family. Why then, didn’t I take pictures of your bruises and cuts, when your father abused you, why then didn’t I have all these evidence to facilitate the year long process of getting full-custody of you and your sister? I don’t have a clear answer for that. All I know is that while it was happening, all I wanted to do was to hold you. Pictures, or it didn’t happen. But, it did. Just because no one else can see the pictures that keep flashing in our heads for the past two years, it doesn’t mean nothing happened. The pictures are here. Just not for anyone else to see.
These are the pictures I didn’t want to take. These are the ones I wanted to miss.
Oh, Lisha, how heart breaking. I hope you are truly free of him now. xoxo
My heart breaks for you and your girls Lisha, those days you suffered are unimaginable to me and my quiet (if not very busy) life… I hope only that one day you are able to destroy the photos in the knowledge that you are all at last safe. From him… from any further danger and from having to witness anything that makes you so angry and scared you feel a need to cause harm to the perpetrator… all love always - stay strong and take strength from the knowledge that your courage as a mother is fierce… xxxx