Thought Picnic: A dreamy page of a family saga

On watchful note

There is a picture seared in our minds of domination, terror, and servitude, demonstrated in their control and discipline of others that filled us with fear and trembling.

Those images came into my slumber that ran like a film cast into my childhood ready to replay with a horror that had exemplified what we had become in relation to how we were reared.

An offence there, and error here and they as prosecutor, judge and jury had passed judgement to carry out a nondescript and arbitrary sentence with the whetted appetite of an executioner in his prime.

From the recesses

In the other room, the altercation had begun with some I thought were mine, a pummelling with the rod, to inflict and to humiliate, consuming us with a feeling that our turn would soon come.

It did come to the first three of us, as we were stirred from slumber by the typical monologue of the patriarchy as he like a director of a filmset began to sketch out his thoughts and his intentions, a louvered contraption was constructed before our eyes before suddenly two rods were extracted, the rods that looked wickedly brutal beyond the ones that were once not spared in their quest not to spoil the child.

We were offered choices, hands, backs or any other place, and we were to expect the very minimum of 10 each. Was I going to allow this unjust collective punishment to happen?

My eyes saved

Ten each, so we were to moderate our squeals of pain so that she who was already dealing with the others will not think she was being outplayed in the sadomasochistic stakes that they had perfected in a double-act on me many years before where all he said when he ceded control to her was, “Mind his eyes.” That was how I remembered their depth of love, in the care of my eyes, but maybe in another story, the needed care for my eyes was never given.

My mind in flux, about to plead innocence and extricate myself from the terror to be unleashed on an undecided part of my anatomy, the third laid out her hand and received a violent lash, the piercing sound of agony jolted me back into the present.

Not tonight

There was not going to be a struggle when he headbutted me that I fell backwards, I calmly told him, “Not tonight, you can go to your room now.” I took his accoutrements of torture off him and he went away.

That was where it ended and where it should end. Sadly, our meetings are still of monologues and entitlements, the inability to impose upon as before has seethed into grudges engendering estrangement. Amid our grief, we have ensconced ourselves in our bunkers whilst everyone wonders if we’ve gone bonkers. The unspoken truth is no one does dysfunction the way we do it, without class, without care, without concern and almost without consequence.

Let’s flip another page in this saga called family.