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Stop Downplaying It: That Was Your Childhood Experience
Stop downplaying what was… As a child do you remember when the parents lined us up against the kitchen doorframe? They’d tell us to put our heels against the wall and stand tall and straight. Then when we stood still, they would put a pencil mark against the wall to show how tall we were. Beside the mark, the height and date were added denoting the milestone. To me, it felt like such a treat. Funny as it is to say that, given it was just a measurement of height. A moment of parental presence, perhaps? I did the same measurements with my daughters. As we moved homes I wrote…
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The latch-key kid generation was a game of cat and mouse
The latch-key kid generation I was a part of was like serving a little mouse up on a platter to a cunning cat. Mindful, of course, that cats don’t like to eat their prey; they prefer to stalk and play with them a little first. There was plenty of time for the cunning cat to play with his little mouse in the hours after school and before a parent arrived home by around five or six pm. Alice Perle (2023) Resolve, Chapter One, Young Alice’s Story. Easy access to siblings makes it more likely that an adolescent abuser (who can be just as predatory as adult abusers) will choose someone…
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You come from a good family, Alice
‘You come from a good family Alice’, my 90-year-old neighbour from our childhood street said in 2019. I looked at her blankly and thought: A good family. What does that even mean? I was eight when my big brother began sexually abusing me. Unbeknownst to me, I wasn’t the only sibling he was abusing in one way or another. None of us knew that. We didn’t disclose it to each other until we were in our 20s and 40s. How could that have been? How did my mum, dad, grandparents or neighbours not see that? From the outside, we looked like a good family, a happy Catholic family, living in…
