The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland (33 page)

When we got back, I went to the doctor’s, but I took Tony with me for support. Tony told my doctor what had been going on with me and, after he had finished speaking to him, my doctor said that I would have to go and see the mental health adviser or he would have me sectioned under the Mental Health Act. I said ok and we left the doctor’s with a new prescription for my old medication again; and after a couple of weeks, I felt normal again or as normal as I would ever feel.

Then the appointment to see the mental health adviser arrived in the post and I felt like the abuse was starting all over again, so I sat by the kitchen window, I lit up a fag and I wished I had been dead. A couple of days later, I went to the appointment and I told the doctor almost everything about myself; and when the appointment was all over, he was shocked, but I felt no different. A week later, I went back to see him again and this time I told him everything about me and my baby brother Simon and how I missed him; and when I finished, he said that I should write a book about my life, so I did.

How Do I Feel Now?

I feel sad for myself, I feel angry at everything, I hate everyone and I feel sorry for my children. Almost everything about my life has been bad, I am not happy and I never will be. If I live a thousand years, I will still feel the same as I do today. What everyone did to me when I was young was wrong, this is my life now and I have to live with it. I deal with each day as it comes, but my past still haunts me to this day and it always will.

The problem is that when you experience life as a child, it should be with your mum, dad, brothers and sisters and other children, playing and exploring the world around you. Going to bed happy, smiling, and waking up with excitement and anticipation as to what you will learn and discover throughout the day. When you are a child, your mind is free to absorb its surroundings and absorb the feelings your body experiences, both physically and emotionally. This is how you learn good from bad and right from wrong.

Still as a child, you learn to read and write and to make friends. I never had any of that and now I am beyond the reach of any counselling or education and I have been so from when I was four years old. From the first day that I was abused, my life changed forever; and when I walked through the institution’s doors in Ireland, my life was set on a path that has destroyed my soul. I never had a childhood and I never will; for me, my childhood was over before it began and my life with the nuns was hell. My emotional pain today is as strong as it was the day it began. From a very early age, I suffered at the hands of the very people who said they would take good care of me and at the hands of many other people around them who they called their friends.

For me, my pain will never leave me alone. When I go to sleep, it is in my head; and when I wake up, I can see it in the mirror. It is a part of me that I grew up with and is now and always will be embedded within me. You cannot change me or the way I am with counselling, education or money and you cannot split me into two like my personality.

No matter how much counselling the doctors give me, it will not help me. Counselling does not work and it never will; I have been through many counselling programs and they do not work. I did try. I took up the offer of counselling, hoping it might help in some way, but it did not. Money will not change me or the way I feel; it will not make me happy, it cannot buy me love, friendship or a childhood and if I had one wish, I’d wish I had never been born.

However, I do have three children who I love very much. They have suffered because of my upbringing and my personality; and if anyone deserves something, then they do. And they deserve more than what I can give them. This is where I would get the satisfaction and the benefit of money. I am not and I never will be a greedy person and perhaps that is why I have very little. The damage to me was done a long time ago and it will stay with me and haunt me until the day I die.

Who knows what I might have become if I had the chance to be myself in the beginning? A doctor, a cleaner, a mother. The time that I spent in the institution has made me into a very complicated, difficult and unhappy person and my emotions are cold. I am only waiting to die and I feel like it is taking too long. My family began the path to my destruction, they used me and they abused me, but they never ever loved or wanted me, or my baby brother Simon. If I have a soul, then it is lost somewhere between hell and Ireland, and I do not think I will ever find it; but time will tell.

Little Children

The first step through the institution’s doors began a struggle that many children lost by paying the ultimate price with their lives. Some gave up the struggle while still in the institution and others, like my brother Simon, gave up at a young age, when they could not cope with the pressures of real life any longer and the abandonment they felt when no one wanted them.

Many of my friends from the institution are now dead; taking their own lives was their way out and a means to peace. I am still alive, but only because I found someone who truly loves me for whom I am; and without his help, I would be dead. I am not going to kill myself, because I have put too much into living this long and it would be a waste to give up now, but I am not happy having to live the rest of my life without my beautiful baby brother Simon by my side.

I dedicate this book to my baby brother Simon and to all the children who went through the institutions in Ireland and to those who took their own lives later in life as a way to escape from the torment that never left them alone.

I will never forget you.

I would also like to thanks my partner for writing this book for me and for never once judging me for what others have done to me.

THANK YOU.

God bless you all if it means anything.

The End