God Was In The Cricket Bat!!!!!

Hello Everyone,

Thanks for all your lovely comments regarding my last post. I thought I would make a post rather than just some small little comment that you might not check back on. Besides I had also been thinking a lot about the things you said to me and how I got to be the me I am today.

I do always value your comments and try to take on board what you say to me, as you have all become valued friends. I am a firm believer that if enough people, that you know, value, trust and respect are telling you the same things, then you really should take them on board as much as possible. But I didn't always believe in that and often ignored the well given and good intended advise.

It took a long time for me to work out who I was, still not sure I know where I am going, but the journey has been a blast to say the lest about it all.
I never really started to come into myself until rather late in life, (I was 32) compared to my friends around me, who all seemed to have it so together, while I lurched from crisis to the next crisis. With my poor 3 kids in tow and the poor little things wondering why they were being raised by a headless chicken.

I remember when the penny dropped that life wasn't a dress rehearsal, when it did the noise was deafening. I can remember the clank, clank of the penny as it dropped from a high place.
I knew that day that I had reach my limit and that somewhere in all this mess I had played a part in it. That I wasn't as innocent in it all, as I had thought. We do whether or not you choose to see it, play apart in what happens to us. After all we put ourselves in to that place, at that time. Be it that we don't see it at the time, but in hindsight we do. We have choices in life, I made bad ones. But it's not the mistake you make, it's what you learn from the mistake that is important.

So finally the penny dropped.
It happened the day my husband came home drunk again and he completely lost it.
Here's what happened.

He went out early in the morning and like a dog that knows it's going to be kicked, I knew, I just knew that when he got back that there would be trouble. He came in just as I was serving dinner, said he was starving and that he would eat with us. For the briefest of moments I thought we would all be ok. The kids were all happy and relaxed and he seemed to be in a good mood.

Until that was he realised that Patricia wasn't eating the same as the rest of us. (I don't believe in feeding kids things they really don't like and she really didn't like the dinner I was serving that night,. She still doesn't in fact and with good reason.). I still find it hard to put into words what he did that night, but he suddenly reach out for Patricia and before I had chance to take it on board he was banging her head of the table and screaming at her. The World stopped for a moment, I couldn't take in what was happening in front of me, there was a horrid sounding thud, thud, thud, then I realised. I remember hitting him with a chair to get him off her, I remember getting in between them and protecting her, she was 6, I remember Ashley 9 at the time, grabbing his baby brother (18 mths old) out the high chair and then getting hold of his sister and pulling her towards the door, while I stayed between them and the maniac that was their father, as he rained down blows on me.

We lived in a town house and it was over 4 stories, instead of heading downstairs, the kids in their confusion headed upstairs to Ashley's room. I heard the door slam and the children screaming. I ran for the stairs and the kids, he grabbed my ankle and dragged me down the stairs, face first, I twisted around to kick him in the chest. He leaped back at me and I could feel his hands round my throat and it was suddenly harder to breathe, there were spots before my eyes, my body started to become heavy and then he whispered almost lovingly and softly "When I'm done, I'm going after them". He didn't have to tell me who "them " were I knew he meant our kids.

I had a choice in that moment, die or fight. When I say that please believe me, it really was a case of die or fight. We had, had many fights before this one, but instinctively I knew this was a fight for my life, but more importantly a fight for the kids lives. This would be the last fight.
I only weighed about 100lbs (about 7 1/2 stone) and he was at least twice my weight. I still to this day have no idea how I got the strength, but somehow I brought my knee up and connected with his.......bits for a better word. As he let go and bent down I kicked him down the stairs and ran for the kids. He was right on my heel, as I ran into Ashley's room, he yelled "Quick Mum, use this" and threw a cricket bat at me. In what can only be described as a nano second I had caught the bat swung round and clobbered him with it. There was a horrid noise, like a dry twig snapping violently and a scream from him, but he kept coming, so I hit him again and again and again and again and I kept hitting him till he was on his knees and then out cold on the floor. The silence was deafening and I wanted him away from us, as far away as I could physically get him.

I dragged him then out of our home, down three flights of stairs, making sure he banged his head on every stair all the way down. I dragged him up our garden path which was about 30ft long and was concrete, not the smooth stuff but the rough textured stuff, face first and I dumped him outside our garden gate. I remember looking down at him and then exhaling, a huge exhale as if I had been holding my breath my whole life. When I breathed in the cold air stung my lungs and burned all the way down, yet never has fresh air felt so bloody good.

In the distance I could hear the sirens of the police I knew they were for me. One of the neighbours asked me if we were ok. I looked at him lying there, turned to the neighbour and said "We will be now". In that very moment I knew, that things would never be that bad again.
I felt strange, as if a weight had been lifted and a light had been switched on in my head.

I had broken both his collar bones, 7 ribs, fractured his skull in two places, fractured one of his wrists and he had grazes all over his face. I'm not proud of it, it's the worst thing I have ever done to another human being, but one of us was leaving that night and it wasn't going to be me. He tried to have me arrested and charges pressed, but the police, sick of coming to our home refused and told him that it was self defense and I was not going to be charged. Some of the neighbours told the police that he had come home from the pub in that state, had fallen over in the street, so some of his injuries must have come from that. I did however have him arrested and charged with the assault of our daughter. Funny he didn't like it one bit.

The next day I woke up a different woman. I think she had always been inside me, but now she was rising and nothing and no-one was going to get in the way. It wasn't the first time I had woken up with black eyes, bruises and marks all over me, but as I looked in the mirror I knew it would be the last. Never again would my kids be in such danger.

Years later during a phone conversation with the husband he said to me that; when I hit him with the cricket bat there was a look in my eyes that scared him and I remember thinking GOOD!
He said that at that moment, he knew there was no coming back from this and he wasn't surprised to come round in hospital with a police man standing next to him waiting to arrest him.

Another odd thing happened in the few days after that, friends have told me how they noticed a steeliness to me and a determination that they hadn't seen before and people knew I was serious. They helped a lot and I got serious about life.

We've never looked back from that day and we never will. We have talked about it, which has been good for all of us. But we will never be there again.


Some one once told me that there has to be evil in the World, so that when good comes along you will know the difference and appreciate it all the more, (I think it's a quote from Buddha).
I can say that, even if I could go back in time and change what happened to me that I wouldn't
Funny thing is that everything that happened, led me to who I am today and I like me. If God was there, I think in was in the cricket bat. I'd have never believed a cricket bat could do that much damage, if I hadn't have seen it first hand.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's not the end of the World if crap happens to you, sometimes it can be the start of the journey to your self.
Personally speaking, I wouldn't have missed any of it for all the tea in China (do they still grow tea in China????)