Stepping on the Cracks: Learning to Live Again after Abuse, Addiction and Loss

This edition published in 2024 by Trigger Publishing

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Text Copyright © 2020, 2024 Dominique Dowdney

First published in 2020 by Cherish Editions

Dominique Dowdney has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners and the publishers.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available upon request from the British Library

eBook ISBN: 978-1-83796-075-0

Trigger Publishing encourages diversity and different viewpoints. However, all views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and are not necessarily representative of us as an organization.

All material in this book is set out in good faith for general guidance and no liability can be accepted for loss or expense incurred in following the information given. In particular this book is not intended to replace expert medical or psychiatric advice. It is intended for informational purposes only and for your own personal use and guidance. It is not intended to act as a substitute for professional medical advice. The author is not a medical practitioner, and professional advice should be sought if desired before embarking on any health-related programme.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Introduction

1Violent Beginnings: A childhood built on fear

2Something Snaps Inside: Fighting back

3A Taste of Life: Freedom at last

4A Stifled Soul: Friendships bring an entirely new perspective

5Lost Love: For me and my father

6‘You Little Bitch’: Our worst fight and a final escape

7Growing Up Fast: Learning the hard way

8Escaping the Mundane: Taking ecstasy and discovering an exciting new world

9Feeling Restless: A need to make peace with my mother

10 Letting Go: Finding the courage to give in to my desires

11 Reality Dawns: Time to face the music

12 When One Door Closes: A fresh start

13 New Routines: Smoking cannabis unlocks the darkness within

14 Tying the Knot: Overcoming my demons

15 Accepting Addiction: Craving a normal ­family life

16 Motherhood: Attempting to rewrite my history

17 History Repeating Itself: Cannabis abuse takes its toll

18 An Ultimatum: Pushing for change with a fatal outcome

19 A Shocking New Reality: My new normal

20 Rebuilding My Life: Going back to school and finding the courage to face my past

21 The Final Exam: After several years of hard work, my fears return

22 A Proposal: Letting love in again

23 Showdown: Laying ghosts of the past to rest

24 The Perfect Day: Everything is exactly as it should be

Epilogue

For you, Nick.

Then. Now. Forever.

PROLOGUE

I decided to become a counsellor approximately one year after losing my husband to suicide. He was thirty-six. Weighed down with grief and desperate for answers, I felt a calling to help others suffering with their mental health. I remember thinking, if I could only help one person, then somehow my husband’s death would not be in vain. Little did I know I was about to embark upon a long and turbulent road into my childhood where I would revisit the terrible violence and abuse I had experienced at the hands of my mother.

My journey began when I secured a place on a counselling course at a local college. Alongside my training, I spent the next four years in therapy talking at length about experiences I had long since buried. And that was the way of it – my way. I was beaten and bullied by my mother, but I had not spoken to anyone about it because I felt ashamed by what had happened.

It is baffling but I would come to learn that this is not uncommon for survivors of abuse. Nor is it uncommon for survivors to choose abusive partners later on in life in an unconscious endeavour to work through their trauma. Many survivors become dependent on drugs or alcohol in a futile effort to escape their pain. I became addicted to ecstasy and cannabis in my late twenties and, if I am brutally honest, I think I initially decided to write this book under a pseudonym because my feelings of shame were still lurking just beneath the surface.

Becoming a counsellor and writing this book have proved to be profoundly cathartic. Both experiences have changed my life for the better. I was moulded by the terrible experiences of my past, but it has taken decades for me to realize that I was never truly defined by them. Today, I’m grateful that the world no longer seems a multitude of grey shades.

In October 2020, I published the first edition of my memoir – Finding Frank – under the pseudonym Rachel Townsend. When the book came out, I was a qualified counsellor and counselling supervisor with my own practice. At the time, I did not feel it was appropriate to use my real name. More recently, however, having retired from counselling, I was given the opportunity to publish a new edition of this book with a brand-new title, using my real name. Scary stuff. Perhaps, then, this will be the very last hurdle in my quest to lay the ghosts of the past to rest.

I am Rachel in the book and Rachel is me, Dominique. This is my life – no holds barred.

INTRODUCTION

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write stories. Put words such as these together like carriages on a train. And here we are, you and I, meeting for the very first time. The hiss of brakes before my journey departs with you aboard, track and sleeper so familiar to me as we voyage back in time. Back to the beginning. A plume of steam rising high across a cloudless sky.

I was born in Cornwall, England, in 1967, wedged firmly by birth between my younger brother Casper and my older sister Philippa. I suppose you could say I was the middle child, although my siblings and I also had two older half-brothers – Mike, our mother’s son, and Ray, our father’s son. Mike was always around when I was growing up. Ray wasn’t.

Mike was born in Jamaica. He was born into a silent world. The shock of seeing his tiny frame, without any ears, and hearing his pitiful cry, must have been deeply distressing for my mother. His fate, however, was not to be pigeonholed by the unfortunate circumstances of his illegitimate birth, but by an evil drug, which was to become infamous for affecting so many children around the world. Many were born without arms or legs because of this inadequately tested drug, given to thousands of pregnant women to help them with morning sickness. Mike was branded a ‘thalidomide’ – a term that would be used to describe him from the day of his birth, as if he were some kind of object to be verbally abused.

Less than four years after Mike was born, my father would meet my mother in a Jamaican doctor’s surgery. He had been in Jamaica for some time, on a posting from England, and after acquiring a small injury while playing his piano, he dropped into the surgery to have his finger examined.

My mother was mixed-race – a real-life Jamaican beauty queen – and my father was instantly captivated by her. Without hesitation, he asked her out. That very same evening, as they danced cheek to cheek, he proposed to her, and within a few short months, they were married. As soon as my father had legally adopted Mike, the young family left Jamaica for a new posting on a small island in the Indian Ocean.

It must have been a difficult decision for my father, taking on another man’s son, not least because of the additional support Mike would need as he grew up, profoundly deaf in one ear and with only partial hearing in the other. But they soon forged a bond of love, those two – a bond that can only be made between a father and son.

Throughout my childhood years, my father was employed by a large telecommunications company, which posted him to destinations all over the world, with the chaos of our family in tow. In each new destination, another child was born. Before I was five years old, we had lived in England, Jamaica and Barbados. By then, there were four of us.

I first met Ray, my older half-brother, when I was nine. He was nineteen and had come to stay with us in Barbados for a few weeks. I only discovered several years later that the reason for his visit was the untimely death of his mother. He had found her lifeless body one morning and an empty bottle of paracetamol tablets next to her bed. This gruesome discovery continued to affect him throughout his adult life. It didn’t take much for him to turn to alcohol, where I believe he is still trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to drown out that devastating event, which forever changed his destiny, a destiny with so much unfulfilled potential. Tragically, his life was not the only one to be blighted by the premature death of a loved one, taken away by their own hand.

Growing up in Barbados provided a wonderfully rich and fertile soil for my keen young mind. I often yearn for the warmth of the people, the cool Atlantic breezes, the rhythmic calypso music and the sweet smell of the rum distilleries hiding in the tall sugarcane fields. It remains a part of me, not least because my mother, my brother Casper and his family continue to live there. Over the years, however, the rest of us have decanted, one by one, back to England: first Philippa, then me, then my father and lastly, Mike. I believe we all had one thing in common – we were desperate to get as far away as possible from my tyrant of a mother.

There, I’ve said it.

When I first decided to write this book, I wasn’t sure whether I would be saying much about her at all. I wasn’t sure whether I could be brave enough to be honest about what happened to us. To me. I wanted to protect my siblings, who more than likely would feel the same weight of shame at the thought of our experiences becoming public. I also wanted to protect myself.

I suppose if you are reading this, the invisible hand that lays lightly on the lid of Pandora’s Box is slowly releasing her grasp…

CHAPTER 1

VIOLENT BEGINNINGS

A childhood built on fear

My earliest memory of my mother was not of her violent temper. It was, instead, of one of the very few times I witnessed her genuine concern for me – although I would not go as far as saying it was her love that I felt on that day, many years ago, in our house in Jamaica.

In this first memory of my mother, I am three and we have woken up to yet another power cut. I know this because my fan has stopped and the house is quiet and humid. The birdsong outside my window seems louder.

My father is boiling water in a small saucepan on the hob. His shadowy morning cheeks prickle like a wire brush when he kisses me good morning. I watch him dispense the steaming water into a square, plastic ice cream container before he carries it into the bathroom, with me trailing behind. He turns on the cold tap, loud and full. Two cool drops bounce out of the sink; one lands on my nose, the other on my eyelid. That makes me laugh.

I love watching my father shave. The upward sweeps he makes along his upstretched neck with his heavy metal razor. Like roads through foam. Foam he whips up like meringue, with a thick round brush. The brush has a wooden handle and it lives inside a ceramic container. It rattles when I shake it. The container is solid and white. Like heavy glass. I’m holding it with two hands. I have been told I must be careful or it will break. I press my nose into it. I like the smell. It smells like him. Safe. There is a flat, round bar of soap at the bottom of the container, dry and cracked, until my father adds a few drops of water and sets to work with his whipping brush.

The ice cream tub balances precariously on the side of the sink. Its plastic sides are softening rapidly, although I don’t know that. I reach out to touch it. I poke at it. There is a faded blue picture of a swallow, with part of its wing missing, scratched off with age. The malleable container tips forward. Its scalding contents spill over onto my cheeks and naked chest.

The shock of it.

I gasp. A sharp intake of breath and I am falling backward, onto the bathroom floor. Hard. My only protection, the pair of white shorts I am wearing. They have tiny strawberries embroidered on a single back pocket.

The pain begins. Like a jellyfish stuck fast to my face and chest. My skin begins to peel off. I am pulling at it.

My high-pitched screams bring my mother running in from outside, where she has been meticulously hanging out the washing in neat, orderly rows. Seeing her expression stops my wailing instantly. Like I’m a ragdoll, my mother manoeuvres my burning body swiftly into a sitting position on top of one of the kitchen worktops where I remain, stunned, as she rummages around in a nearby cupboard, desperate to find a bottle with odd-smelling white lotion. It smells like toilets. She lathers it liberally all over my face and chest. I begin to cry again as the pain rushes back into my body, this time with a vengeance.

‘Tim, what have you done?’ she screams at my father.

Through my tears and the stinging pain, I know that my father is not responsible. It was me who grabbed the container. I emptied the entire contents of scalding water over myself. Why is she screaming at him?

This is my very first memory of her.

I really don’t remember much about my mother before that, although my father always maintained that she was gentle and sweet to each of us when we were babies – when we were helpless and entirely dependent on her. Before we developed our own minds.

We leave Jamaica two years later and head back to England. But we don’t stay long, because my mother hates the cold weather.

In less than a year, we are on the move again, travelling to Barbados on a very large and rusty banana boat called the Geest Tide. I am standing on deck watching the huge swell riding up the side of the ship before it retreats, far below me. It’s a long way down. The swell rolls and as it rises, it spits salty spray at me. The towering, rusty walls of the ship loom large behind me and only a thick railing separates me from a vast expanse of ocean. I fall in love with the excitement of it.

Our first stop in Barbados is a south-coast hotel. Once the sun has set and night has drawn in, I stand outside in my bare feet, listening to the sound of the tiny whistling frogs. I’ve seen only one before, the colour of wet sand with two black eyes. The grass is lush and damp between my toes. It feels like plastic. Vivid blue and green spotlights shine up into the palm trees and exotic plants. We live in one of the whitewashed villas dotted at jaunty angles around the beautifully manicured gardens. A new playground.

In no time at all, we are packing once again. My father has found us a lovely coral stone house to rent. He works only a few hundred yards away. Each morning, he waves us goodbye and sets off with his leather briefcase, disappearing down the steep hill at the bottom of our garden, through a densely wooded path, which pops out onto a busy main road below. Directly opposite the path is my father’s office. To me, it’s a giant pink and orange skyscraper. In reality, it is probably only six or eight storeys high.

My siblings and I go to school, we fall over and scrape our knees, we learn to ride bikes and fly kites. Normal things like that. I have a pet tortoise called Touché. I like the way he eats bananas, with his long, wrinkled neck and pointy mouth, snapping at the soft fruit as if he were angry.

I grow taller. I am a skinny child. My skin is coffee-coloured from playing outside in the sun and my hair is a mess of golden-blonde curls. Perhaps my most prominent feature is my eyes. They are olive green with flecks of saffron around my pupils and a deep grey rim surrounding each iris. People often stare at my eyes. It makes me feel uncomfortable.

And all the while my mother is becoming more and more unhappy. And more and more angry. She shouts all the time. Mostly at my father.

I am almost five years old, playing quietly on my own in my bedroom with my brother’s Fisher Price garage set. I can hear my mother’s raised voice coming from somewhere across the house. She’s shouting at my father. Again. My heart begins to beat a little faster. I feel the familiar rush of adrenaline shooting through my small frame.

I look around for somewhere to hide.

Her voice is growing louder. And closer. She’s shouting at my brother now, just outside in the corridor. I can hear myself breathing. I jump to my feet. Is anything untidy? I am frantic. I tuck the nearside corner of my sheet in again. Tighter. I smooth down the green spread on top of my bed, as she has shown me. So that there are no folds in it. It must be flat.

Moments later, she appears in my bedroom doorway. My heart jumps clean out of my chest. I want to run away, but I’m frozen to the spot. I pray silently that she will leave. My eyes sting. I dare not blink. She approaches me and draws her hand above her head. It pauses briefly. A single, defining moment. Before. She slaps me clean across my face. Hard. I am stunned. What have I done? I don’t understand.

That is the first time. The first of many.

My father hopes a change might make my mother happy and so we move a few times