By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS
HOME has been a house of horrors for ‘Neeti’ both as a child and as a wife.
At 65, the Noble Park grandmother’s hands tremble as she recounts the beatings, threats to kill and the demeaning insults that punctuate her life.
If Neeti was now in the same situation with an abusive partner, she’d “shut my mouth and run”.
“You don’t stay.
“I tried and tried to stay. I tried to get them to love me and nothing worked.”
Neeti grew up with violence. She tells how her father savagely beat her and threatened to kill her, and how he fought drunkenly with his mother and stepmothers.
During one brawl in the bathroom, a stepmother had the tops of her fingers severed by the father’s cut-throat razor.
Then her own first husband – “a big drinker and swearer” – lashed out “even before we got to the altar”. One of his blows dislodged her front tooth.
She remembers him berating and screaming at her, calling her stupid.
After she had an abortion at 19 – the biggest regret in her life – the husband left her for another woman.
Neeti chose her second husband because he came from a good family.
He’d come home from his managerial corporate job, and tell her repeatedly she was “f***ed in the head” and that “men in white coats are coming to get you”.
During an argument over money, he kneed her pelvis and slammed her to the floor in front of their children.
“My kids, except for my second daughter, have blamed me over the years.”
It’s striking that Neeti didn’t leave her husbands but the other way around.
Nor did she report the violence to police – she didn’t believe police could or would help at the time.
“I thought if I left, where would I go? It wasn’t until a single mother’s pension came in that I’d think I could do it.”
Her advice for women in abusive relationships is to get help from a family violence service.
Therapy and Christian faith has also helped salve the wounds and raise her from a self-medicated spiral of Valium, morphine and alcohol.
Along the way she survived two medication overdoses.
Her psychiatrist tells her not to just talk about the “past stuff”, all the negative messages from the significant men in her life.
Instead the doctor reinforced that she was a good woman, mother and “worthwhile human being” until it started to sink in.
Nevertheless, Neeti said her body and mind retain a traumatic memory.
Her eldest brother was “belted” by their father and later couldn’t hold a job.
He got addicted to morphine after a serious motorbike accident and died of a heroin overdose.
Neeti’s mother and another abused drug-using brother were committed to an asylum by her father.
It’s a whole family’s tale of woe which Neeti can trace to her own mother’s depraved upbringing.
Neeti’s mother was forced as a 10-year-old by her own mother to sleep with an older man, then met her future husband and got pregnant at 13.
That child was adopted out by the Anglican Church.
Later Neeti’s mother, who suffered post-natal depression, was acquitted of murdering Neeti’s four-month-old sister.
“When I was five, I found my four-month-old sister dead in a bassinet,” Neeti said.
“I found mum on the doorstep crying. The police came and took her away.”
After her acquittal, the mother returned home but “wasn’t quite right”.
“I believe if my mother had have had a husband that loved her and wanted to be with her – it would have been a different story.
“There’s been a side of me that has wanted to be loved and be a good person.”
If you need help contact Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre on 1800 015 188 or via www.safesteps.org.au.
