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on it as well. Clients were getting their cars on time, vendors were getting paid on time, and<br />
they would say, “Hey, Abie, this workshop is going so much better now that your wife has<br />
taken over.” That didn’t help.<br />
We lived in the workshop for close to a year, and then my mom had had enough. She was<br />
willing to help him, but not if he was going to drink all the profits. She had always been<br />
independent, self-sufficient, but she’d lost that part of herself at the mercy of someone else’s<br />
failed dream. At a certain point she said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m out of this. I’m done.”<br />
She went out and got a job as a secretary with a real-estate developer, and somehow, between<br />
that and borrowing against whatever equity was left in Abel’s workshop, she was able to get<br />
us the house in Highlands North. We moved, the workshop was seized by Abel’s creditors,<br />
and that was the end of that.<br />
—<br />
Growing up I suffered no shortage of my mother’s old school, Old Testament discipline. She<br />
spared no rod and spoiled no child. With Andrew, she was different. He got spankings at first,<br />
but they tapered off and eventually went away. When I asked her why I got beatings and<br />
Andrew didn’t, she made a joke about it like she does with everything. “I beat you like that<br />
because you could take it,” she said. “I can’t hit your little brother the same way because he’s<br />
a skinny little stick. He’ll break. But you, God gave you that ass for whipping.” Even though<br />
she was kidding, I could tell that the reason she didn’t beat Andrew was because she’d had a<br />
genuine change of heart on the matter. It was a lesson she’d learned, oddly enough, from me.<br />
I grew up in a world of violence, but I myself was never violent at all. Yes, I played pranks<br />
and set fires and broke windows, but I never attacked people. I never hit anyone. I was never<br />
angry. I just didn’t see myself that way. My mother had exposed me to a different world than<br />
the one she grew up in. She bought me the books she never got to read. She took me to the<br />
schools that she never got to go to. I immersed myself in those worlds and I came back<br />
looking at the world a different way. I saw that not all families are violent. I saw the futility of<br />
violence, the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that’s inflicted on people that they in<br />
turn inflict on others.<br />
I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love.<br />
Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother<br />
did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and<br />
created a new world and a new understanding for her. After that, she never raised her hand to<br />
her children again. Unfortunately, by the time she stopped, Abel had started.<br />
In all the times I received beatings from my mom, I was never scared of her. I didn’t like<br />
it, certainly. When she said, “I hit you out of love,” I didn’t necessarily agree with her<br />
thinking. But I understood that it was discipline and it was being done for a purpose. The first<br />
time Abel hit me I felt something I had never felt before. I felt terror.<br />
I was in grade six, my last year at Maryvale. We’d moved to Highlands North, and I’d<br />
gotten in trouble at school for forging my mom’s signature on some document; there was<br />
some activity I didn’t want to participate in, so I’d signed the release in her name to get out of<br />
it. The school called my mom, and she asked me about it when I got home that afternoon. I<br />
was certain she was going to punish me, but this turned out to be one of those times when