My Life

Story of the Radford’s/Maddick’s

Adam Gilfred Radford

When I was 2, I couldn’t really remember much but I remember the arguments between my Mom and Dad, they split up soon after. I would go and see my father every weekend but lived with my Mom most of the time. She relied on my father a lot. If I ever was naughty or refused to eat, she would call my father who only lived a block away to hit me or force me to eat. This went on for many years. When I was only 5 in pre-kindergarten my mother met this guy. He would screw with her head. My grandmother was living at the house. My father had a bad feeling about that day while at work, even while split up he still loved my mother, he rung up my grandmother Judy and asked her to check on Mom. Judy told my father that everything was ok. It was only an hour later when my father received the call. After that guy had screwed with her head. She had decided to lie down and let a train take her life. She killed herself. All because of that guy. I was pulled out of classes. I was walked home my father crying the whole time. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. I didn’t understand. I only started understanding everything a couple years ago. When we finally got into my Mom’s house everyone was towering above me. I was so small everything was spinning I fell to the ground. My sister in tears helped me get up no-one would tell me anything. Everything before being told the news made me cry.

When I was finally told I couldn’t comprehend what I had just been told. I was sad then but little did I know the impact it would have on me later in life, when I would be older. Someone I saw as an uncle, Edward, tried to calm me down by feeding me my favourite candy bar of the time which was a Milky-way. Nothing could help I cried for hours. For years I rarely thought of the event until my grandmother brought it up every other weekend when I would visit her. Even though she knew it would upset me she couldn’t help but talk about it. It was as though when she knew it would hurt me, she would not take that into account. She would only take her feelings into her dark heart. For years I could never speak to anyone about it, they would never give me the opportunity to speak. Throughout all of this the physical punishment would continue.

In 2012 my Father met Clara Bedford she had a daughter Rachel and a son Ben. While Rachel was the kindest little girl you could meet Ben was the devil’s son. For the first two years while the physical abuse was being endured everything with Clara was going really well even the devil’s son ben was being kind but it always seemed that my father had a soft spot for my sister Jade and Clara would have a spot for her kids I would receive all the blame anything at all. It was the following year when things started going downhill my sister decided that she had had enough of Clara. While Clara was being very rude and disrespectful at the time, I don’t believe I was old enough to understand it, my sister however realised everything that was going on. It took her three tries but when it had finally worked, she left to never return to live with us. She ran away from home and started to live with our friends Kaitlyn and Delilah.

At one point the physical abuse got so bad that my father had accidentally given me a black eye because of this I had two weeks off of school, this was the one thing that Clara had ever done that was good for me, and she managed to get my father to stop hitting me. It was only after that I realised that it wasn’t normal and I didn’t deserve it. After that moment I stopped seeing things blindly and saw them as they were. I realise that my nan was trying to put the blame of my mothers’ suicide on my father. I started to make the gaps between seeing her longer and longer. This realisation had an effect on me. I started to feel a very dawning and pensive sadness all the time. I felt very melancholy but I could never show this at home or in school. And to add to the pain of that that is when one of the worst things to happen to me began to happen. At the age of 8 was just the start. The devil’s child A.K.A. Ben had started to threaten me and tell me that if I didn’t agree to him or do what he said then he would hurt me or sometimes he threatened to kill me. He forced me to have interactions with him and perform not so family friendly actions on him. I hated it but could not think straight when I believed my life was on the line. This was going on over four times a month and I couldn’t tell anyone or do anything to stop this 15-year-old doing this to me. He did this until I was 9 and he was 16. It had finally stopped. While Clara had started being more abusive and asking more of my father, I realised why my sister left when she did. She took the chance that I couldn’t.

In the next following years nothing particularly eventful happened apart from the child protection services coming around frequently. When one of the social workers tried to enter my house while I was alone my dad refused to work with the services until the worker was gone. The result of this was him never being able to work in our state again what a result. I had finally cut connections off with my god-awful grandmother. Every year I would receive at least two cards or voicemails leaving guilt tripping voicemails such as “Don’t forget about me” or “I am ill so come and see me before I am gone for good” she knew what she had done and the reason for the connections cut. She still however tried to convince me that wasn’t her true intentions. While my sister was going into foster care, she began teaming up with some of the ‘my father hating’ members of my mothers’ family. They would put in ‘anonymous’ reports about my father and friends of my fathers and then post about them on Facebook so they weren’t so ‘anonymous’. My father still believed that my sister had nothing to do with this so therefore he would give her money every birthday and Christmas even after I had spent many times trying to explain to him that my jade was only in it for the money.

About one year later we went on a camping trip and Clara brought Rachel and Ben and my father brought me. On one of the nights when Clara was especially drunk the abuse was at a high. She would even make personal attacks towards me. We left the tent and only returned when everyone was asleep. Of course, after many years of bullying me Ben was backing his mother all the way. That camping trip ended very shortly. And finally, after many breakups and getting back together this seemed like the final breakup. This time it lasted for about a year until one morning on the way back from a friend house an old man pushed me off of my bike injuring my arm. I tried to get my dad to answer the door but because of the night Clara had given my father he was too sound asleep to hear my knocking. I was sat in the back garden for about 4 hours until my dad finally woke up. I walk in to see them there speaking as good friends. The same day my dad saw the man and beat him up even though my father was bottled in the fight. My father managed to get out of any trouble on the bounds of self-defence as my dad had cuts from the glass bottle and the man was obviously a drunk.

After me hating my dad for two months straight I gave him the ultimatum. It is either me or Clara. He chose me as he realised, he could not lose another child because of this girl. Ever since then he has never been with her again as I tracked his movement for a year. It was in 9th grade when I started to cut myself every day. At school I would be a whole different character that I believed I needed to be to make people like me but as it turns out this year when I finally let that character down, I realised people like me a lot more. Every day I would go home and cry as I knew I could not show emotion at school otherwise I would be seen as weak. I could blame everything that happened in my past for my actions that year but I’m not going to I do believe it was a factor but it was not solely the reason. It was when in summer vacation of 2019 I broke up with my boyfriend that everything came down on me. I was keeping all my emotion inside based on the assumption that men shouldn’t cry. I believe the breakup with my boyfriend of a year finally tipped the scales. That is when I was in the darkest moment of my life. After I had been cutting my wrists for two years straight and that summer I burned my hand with a lighter just to feel pain but then when I was at my lowest, I was hell bent on death. All the bullets were hitting me but never pierced I tried to hang myself. My father found me hanging there just after I passed out. I was on my last breath of life I am glad he saved me. I apologised to everybody I had ever annoyed in 9th grade and ever since my life has been looking up in 10th grade. I have many more friends and my mental health is just getting better.

While my life has been hell in some places it has provided me with some of the most fun and loving people in the world. Throughout the years I have had my fair share of bullying and trauma but this year everything has seemed to have changed. My whole life has turned around and now almost everything in my life is pretty much great (except my love life that has been a disaster) and my best friend Claudia Salttivan who helps me through anything and I love dearly and I also help her through anything. At the moment I have sort of become an agony aunt or cupid in our grade which I am glad because I always have one goal in life to help people or make them laugh or even just to stop them crying/ being sad.

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