Whenever he walked into the kitchen with his girlfriend by his side he would pause and look around to see who all was there. My image of what he looked like is not flattering; with a very slight forward lean and arms by his side, to me he represented a gorilla, especially considering his temper. We knew about his temper because the girl with him often bore the marks of his wrath. The air of anger that surrounded him was almost like a huge advertisement- Don’t mess with me!
At certain times, I could stay quiet no longer and on more than one occasion had him removed from the kitchen for his anger displays against her.
I would try to speak with the young girl, trying to convince her that God did not create her to be a punching bag, to which she replied that she had probably deserved his tirade.
For me, this presented an opportunity to try and find out their stories or whatever it was that brought about their current attitudes and lifestyle. What I found out was stuff I did really not expect nor want to hear, but I had asked and I learned.
I have a letter from the girl wherein she writes her history that reads like an extremely bad and violent fiction, involving repeated rape and rejection by a family member while her mother was present. By the time she was thirteen, after her first abortion, self-worth was not even in her dictionary.
In the young man’s case, his back still bears the scars produced by the buckle on his father’s belt as in his drunken rage he tried to teach his son a lesson.
His son spent a year in a group home trying to learn a life of normalcy.
After another undeserved beating, he had turned on and sent his father to hospital. His anger was in essence beat into him by the one he should have trusted to teach him a better life!
As gripping as these stories are, they are by no means uncommon.
Out of the 200-plus folks that have frequented the kitchen, we have heard the same stories with slight variations over and over.
Then with the ‘help’ they receive on the street, they soon find that drugs do not eradicate the memories, they exacerbate them and the battles only go from bad to worse.
The manifestations that we witnessed at the kitchen in most cases were the results of stories like these, so we were always reluctant to remove anyone from a meal time.
In our minds and hearts, there was constantly that hope that whatever little influence we might have on them could in some small way help them on a road to recovery. Simply expelling them would only add to their low self-worth and would also remove us from them as a possible source of help.
One thing I have learned from my time at the kitchen is the incredible influence that fathers and mothers have on their children. I have also learned that the parents will mostly teach their children only what they know, or in many cases, what they don’t.
When I look around at society and what I hear on the news about the actions of many of our youth, all I see is a fundamental lack of patient, compassionate, loving teaching from parents, usually because they do not know how. I believe the lack of direction in a lot of kids lives is a direct result of whatever they learned or didn’t from the ones they looked to for guidance.
All in all, I have come to realize just how important is the proper and loving use of authority by caring mothers and fathers.
Chris Salomons is a Retired Red Deer Resident with a concern for the downtrodden