Safe and sound: Bo Bickmore

SAFE

SOUND

Words & Images: BO BICKMORE Opening Image: J. DAVIES

AND

SOUNDAfter a childhood that involved domestic violence, abuse, mental illness and self-harm, this author learnt that home can be a place to grow and heal.

I HAVE TWO HOMES inside me. Built parallel to one another, they house my before and after: the place I am now and the place I left behind.

My childhood home is a patchwork house, mutated and morphed – it is all of the houses I grew up in, merged. My memories haunt the closets and cupboards, all of the shadows and corners; ghosts of domestic violence, fear and shame. My mother lives inside, still dancing and drinking, singing and crying.

For a long time, that was the only idea of home I held for myself. It took years of being away from it for me to be able to formulate a new idea of what home could be; years growing and healing, years feeling the euphoria of finding my Queer1 family and community, years of replacing old memories with new.

It took leaving for me to really believe home could be something of my own making, that it could be different from what I had known.

Now, home looks like my partner’s kiss bookending every day, Queer dinner parties and dancing, my books in every room and his art on every wall, and our best friend making music in their bedroom down the hall.

I no longer hesitate before opening the front door and walking inside.

I no longer wait for the house to empty before I don my gowns and pearls, my lipstick and my heels.

WHEN I WAS TWO years old, my father was killed by a brain aneurysm, leaving my mother with five children and a grief that transformed her.

From the age of six until I was kicked out of home at 18, there were few times we were not also living with a monster – men who stain my memories and turn them into nightmares. There is one who never left, who attached like something cancerous and willed himself to spread. Abusive and constantly drunk, he moved in with us and fed on the frailty of my mother’s pain, her addictions and insecurities.

Violence and alcoholism ran like clockwork for years in our house. Friday and the weekend were the worst, always. Monday was often a day we missed school or arrived hours late. Tuesday to Thursday were spent dreading the arrival of Friday as it circled back again.

Some of my earliest memories of our home are of Mum being thrown across a room, and of my brother being pushed through a window. In the next home, it is memories of overhearing yelling and glass being smashed, consoling my teenage sister while she shits herself in fear next to me, and cleaning up spilt blood before any police arrive.

There is no easy way for a child to walk away, to leave their home or family. Despite the hardship of home, I loved my family and mother.

I knew my mother was safer if I was there to protect her, that she needed the piece of my dad she saw inside me, the reminder of him in the shape of my face.

By the age of 10 I was comfortable calling the police and making a statement to an officer when they arrived too late. Who would do that if I was not there? Who would change

1 The capitalisation of ‘Queer’ highlights my reverence for queerness and all of its multiplicity, as a further act of reclamation and to signify its omnipresence in my identity. my mother’s sheets after she had been raped? I knew the details to leave out when child protective services came to school, and told them that they could not take me away and that my mother was not to blame. I was scared of foster care and being separated from my sister. I had already lost my father and knew I could not lose my mother, too. I knew all that she had lost and I could not be responsible for taking the last of what she had left.

Living with domestic violence as a child brings so much internal friction and confusion.

I knew that what I was living through was not okay, that home was supposed to be a safe place. But even when it is not, leaving still feels so wrong – your home is still home, the only shelter that you know.

I still felt my mother’s love and my need for her. I told myself to find whatever comfort I could in the familiarity of our broken home rather than face the uncertainty of the unknown, of what could come if I were to leave her alone.

We tell children to speak to the authorities, to welfare teams and counsellors, and to do so as if they do not know the separation their words will bring and the fears they will have to face.

I felt I had to stay when I was a kid, for my sisters and brothers, for my mother and her protection.

I will not tell someone that they must wait and that things will get better, but I also cannot tell them to do what they have to so they can leave, as if that is ever something easy or simple.

I stayed longer than I deserved, willing myself to be the brother and son that was needed for as long as I could, staying until I could not take anymore.

When I was 18, I was strangled, verbally abused and threatened by my mother’s partner.

In the days following, I told my mother I could not live like this anymore, that it was him or me. She chose him – chose to kick me out our door.

I MOVED IN WITH my best friend’s family. They took me in for two years and did their best to make room for me in their home. I survived that period of potential houselessness because of them.

It was an act of friendship for which I will never be able to express my gratitude. It was there that I was able to begin planning my life; I began to realise I was looking for my community, that I was Queer and that I needed to find and create myself a home.

I found work in a bookstore in the city. I packed all of my things and moved into a household of Queers and creatives I did not know.

I left the first idea I had of home behind and began carving a new one of my own.

Home is supposed to be a lighthouse, a landing strip – our safe haven and safe harbour. When we are well looked after and supported, comforted and safe, our potential to grow multiplies tenfold.

I could never have anticipated the ways I have expanded since home became a place where I feel protected.

The first blooms of gender fluidity and queerness I was taught to stamp out are now a well-loved garden, overgrown and thriving, robust and resilient.

When you are a child burdened with the weight of your mother’s survival – when you have grown to associate weekends with police visits, and the smell of bourbon with fear – you are left with no room to focus on the parts of yourself begging to flourish.

I think often about the Little Bo I used to be, about the ways I would have cared for them and kept them safe. I think about the dresses I would have bought them, about the beauty of their body – its fatness and its overflow – and how I would have taught them that every inch of them was an inch worth loving.

I cannot give that version of me, back then, what they deserve, but every day I am grateful for how they held on; for their ability to get through all that they did.

I owe the bravest and best parts of myself to the child version of me who kept fighting, who held onto the seeds I was told to stamp out, and the hope that someday I could re-plant them.

I TAKE SOLACE in knowing that the home I live in now is not only for me – that the Little Bo I still carry inside is exploding with joy, proud of both of us and all that we have become.

I know that when I pull on a skirt, today, they are pulling one on, too. They paint their lips red in the mirror alongside me, sit on the side of the bathtub and squeeze too-big feet into borrowed heels, as I do.

They feel the joy that I feel, and they see all that they were waiting for has been realised.

I remind myself every day that I am living for both of us. I refuse my fear and live proudly, outwardly Queer and anything but definable. I no longer swallow the words rising in the back of my throat when asked about my gender, my body, my past or my sexuality. These elements of myself I once hid are now badges I wear proudly. I know that largely this is because in the last five years I have had the chance to live with people who look like me, people who believe in what I do, people who are unapologetically Queer and who saw and loved that I was too.

There is so much beauty in living with people who reflect who you are. I watch my limp-wristed housemates and partner, hear the queerness in their voices like it is a language of its own, like it is a language that I know. I listen to them speak of revolution and revolt, their faces painted, dressed liked queens from head to toe. It took seeing and loving shared qualities in other people to realise I deserve to love those same things within myself, too.

I left home and fell in love with my friends and housemates. I let loving them teach me how to love myself, too, and I finally do – more now than I ever have before.

I could not have become the person I am without them, without moving away and redefining home for myself.

THERE ARE SO FEW chances for us to heal and grow when we are surrounded by violence, when we do not feel safe or valued.

Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I saw psychologists and welfare teams, and spoke to doctors and mental health organisations. I was depressed and anxious, could not sleep and could not stop harming myself.

“I will never be able to forget or completely leave behind the home I come from, but every day a part of it is healed by the home I exist in now, this home of care and compassion, of brazen queerness and support”

A part of me, then, already knew that despite medication and therapy, guidance and appointments, I could not get better when I still lived in a place of grief and abuse.

I recognise, now, that living there and trying to deal with my mental illness was like wanting a scab to heal but picking at it daily. I was still hurting because there were constantly new wounds blossoming over gashes yet to heal.

Walking through that front door meant walking into fear, sadness and shame. It was so heavy in the air it was as if the house was built from it, as if the mortar between the bricks was my mother’s pain hardened, the carpets stained by memory, the door hinges all ready and waiting to be slammed. My body and mind were the same – tense and anxious, afraid and desperate. We internalise the environment we live in, and I could not rid myself of that while I was still there.

There were days when I lived with my family that I would stay in my mother’s parked car after school, spending hours in the limbo of the driveway, not quite home because I had not gone inside, waiting as long as possible before I had to take any of it in.

Now when I finish work, I feel myself rushing, eager and excited to go back to my home, to my partner and best friends, to this place that never hurts.

IN THE SAME WAY that moving created more opportunities for me to appreciate myself, it also offered the sanctuary needed for me to recover and mend.

In a secure, healthy home, the parts of ourselves that have been hurt are safe to emerge, to be faced and dealt with, mourned and forgiven.

I know that I should not have had to wait for this healing to happen, and that I should not have had to recover from a past like this in the first place.

It is an uncomfortable and painful reality that some of us have no option but to tolerate and withstand, to grit our teeth and persevere – to wait for tomorrow before we can focus on ourselves.

It feels so trite to tell someone that they simply have to wait, that things will change – so dismissive of the reality they are currently in. I rolled my eyes at the people who told me that things would improve eventually.

I know there is no real comfort to be found in hypothetical futures and the imagined potential of a better life, but it is the only solace I have to offer.

I left home and found a whole world of people waiting for me. I found more than I was able to dream possible for myself. What I know of home now is that it is where I am constantly growing, that it is where all of me feels seen and valued; it is the place that my body feels most at ease, where there is no part of me that is too much or too big, too Queer or too feminine.

Despite this, I know that for anyone still living somewhere they are not safe, the idea of a better future is not enough, that you want something tangible and real, something now. I know that each day it gets harder to wait, but I also know that no matter how much we want to leave, there is always something forcing us to stay.

What I can offer is this: if home is a place of hurt – if you want to leave, but you know you have to stay – remind yourself daily of the world you are going to build, of tearing down your first idea of home and re-creating it on your own. I promise that it is coming, that it is possible, that the narratives you have imagined for yourself are possibilities you can reach, that they are so much more than just dreams.

No child or youth living in domestic violence has the same story, or the same way out, and I am too familiar with the years we have to withstand. I can’t write a pathway out or a guide to finding home, but I can testify how possible it is, and how beautiful the other side feels.

If you are someone who is waiting, you are not waiting in vain. There are people waiting at the finish line to hold you in their arms, to show you a home in which you feel cared for and valued. There is a place where you have the room to grow, to find new versions of yourself and get to know them. They are not going anywhere – they will be waiting for you no matter how long it takes.

I will never be able to forget or completely leave behind the home I come from, but every day a part of it is healed by the home I exist in now, this home of care and compassion, of brazen queerness and support.

THERE ARE TWO HOMES inside me, built

parallel to one another. I exist within and because of them both.

As more time passes, I am defining myself less by the place from which I have come, and more by this place I have created on my own, and the places I am yet to go.

BO BICKMORE (they/he/she) is a Queer writer, producer and bookseller living and working in Naarm. Bo has worked as a bookseller for over nine years now and is currently writing their first novel. They are the producer and curator of the multi-artform exhibit, show and spoken word event, Taking Up Space: Love Letters to our Queer Bodies.