I CONFESS: Child of rape hated by mum

MY MOTHER hated me, and treated me as if I was the worst person in the world. She could not stand to look at me.

So, for the first ten years of my life she ignored me as best she could. And when she was finally forced to take responsibility for my daily welfare, she made me suffer with persistent physical and verbal abuse. It was awful.

Unlike the woman last week who does not trust men because her father cheated on her mother, destroyed their family, and ended up broke, I don't trust men because my father raped my mother and I was the result.

He was an older man and she a young woman in her late teens. He had a dollar, while she came from a poor family.

In those days the old people used to hush up those things, so my mother had to endure the brutality of being raped, and was made to have a child at a young age which she said destroyed her ambitions, and the man was never punished.

For this she was always bitter, and took out her resentment on me after I had to live with her.

I was conceived through violence and deceit and was made to pay the penalty my mother felt my father should have paid for raping her. She made me suffer so much.

For this reason I hate men and have had little to do with them throughout my life. I see men as being responsible for all of the bad experiences in my life - a near loveless childhood and brutal teenage years.

Because of what my father did, my mother ensured I had little chance to be a child. The thing is, my only crime was that I was the child of the man who raped her.

My recollection of my mother's bad feelings towards me goes back to when I was five years old. In those days I used to live with her and an older woman at that woman's house. That lady was a family friend who had taken us in.

The lady used to tell me that she was my friend and the other woman was my mother. But I could never understand what she meant as she was kind to me, like how a mother should act to her child; while my mother used to snap at me and rough me up whenever I had to deal with her.

As fate would have it, the lady died when I was 10. From then until I became a teenager and could get away from my mother, I smelled hell.

She would beat me for the slightest thing and would sometimes make me kneel down for hours as punishment.

When she was home, she would send me out in the yard and I had to stay out there by myself, and if the rain fell I had to go into the pit toilet for shelter.

If I said something to get her vex, or was even foolish enough to question her, she would hit me with the nearest thing to her hand, and push me in the toilet - and you know how bad those smell.

Sometimes she would make me stand naked in the yard in the rain as my punishment, and though I would cry and beg to come in, she would keep the backdoor shut. And as I did not have on any clothes, I could not open up the gate and run outside.

In terms of verbal abuse, I used to have to stand next to her and endure nasty stares from people when she told them whose child I was and how he raped her, and she did not care anything about me or him.

I guess that was her way of getting back at my father the only way she could, and venting her anger at never getting justice. But can you imagine how useless and helpless I used to feel when she did that? None of this was my fault, but I was the one being blamed!

I can go on about the terrible things that woman, my dear mother, did to me but I know nobody would believe me. When I look back at what she did, and the fact that I survived, it surprises me to no end.

As a result of living with such rejection, I have had a loveless life. I don't feel anything for anybody. I see men as just a means to get money; I care nothing about them.

Though I tried to change after I left from around my mother, I have always kept my feelings in and I know that accounts for my coldness as a person.

Men need to realise that for a few minutes of pleasure they can mess up other people's lives forever - that is what my father did to me and my mother.