16 YEAR OLD KIMMI’S STORY

Hi, I’m Kimmi and I’m the child of a bad marriage and a happy divorce.

My little brother, Raj, and I grew up in an unhappy household. My parents were always fighting and we were always miserable. Raj is four years my junior and I think he got the worst of things because he is such a sensitive boy and needed more of my parents than I did. Of course, they paid him little attention and although I tried to help him with school work and such, I was no substitute for the parents’ love and support that he really needed.

I did well at school because I wasn’t allowed to have friends to visit, so I studied instead. I had friends at school whose parents were divorced. They knew about my parents and supported me. It was a big help to be able to go to school and talk about things with my girl friends.

Once my mother took an overdose and didn’t wake up. They took her to the hospital to have her stomach pumped out. My father mocked her and said she could accomplish nothing on her own – not even death. He is a cruel man.

I asked my mother many times why she didn’t divorce our father but she laughed at me and told me that then she would be an outcast and have no social standing. If she did that she wouldn’t be able to hold her head up again. She also said that we needed a father. She was wrong. We didn’t need to be in a miserable household.

Raj wasn’t so fortunate as me. He was too proud to talk about these things with any one other than me, and he didn’t make friends easily, he was more of a loner: so he really suffered. He started running. I think at first it was just to get away and be alone. Later, he got so good at long distance that he was the best in the school. He still didn’t mix with the other kids.

I went surfing the net to escape. There wasn’t one Divorce Attorney’s website I didn’t know about.  My favourite was abour the Specialist Divorce and Family Law team of Martin Vermaak Attorneys because of the pictures and stories. They were about real people like ourselves.

One day I e-mailed Martin Vermaak Attorneys and asked them for help with a divorce. They were very kind and replied that they would be happy to help if one of our parents asked them. I printed the e-mails, some stories and other stuff and took it all home to my mother. She got very sad when I showed her but she carefully put the pages away at the back of a drawer.

Not long after that my father hit my mother quite badly, and when I walked in (I’d gone back to get my hockey stick for a school match) it looked like he was trying to strangle her. His hands were around her throat and she was choking and I had my stick in my hand; so I stopped him. I didn’t do any permanent damage and he soon recovered to his normal horrible self.

My mother was never the same again. She went straight to Martin Vermaak Attorneys who have a Specialist Divorce and Family Law  team of Attorneys and she started divorce proceedings. That was about 18 months ago.

Now Raj and I are part of a happy family. We love to hear our mother laugh and she does that a lot these days. We had a very happy divorce.