Description

By Kim Wheeler

ISBN: 978-1-78382-4847
Published: 2019
Pages: 164
Key Themes: Mental Health, abuse, Survival

Description

Kim Wheeler writes from the heart, opening old wounds that never completely heal in order to shed light on his past from being abandoned by his birth mother aged just five days, through the traumas and abuses meted out in his children home in Lewisham, fostering, adoption and schooling. Kim then talks openly about some of his physical life changing injuries and near death and how all this affected him and what he needed to learn to overcome such traumas. The book covers several abuses due to skin colour, unknown parentage and humble beginnings and then swiftly moves on to a litany of injuries, surviving meningitis, drug and alcohol abuse and then having to live with an incurable spine injury and very early retirement.

Healing the Broken then describes about Kim’s breakdown and how bit by bit, day by day he climbed from the bottom of his lonely pit towards the light of freedom and salvation, a journey that in itself took over ten years to a new life where he is now free from the confines of self and ego, a content man who enjoys nothing more than his rescue dogs, writing, photography, positive attitude, freedom and contentment which seemed unobtainable many years ago.

We all fall down, but sometimes all we ever needed was someone to hold our hand and help us stand.

Book Extract

I was born in University College Hospital, London, back in July 1954 and within a few days, my Mother deserted me. Now the reasons behind my separation from my birth mother are pretty vague. I recently discovered that I was ill from birth and was taken to a hospital aged just five days old where she dumped me. I can share what I think or imagine what it must have been like for her, and the pressure she had to endure at the hands of the cold hearted, uncaring bastards who saw my mother as nothing more than a poverty-stricken slut. If you were single and pregnant in 1953, you were looked down upon. If you were single, pregnant and the colour of the child’s father wasn’t a perfect white, you were looked down upon. If you were single, pregnant, had a brown man’s baby inside your womb and the child was sallow skinned, you were not only looked down upon. Add to all that, if you were also unwell whilst carrying a half-caste child; homeless and a long, long way from home, loved ones, your family; and were offered absolutely no help with no benefits whatsoever whilst being treated like scum, the chances of keeping that child were two fold – slim and none. My guess is that my mother, like a lot of other women in those days, was told, ‘You give that bastard, brown child up right now or we will send you to Hoxton Hall Mental Home.’ The truth was revealed much later in my life and written much later in this book. I was thus removed or dumped from the only mother I had, and all because certain parts of society deemed it wrong to have a bastard, half-caste child. Well, that’s the truth of the matter, and I at the tender age of just five days, I was dumped. I often wondered what that kind of cruel separation would do to a child and a man; well I know exactly how that feels. Rejection is a cruel bastard of an emotion, made even worse when it is enforced by some repugnant, odious and prejudiced suit working in that odious, repugnant, prejudiced system. How do I feel about this? Well, one-word sort of sums it up: heartbroken. I can assure you; I have a dictionary of a lot more.
I was then moved to a children’s home in Lewisham but unsure when, where I have very few memories, but the five years of incarceration would have an enormous effect on the rest of my life and probably caused more mental angst than all of the following years put together.
Children don’t do being alone very well and although we survive physically, mentally we hurt and this hurt never seems to go away. As much as I hoped that one day my past emotions would dissipate, it seems the complete opposite occurred. So, I and others who were brought up this way are indeed, scarred for life. Not feeling loved is the obvious emotion, but there are a lot more, such as not being granted attention except to fulfil basic needs, which serves to shatter self-confidence and plant the seeds of distrust in others. Being continually provoked leads to strong feelings of violence, a longing for freedom and a need to run away from a dull, vegetated state, all the while suffering from such aloneness and loneliness that I would happily jump through fire to find a friend. Sadly, it seems I was condemned to carry the odious suitcase of my past with me forever.