Today, Gayan Peart helps victims of domestic abuse. As a girl, she lived it.
Shelter director used to block out the darkest time of her life
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Ellen McCarthy.
Gayan Peart feels compelled to support the women who flee to her domestic violence shelter because she can relate to their stories of domestic abuse. For a long time though, it was hard for her to admit what she had in common with them.
Gayan’s parents separated before she was born. When she was growing up in Jamaica, she and her mom were a cozy duo, sometimes even commuting together to the elementary school where Gayan was a pupil and her mom was a teacher.
She was happy when her mom became engaged to a well-liked man from their church when Gayan was 14. Soon there was a wedding and a new house in a different community.
But it slowly became apparent that Gayan’s mom was no longer in charge. Her new stepdad made all the decisions about who could visit, how money was spent and what Gayan should do after school.
Gayan, now 35 and the director of domestic violence shelter Bethany House, often heard her mom sobbing in the shower.
One day a fight erupted as her mother sat sewing. Her stepfather tried to throw her mom’s sewing machine out on the lawn, then stormed out of the house. Gayan and her mother locked the door, but soon he was back. The women blocked the door as he pounded on it; Gayan was in front when her stepdad’s fist crashed through the door and hit her in the chest.
Gayan started sleeping in her mom’s bed, with a knife under the pillow. They would stay with friends for a few weeks at a time, but Gayan’s mom had no financial resources to make a clean break. So they always ended up back under the same roof with Gayan’s stepdad.
“I never want to get married,” Gayan recalls telling her mother. “Because if this is what marriage is, I don’t want it.”
Painful memories ‘wiped away’
After Gayan graduated from high school, she moved to England, following her mother. Living far from home, Gayan locked away the painful previous chapter of their lives.
“My body suppressed a lot of these things. My mom would try to talk about it and I’d be like, ‘La la la la. I don’t want to hear his name. I don’t want to talk about him,’ ” Gayan says. “Sometimes she’d be like, ‘Do you remember?’ And I really couldn’t.”
Gayan made her way to the United States to finish college and ended up getting a job as a social worker. After a few years, she became a program manager with Bethany House. It was Gayan’s mission to help abused women get on their feet — find jobs, cars, permanent housing and emotional independence.
The women who show up at Gayan’s domestic abuse shelter come with crying, confused children who want to go home, even though home is where their mommy gets hurt. They come with one eye fixed on the door, sure that he’s going to burst in at any second, angrier than ever because she tried to leave.
Though Gayan once lived their fear and pain, it has taken her a long time to admit that, even to herself.
A breakthrough in empathy
After a couple of years with Bethany House, her pastor interviewed her for a church newsletter and asked if anything in her past had led her to pursue this line of work. “I was like, ‘Me? Domestic violence? Oh no, pastor,’ ” she recalls. But as he pressed further, something broke open. And then there it was, playing out in front of me. Yes, this span of your life did happen.
Suddenly, she related differently to the woman who was stranded at a gas station with a newborn and no diapers or formula — because she didn’t want her abuser to suspect that she was leaving for good. She understood the preteen gripped by embarrassment to be living in a shelter.
“Your mind processes so differently when you can see yourself in that child or that mother,” says Gayan. Today, when she tells women it’s not their fault, “I can say it, not because I went through some training or because I have a degree, but because I’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Now I have a mental and a heart connection to these women.”
