After being in an abusive relationship with the father of her youngest child for years, Janice Malcolm* prayed desperately for the Lord to give her an escape. Suffering from low self-esteem, she found herself going back time and time again and he promised it would never happen again.
One day she poured out her heart to God with the words, “God see me yah, a dead mi a go dead, do something fi mi nuh,” she shared. On a Zoom meeting organised by her church she confessed that she was struggling to maintain her composure. After that prayer, she got a call from her father pleading with her to return home. She had left the house after her father criticised her boyfriend, saying he was not the one for her.
She acknowledged in hindsight that parents oftentimes see things that children are too blind to observe. Shortly after her father’s phone call, she got a call from one of her friends, who told her that she saw her in a casket and begged her to move out and return to her parents home.
Later that day, her grandmother called her and said, “Janice, I don’t know what’s happening with you, but please go back home.” It was then that she knew she had all the warnings she needed, and God was indeed speaking to her and she decided to settle into a church.
Beginning her testimony, she said all the good will be spoken about her now being a teacher, a tutor, a lecturer, and the single mother of three boys ages 14, 7, and 8, but all that came at the cost of being broken into pieces.
In 2016, an experience saw her asking God to take her life as she was raped by someone her brother trusted to accompany her home. She kept it quiet, unable to talk about it, and when she finally did, her father did not believe her.
“For years, I was so broken because of this and felt so broken inside. For years, I felt ugly. For years, I asked God to take my life. Why am I getting hurt all the time? I remembered I started cutting my hands just to relieve myself of that hurt,” she recalled.
Janice, who grew up in a family that “had money,” might not have lacked material things, but she lacked the love she was looking for. She was classified as the black sheep of the family and would often be told that she would never come to anything good.
She remembers being in a math class at De Carteret College and struggling with a problem, and her teacher coming over to her and telling her that she would not amount to anything good. She was so hurt.
“I believed that for a while. I remembered that day I came home and went into my parents cupboard, and I started drinking and drinking. My parents didn’t understand what happened to me that day, they didn’t even understand that I was drunk. I started crying and breaking things, and before my father could ask, he just used words. Nontheless, he still loved me, but some parents didn’t know how to show that love,” she reminisced.
All she wanted was comfort for the turmoil she was going through. As she started to grow, she yearned for her father’s love. Even though he was strict, she said she looked up to him.
At age 19, the sixth-former experienced her first love, a boy, in her class . She realised it wasn’t love, but at the time, it felt like it. She looked up to him. Three months after they started dating, he started abusing her, and she didn’t tell anyone but took it instead, as she thought this was his way of showing love to her.
“I stayed around for a bit, and I would go to school with bruises on me. I couldn’t tell my father because, for some odd reason, I knew he would curse me out. I remember one day at school, I couldn’t take it anyone, and I took a block and hit the boy in the knee, and we started to fight, and I went over to the police station, and my father heard about it,” she shared.
She remembered him being so upset and called her names. She said she cried out to God, asking why her father was upset with her and not giving her the comfort she needed.
At the age of 21, Janice got pregnant with her first child. She was still seeking comfort and love, but that person didn’t love her the way she wanted to.
He only saw the girl who could dance up a storm at a stage show or dance. Give her any music, and she could put steps to it. He fell in love with that persona. By the time her son was eight months old, Janice said she knew she had to go as he wasn’t fitting in her profile.
“Even though I was this person, I wanted to be someone else; the person talking to you now,” she confessed to those who logged into the Zoom meeting.
Pointing out that she wasn’t a sexually promiscuous person, she said she dated a lot, not giving herself time to heal but still searching.
That search saw her enter another relationship, which resulted in her second son being born. She thought she was in love with him, but he turned out to be a drug dealer.
“I felt down. I was like, Why me? Why can’t I be married like everyone else? I went to college, got my first degree, and went to pursue my second degree. Why can’t people love me for me? Am I ugly? Am I stupid? I felt this way for quite some time,” she revealed.
After being in the United States, she met a guy whom she thought she connected with; he was a drug dealer, and he commanded so much force and respect that she confessed to having a lot of respect for him resulting from the power he commanded.
She said they fell in love, and she became the head of his operation, where she would tell him how to pack the drugs and how to do certain things. Still, that didn’t fulfil her, as once again she found herself reaching out to God.
“I remember one year I said to God, God, give me a sign, because this cannot be it. I remembered being at the airport with my two boys. I remembered I prayed before going to the airport; I was praying God give me a sign,” she informed. At the time, Janice was supposed to return to the States and carry out a mission for her boyfriend, taking ‘white stuff’ for him, but an incident at the airport opened her eyes.
Her eldest son was fiddling with something on the seat, which turned out to be a packet of coke. He asked her what it was and threw it in her direction. “It seemed someone got scared and left it there,” she told him. Janice said she could have been arrested if a police officer had seen her with it when her son flung it to her.
“This is it—a sign. I broke it off.”
In 2020, while doing her masters, she got pregnant with her third child. The father was a construction worker doing well, and they both were lured into investing in a drug deal. Even though God had led her out of the relationship with the drug dealer, she was now contemplating being involved again. The deal didn’t go through. Everything went downhill, and with it came physical abuse. He would beat her until she was black and blue for a week.
Although she had walked out on God, Janice is now thankful that God didn’t leave her alone. She now sees her three children as blessings from the Lord. They pray together, they have her back, and her family feels complete.
Coming from the depths of her pain, she is asking parents to listen to their children and not ignore whatever they have to say.
*Name changed to protect identity