She had three children by three different men and married the father of the third child “out of necessity”.
The marriage didn’t last and Kaz fell into serious bouts of depression. After several suicide attempts, mostly by overdose, she lost custody of her children and was admitted to the Windsor House psychiatric unit at Belfast’s City Hospital, where she attempted suicide again, almost dying on an operating table.
When she reluctantly told a consultant the reason for her distress, the police were alerted and the uncle was arrested, but he was never charged, because his victim was deemed unfit by her carers to give evidence against him. He was, however, forced to leave his neighbourhood by angry locals.
Kaz had a harder time convincing her family that her uncle was a paedophile and rapist, and was accused of being “an attention seeker”.
One of her songs, Surviving, is about the abuse, with a message for her uncle. Another, Lipstick and Cocaine, is about hope and about the people who helped her, including a doctor, a policeman and her mother.
After leaving her ‘Mama Kaz’ covers band behind her, Kaz debuted her own songs at the Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival in 2013. Since then, she has won awards, supported Van Morrison and Nanci Griffith in concert, released an album, toured all over the UK with her new group and performed in Boston, singing and giving a lecture about her hard times and about her philosophy of “fighting the fight to come through trauma”.
This week she’s off to the US, where she made the February cover of ION Indie magazine, resplendent in a red bandana, matching gloves and a Yankee flag-themed dress.
From dressing head to toe in plain black, Kaz now wears vivid rockabilly clothes and has her arms covered in colourful tattoos: “I replaced my scars with art and I love wearing colours – it makes me happy”.
She has stopped smoking recently, conscious of trying to extend her life to see her grandchildren grow up.
Posted from: https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/weekend/she-was-abused-as-a-child-almost-killed-by-an-ex-partner-and-attempted-suicide-now-belfast-singer-kaz-reveals-how-she-turned-her-life-around/35513955.html