Trigger warning sexual harm; complex PTSD.
He emailed my sister saying he wanted to attend the celebration of my mother’s life, and she asked me what I wanted to do. “Let me think about it,” I said, pausing to ask myself that question overnight.
I had forgiven him — and everyone else who knew and did nothing — over fifteen years ago, as part of the healing that began as I started telling stories from my past out loud for the first time.
I wondered, “What does my apology mean now? What do I want to do now?”
As soon as I gave myself that space, I felt – in the trembling just under my skin – that I wanted to be unencumbered by his physical presence. I didn’t want to be triggered. Most of all, I didn’t want my children or grandchildren to see him or experience his energy.
***
It had taken me years to remember, face, and process what had happened the summer after third grade, and all the varieties of torture that older boy had subjected me to when I was a young girl.
As I began to remember — the summer I took my first Women’s Studies classes and worked doing child care at the New Haven Project for Battered Women — I went to see him when I was home visiting my mother. I was wearing overalls and one of my father’s drab green t-shirts from the Marines, almost like my father was there protecting me.
He opened the door, I walked in just a few steps, and said, “I’m not sure exactly what you did to me, but it wasn’t right.” He started to flirt with me, and reached out – first to touch me, like I was his pet, and then to pull me into his space. “No,” I screamed very loud, as I left, banging the door behind me and running down the stairs.
Driving back to my mother’s house, I composed my face and feelings. My face twitches as I remember my audacity and his sense of entitlement that day.
***
When my first daughter was a year old, I remembered the whole thing. Not all at once and not all the details, but in sharp thin edges that crept up through my everyday life — acute pain in my gut that radiated across my chest and up to my throat — and in vivid dreams, night after night, that part of my past demanded my full attention.
A friend recommended a social worker who helped women that had been sexually harmed as children. I spent over a year, on my back on her couch, three days a week, remembering. I’m not sure if psychoanalysis was the standard of care – or if there even was a standard of care – at that time; it certainly is not considered the best treatment now for PTSD.
Though it didn’t help with my healing – that process began with EMDR years later – it did require me to recreate the scene of the first attack, and the various acts of harassment, humiliation, and physical harm that led up to sexual violation and never fully stopped until I left home for college.
When I told my sister what I was remembering, and asked her if she had any similar memories, she said, “It might have happened, but I didn’t see anything.”
The next day, when I told my mother, she said, “It was so long ago. You don’t want to do anything now do you?” Up until that moment, I had naively thought that my mother didn’t understand or didn’t have words for what happened to me when I was a child, or that maybe my mother didn’t understand what I was trying to tell her or that maybe my five-year-old sister was too young to even know.
But they knew, all along they knew. My mother and I didn’t talk about my experience until much later, when I was helping her write her memoir and we had become able to talk about hard things – things we had experienced differently when they happened. That was the first time I felt she really grasped the enormity of that sexual attack on my life ever since. She jumped up. “Mom, where are you going?” I asked.
“I have to go do something about it,” she said.
“Mom, I’ve already forgiven him, you, everyone. Please just stay here and sit with it.” And she sat back down. I wish I had asked her what was driving her to “do something” that morning. What she imagined she would do. At the time, I was content that she was just sitting with me and the long ago event that had shaped my identity as a girl, woman, and mother. It was as if the past sat between us, untouched and unvoiced. I missed my chance to explore what it meant to her when I was a young girl, and she was a wife and mother in her early thirties.
***
I asked my sister for his email address, and I wrote asking him not to come. He said he would not come, adding a PS: “When you wrote to me I wasn’t sure what to say. It was a long time ago. I was young. I WAS WRONG. I apologize.”
He was maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. I was eight. He lived in our neighborhood; his parents were my parents’ close friends and colleagues, much wealthier and more influential than we were. I had often thought over the years about how nasty his father was, how loud and cruel he became when his face got red from drinking. I knew my abuser was also abused; that’s a big part of what allowed me to forgive him.
After he apologized, I told a few people the story. Most did not get how big the absence of an acknowledgement had been in my sense of who I was. After the initial shock passed, I was surprised how light I felt. All my years of shame and hiding – and my mother’s and sister’s gaslighting me, as if there was something emotionally wrong with me – it all shifted and floated back into the past.
I wonder what my life would look like, who I might be, if there had been a process of apology and repair when I was a little girl? I also wonder if my mother was sexually or physically harmed as a child? Or did she see other women being harmed? The apology, the shift made it no longer just my problem, but a community disease, still rampant, that had happened to me and through me long ago.
There was one person I told my story to who had a similar experience. I will tell that story next week.
If you or someone you know have been harmed, you can access confidential help at National Alliance on Mental Illness.
What is something painful that happened to you in the past that you do not usually talk about? What do you imagine might happen if you forgave your perpetrator, yourself, and the community for enabling that violation to take place?