Taking a Deep Breath....

Motherhood. The ultimate bond, the ultimate trust. And when that trust is betrayed, when a mother doesn't keep her child from danger, doesn't protect her child from harm, be it physical or emotional, where is a child to turn to?

Sibling rivalry and jealousy. When does it cross the funny line? When does it stop being silly, childish pranks and become something altogether more sinister?

Before my father passed away, I used to go home to visit him and my mother. The final year and a half was very tough, seeing him faltering despite his incredible courage. Witnessing his crippling pain. Knowing that I would lose him - my rock, my anchor - one day soon. But still, even with that tragedy looming, the visits were filled with love and laughter between us.

Now I go there to the house on the sea, which he chose, the place he loved, and spend time with my mother. And I'm uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because every visit, she speaks of my brother to me, and I cannot speak of him in return. You see, I loathe him. Yes, I can honestly sit here and type those words. I loathe my brother. I cannot forgive him for what he did to me as a child. I have been told that I need to forgive him because I won't move on until I do. But I will never forgive him.

And on these visits I have to sit and hear how wonderful my mother thinks he is. What a good child he was. And a good man he is. I bite my tongue and bile builds up inside me. There are times I have to just walk away and regain my composure. My sister dislikes him, for different reasons. A recent dislike and distrust of his motives for getting closer to my mother. The reason being, our inheritance. She may well be right but I will do everything in my power to make sure that doesn't happen.

My mother took me aside on this last visit and told me that she feels upset that my brother and sister aren't on speaking terms. That for her this is something she wants to see change before she leaves us. As though it's my responsibility to make it happen. I felt sick to my stomach when she said 'I don't even want to know what the problem is between them, I just want it fixed.' My reply to her was that perhaps this is an integral part of the problem, her refusal to show any kind of interest as to what is fuelling their mutual dislike and why my sister feels this way (my sister did email him over a year ago to try to build a bridge but he never replied to her). My mother was genuinely surprised that I would say that to her. And I took the opportunity to add: 'I'm not close to him either and don't want to be.' I guess I was hoping she might ask me why, especially as I'd just intimated she should ask what the problem is between my sister and him. But she didn't.

I was so damn close to telling her. To destroying her loving son's image in her eyes. To opening a gaping wound in our family that could never be healed. But I didn't. I couldn't. I couldn't tell her all those years ago and I still can't tell her. That he and his older friend abused me for years. That she sent me out with them every day. To 'play'. From the time I was eight years old. That the tantrums she laughs about to this day were probably something to do with the anguish and fear I lived with every day of my life for years. That I was afraid to fall asleep at night because he would come into my room and pull my nightdress up and touch me. That years after he stopped, I could still turn ice cold from remembering how his fingers felt on my skin.

That his friend would make me sit on his lap in the cinema and touch me. That I had my first orgasm sitting there at the age of eight or nine, watching the Disney movie 'The Sword in the Stone'. That I didn't know what had happened to my body that day and my first boyfriend ended up with a catatonic mess on his hands when he touched me in the same places so many years later. That I was sexually shut-down well into my 30s. That I didn't orgasm again until my mid 30s and that is when I realised what had happened to me in the dark cinema that day. That I had tried to destroy the body they had had such an unnatural interest in, first by overeating, then through anorexia and finally with a passage into the depths of bulimia.

And as if it wasn't enough to steal my childhood, he also tried to kill me three times. That's harsh, I know, but it's true. My mother knows about two of them. And laughs about them as though it was some silly childhood prank. Once he helped me up onto the railing of the balcony of a ninth-floor apartment when I was only four. When my mother recounts the tale, she treats it as a joke and her punchline is: 'I don't even remember running to pull her off the railing but I suppose I must have because she's here today.'

The second time, using a bow and arrow set my dad had given him (not a toy, my dad was at sea in those days and brought home a tribal artifact, not thinking ahead enough to remove the arrowheads before giving it to him to play with), he sat on my chest, loaded it and stuck an arrow in my mouth, then shot it into my throat. For some reason my mother finds it amusing that I had to be rushed to the emergency room of the nearest hospital as my throat swelled up around the lodged arrow and I couldn't breathe. Funny stuff isn't it!

The third time she never found out about because my brother threatened me if I told her. And I knew his threats weren't empty. This is why. A normal day, he was told to take me out to play, to go and have a swim in the pool in the complex. I was under his care because I hadn't learned to swim yet, I would have been about 10. I was given my inflatable ring. I got into the pool with it on, in the shallow end and my brother, who could swim, towed me to the deep end, put his hands on either side of me, on the ring, and pushed it down under the surface until it was free of my legs. My buoyancy aid removed, I slid under the surface. I still remember tumbling over and over as I sank into eight feet of water. To this day I believe I had a guardian angel looking after me because somehow my fingertips found the bottom rung of the ladder and I managed to grab hold and pull myself up. He was standing there on the side of the pool laughing, holding my ring.

From that moment I feared being near him. That's when the tantrums started, my refusal to go out, my dark moods, all the tears. All of which made me a 'bitch' in my mother's eyes. To this day she'll tell people what an absolute bitch I was as a baby and a child. Well, these are the things I remember, perhaps there are some I still don't want to, still can't. I honestly don't know. Maybe I just don't want to know.

My mother may wish to see her children a happy little trio before she goes. But she won't. And she is partly responsible for it. As much as we are, anyway. I may be wrong in not telling her some, or all, of this. But to me it's the only compassionate thing I can do. To protect her. Even though she failed miserably to protect me as a child. And I cannot sacrifice myself again. I cannot risk finding out she knew and did nothing. Or that she'll disbelieve me. Or that she'll like me even less if she thinks that because of me, my brother becomes less than he is, in her eyes.

How could she not know what was happening? Or did she know and choose not to see? My father wasn't home all those years, he would be away for almost a year and then back with us for only short periods of time. That was the way it was for men at sea in those days. I know he'd have believed me, but he would also probably have wanted to kill my brother if he'd known.

Breathing out again....


Update 27 February:

Thank you all so much for your words, your support, your understanding. I'm overcome by the outpouring to what was such a difficult post for me to write, one that I very almost didn't put here. After my second quod-me-nutrit-me-destruit post way back in August, Sunny and I exchanged some comments that bear repeating here, to show that these experiences don't need to leave a person in a state of hopelessness :

Sunny: Abuse is an insideous evil in our world...but those of us who survive it AND the punishment we mete out upon ourselves for being abused....we are stronger, we have steel backbones, and we teach...sometimes in small ways...sometimes in large...YOU my dear are teaching :)

Me: We do end up with backbones of steel, without a doubt. I have grown up to be not the victim. He is more the victim than I ever will be. He is the one haunted and unable to form any kind of relationship with me. He is the one who remained silent at our father's funeral, unable to even speak of an exceptional man, for I believe he knows people would have looked at him and through him. He does not wear his guilt, it wears him, putting him in a constant state of discomfort.The perpetrator becomes the victim in the end. I instead grew up and grew strong.