I was having a wee cuppa with a lovely friend of mine last week when another of her friends joined us and the conversation turned eventually to the miseries of child sexual abuse. The other two spoke of uncles and male friends of the family who you sensed even as a wee one were somehow not to be trusted; of creepy men in huts in the park, on building sites and other land who would entice kids in for a heat at the fire and a glimpse of his cock; and why no-one ever thought of hiring friendly older women to this kind of work (although I do accept that women are abusers too). My friend’s pal recommended a book for me to read - “Where There Is Evil” by Sandra Brown is the story of a woman and her father’s crimes against another child, which I have just started reading.
I am ashamed to say that during this conversation, I just sat nodding like an idiot, making sympathetic and supportive noises. You see, I was never abused in that despicable way as a child. I know my mother was assaulted by one of my granny’s brothers but was still horrified when she asked me when I was in my twenties if my dad had ever made any advances to me. My dad was nothing but loving and kind to me and we were very close. So when am I in company and the subject of these horrific crimes and atrocities that are perpetrated against innocent bairns, I feel like I used to feel like I did back in the late 1980s when I went to a couple of women’s consciousness raising group meetings and felt so guilty that I was in a relationship with a good man who has never lifted a hand to me that I left and never returned. Now don’t get me wrong – I am so very grateful that I was never a victim of either child sexual abuse or domestic violence - but I feel lost in these conversations and want to apologise to my friend and her pal for not saying that at the time.
That’s not to say I wasn’t abused. I was hammered to within an inch of my life for the mildest infraction and witnessed the same being done to my younger siblings, holding them afterwards as they sobbed; time and again I wrestled and forced myself between my parents as they physically and verbally fought because my siblings were howling in fear in the corner and begging me to make them stop; I dragged my father on the one time he was pushed to his limit by my goading mother, downstairs and threw him out of the house, his usually slicked down black hair flying, his mouth bleeding and eyes wild reminiscent of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”, with me standing shaking in fear after he was gone (I am not apologising for or trying to downplay his response but it was almost always her attacking and beating on him) . I was punched, kicked and challenged to fights by a mother who saw me not as a daughter but as a rival who was turning out to be tall and fat with my father’s face and not hers – the last time she did this to me I admit with no pride and the deepest pits of shame that something snapped in me, I saw “the red mist” and the next thing I recall was my father pleading with me to loosen my hands from around her throat and let her breathe. My mother also verbally ridiculed me and even now, as a middle-aged woman, in a corner of my mind I am massively fat and thus have a poor body image, although I hide it well. She criticised me at 14 when I wasn’t interested in boys and accused me of being a lesbian (strangely as she was bisexual herself) then called me slut and whore at aged 17 when I made up for lost time with a slew of boyfriends. At age 15 when she called a family meeting to announce that she and my dad were separating and told us we kids “had to decide which one of you want to live with”, she had the temerity it seemed to me to be shocked when I chose my dad. She openly had an affair when they reconciled and memorably once stepped over him and walked out as he lay on the floor curled in agony with an angina attack and pleading with her not to go, leaving me to later call an ambulance and console the other two kids when he had another.
I know now that she had bi-polar disorder – in her highs she was the most generous and magnanimous giver of gifts and in her lows she would demand money from me or steal and pawn my things.
As an adult, I took her into my home when she turned up at my door at 3am in the morning after her lover had beaten her up and tossed her out; I picked her up from the police station after she set fire to her flat and then took her to a psychiatric hospital and signed her over to them for electric convulsive therapy; I listened to her tell me that she had hoped that my partner then of 10 years (now 25 years) and father to her grandchild was a phase I was going through. The last straw was when she came to my house to visit and proceeded to tell my 4 year old daughter that the fairy cakes she had baked for Granny “tasted horrible” and that the pictures my wee lass (at that age when they are fascinated in their growing sense of self that they were once a baby) showed her were “of an ugly baby”. Seeing the cycle moving to start again, I told my mother to never come back, ceased all contact with her and never saw her again. She died 3 years later alone in her bed, having also pushed her other children away.
But I feel that it is time now though to try to make peace with my mother and so via this blog one of the things I will be doing and asking you to read if you care are outlines and pieces of writing in the hope that eventually I will have a script or maybe even a book that tells her story. Mammy, our own Georgie Girl, this will be for you with love x
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