“Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.”

~ Catherine M. Wallace

Click here to read Part I.

One of my earliest memories is my mother locking herself, my sister and me in the bathroom of our tiny apartment. She was talking soothingly and sweetly to us as our father, on the other side of the door, was drunk and in a rage. He was slamming cabinets and throwing things around, looking for more alcohol.

And I worshipped him.

My mother was raised in an upper class family, a world of  debutante balls and cotillions. One night, her date left her at a party where she didn’t know anyone—a tall handsome man found her crying in the corner and offered to take her home. He was a Vietnam War Vet, a Marine who had earned two Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star for Bravery.
And she fell in love with him. Hard.

But he was not from the same circles as my mother’s family and therefore deemed not good enough by her parents.

As my grandmother used to say about him, “Even a dog has a pedigree.”

They never liked him and often made him feel less-than. To their great dismay, she got pregnant and married him. She had disgraced the family’s good name. They never let her forget it either.

So it was with great shame that after five years, she divorced my father and went crawling submissively back to her family. I wonder if she would have left him earlier if she’d had their support?

The three of us moved in with our grandmother (my grandfather had a heart attack and died four months before I was born, which was something else my mother was blamed for).

My father pretty much dropped out of the picture; I was devastated. Everything took its toll and my mother became a shell of the woman she once was, always lost in thought and just going through the motions when it came to parenting my sister and me.

Consequently, I grew insecure and lost self-esteem which made me an easy target for “him.”

I remember at night he’d come into the bedroom after we fell asleep. I never made eye contact with him when he did things to me—I’d just look over at my sleeping three-year-old sister, hoping so hard that she’d wake up because maybe he’d stop, but then at the same time wishing she wouldn’t, because I wanted him to leave her alone.

Still other times, he’d cajole his younger brothers into doing things to me.

I’d like to believe that my mother wasn’t aware of the sexual abuse, because I just can’t fathom not taking action if it were happening to my precious daughter. But my sister and I both recall a doctor’s appointment, where at least one of us was examined vaginally and our mother was crying while the doctor spoke to her.

I guess I’ll never know because my mother, presumably unable to cope with an overwhelming sense of inadequacy, committed suicide a week after my eighth birthday. The immediate blessing that resulted from her death was that the abuse stopped, because we never saw that family again.