My Mom Didn’t Believe Me
But I’m not sorry I told her about my sexual assault.
Trigger Warning: this article contains descriptions of sexual assault that may not be suitable for all readers. Fearless community, please read with care.
When I was seven years old, I was molested. He was a family friend or, really, a family acquaintance. Our family was pretty counter-culture in those days, and a lot of near-strangers came and went. Smoking pot and dropping acid in our living room. Crashing on our floor, or in their campers, or wherever.
This guy slept in the bed of his pickup truck. He took me there with him.
I remember some moments of it so clearly, as though they happened yesterday. The feel of his fingers touching me. My thoughts about how I knew this was wrong, but it also felt good. My guilt and shame about that.
I’ve forgotten — or blocked out — huge portions. How did he get me out to his truck? Where were my parents?
Had I wanted to go?
I’m afraid maybe I did.
I was starved for attention and affection in those crazy, chaotic days. Anyone who was nice to me, who showed interest, won me over in a heartbeat.
But I was seven. I didn’t know better, I couldn’t have known better.
Even so, I carried the shame and guilt into adulthood.
When I finally told a therapist about it, in my twenties, she asked if I had told my mom.
“No, of course not,” I told her.
“Why not?”
“She’ll think I’m lying — or she’ll blame herself. I know I must have wanted it, asked for it.”
My therapist got so incensed at every single part of my answer. “You were seven years old — a child. Your mother, your parents, should have protected you. It was not your fault!”
All of that only made me more reluctant to tell Mom about it. After all, it was decades in the past. What would be gained?
And I still felt ashamed and guilty, despite how hard my therapist tried to convince me otherwise. What did she know? She wasn’t there.
When I began writing seriously, writing the story of my life, thinly and at times thickly disguised, I realized I needed to know more details. Things I couldn’t remember, because I’d been too young — or I’d blocked them out.
I asked my mom questions. She was reluctant to talk about that time; it hadn’t been good for her, on many levels. She was remarried now, happier and far more stable, and wanted to leave the past in the past.
But I felt like I couldn’t write honestly about myself without knowing more about how I had gotten here. And I knew I couldn’t get past the lingering feelings of shame and guilt if I was keeping such a big secret from my mom.
So I told her. I went home for a visit and asked her to come out to coffee with me. I wanted nobody else from the family around. I was so nervous. And with good reason.
“That didn’t happen,” she said, looking not angry but stricken. “I would have never let you go sleep with a man in his truck — any man, stranger or friend. That’s crazy.”
“It happened,” I said, wishing I could soften the blow.
But how do you soften such a thing? I was only molested a little bit? He only used his hands? It didn’t hurt? I even kind of liked it? None of this — not any little iota of this — was anything a mother wanted to hear.
She hadn’t been a bad mother. In fact, she had been a very good mother, during some really chaotic and difficult times for the whole family. We were poor, isolated, and vulnerable. She fed us and protected us (mostly). She kept us clean and got us to school. She did the best she could.
I tried to tell her this.
But she couldn’t let herself believe it, because of what it would mean to her. It was exactly what I’d expected, years earlier when I’d told that therapist.
I think she did come to believe me, eventually.
Or at least to allow the possibility to exist in her mind. We never spoke of it again, though I did write stories — some quite thinly veiled. She always loved my writing, even though she didn’t read many books and even less fiction. She was proud to have a daughter who was a writer.
Secrets are like boulders, blocking the stream of truth, of self-awareness. Even of empathy for others.
The more secrets I tell, even painful ones, the easier I find I am able to live.
The more secrets we all share with each other, the less room there is for shame, for guilt.
Mom is no longer here to ask about it, but I felt like things got more comfortable between us after I told her.
Not right away — in fact, quite the opposite — but in time. Or maybe it was just me? Knowing I had said the most-forbidden thing and that the world hadn’t ended. Knowing that I still loved her and she still loved me. That we could still be okay with each other.
I didn’t have anything to hide from her after I had told her my terrible, “shameful” secret.
I still don’t know what happened, other than what I remember — those little snapshot details. I still don’t know how an unhappy, distracted, stressed-out mom could have not been aware that her seven-year-old daughter got into a man’s sleeping bag with him in the back of his pickup truck.
But I don’t blame her — or myself.
Bad things happen. If we survive them, we can become stronger for having done so.
And if we don’t keep them secret, if we speak the truth about those bad things, we are proclaiming to the world our refusal to own the shame and the guilt that our culture wants to put on us.
The only person to blame for what happened to me is that long-ago man, whose name I’ve long since forgotten — if I ever knew it.
He knew what he was doing was wrong.
I’ll never know what happened to him. I can only hope he got the help he so clearly needed and became a better person.
I can only hope.
