Not Your Toy, Not Your Victim.

Once I began to remember moments of abuse at the hands of my father, I thought I couldn’t be surprised anymore.

I had already done the devastating work of acknowledging that my childhood was unsafe. It took months for me to truly understand what it meant that I had been raped.

At this point, I thought nothing else would be able to tilt my world on its axis that much again.

Unfortunately, the universe has a sense of humor, because I had to go through that same process again these last few weeks. I had just started feeling as though I understood my childhood and the different dynamics that existed in my family…

To my complete devastation, I’m learning that my mother also sexually abused me.

My first reaction was that I had to be lying, there was no way this could be the truth. It felt so different from the mother I knew to think that she would ever hurt me… But the red flags have become too obvious to ignore.

This is not the first time I have felt that Mom was involved in my abuse, but the third. I first started suspecting it back when I learned about Dad’s abuse, there’s a letter to Mom in my journal where I am desperately trying to understand how she was involved.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I had more gaps in my memories around my time with mom than I did with Dad.

She and I were clearly enmeshed, the whole family was, but Mom always treated me differently.

Where my siblings would get in trouble, I push back against Mom and she would listen.

I was handled with kid gloves from the time I was small, and even my sister admitted that it felt like the way I was treated by both parents was different.

Sure, they didn’t protect me from my Aunt’s murder, I knew what it meant to be strangled by the age of 5, but anything that had consequences was dumbed down.

Another red flag was a friend of my Mom, a woman I can only remember as the Barbie Lady.

Apparently, when I was small, likely only three or four, my mom would bring me over to this woman’s house and we would play with Barbies.

Barbie Lady had no children, I would just play with her.

A few years later when I met this woman again, I had no memory of her at all. Even at the time, I thought it was weird to forget a whole person, but I knew better than to mention this lack of memory, so I pretended to know her.

There are other flags that came up as my therapist and I were discussing my fears, most of which were benign, thankfully. 

These were mostly things that would be completely normal regularly but that would look much worse under the light of potential sexual abuse.

When Dad was gone for work or other events, Mom would have me sleep in the bed with her, and Dad would do the same thing when Mom was gone. Totally normal, right?

Not when I know how much abuse was happening in the house.

One of the worrying signs that caught my therapist off guard was that my Mom would talk to me about her intimate encounters.

Sex was a taboo topic in our house, but there would be offhanded comments that Mom would make when I was small.

There would be things like her encounters with the two men she cheated on Dad with, or the way dad was treating her differently after Lynn’s death. 

As I got older, these comments stopped, which apparently is far more worrisome than if my mom simply didn’t have those boundaries across the board. The fact that she stopped shows that she understood, at some level, that talking about sex with a small child was inappropriate.

If that doesn’t sound like enough to label her as a predator, that’s understandable. Why else do you think I brushed this fear off for a year?

The other flags are subtle and they only stand out when looked at together.

One of the coping mechanisms I’ve had for years, and has been especially prevalent in the last year, has been to read research papers on the topic I was concerned about.

Something about looking at hard data  is comforting in this situation.

The paper I found this time is “Sex Offender Management Assessment and Planning Initiative” It is a report put out by the government and it covers types of sexual offenders, possible management strategies, risk assessments, etc.

I highly recommend looking over the report, and I’ll be sure to link it at the end of the post.

The section I was most intrigued by was Chapter 3: “Sex Offender Typologies.” This went into different types of offenders and what characteristics each type might have.

Now, the paper also makes it clear that trying to bring too much specificity to a profile is nearly impossible because of the variety of offenders. So obviously, any one trait doesn’t mean a person is an offender.

But as I read about the type of offender I believe mom would be, things just made sense.

• Emotional Regulation Deficits – I was her therapy child the entire time I lived at home, and the moment you challenge anything she believe, she takes it as personal affront.
• Offense Supportive Beliefs and Empathy Deficits – Mom refused to believe my sister and I when we brought our fears about Dad to her. It took me telling mom I had a memory of rape for her to even consider believing us. There are so many more examples of this that I won’t go into now.
• Social Isolation, feelings of inadequacy or loneliness, or being passive in relationships – You don’t know my mother, but this does describe her, especially when I was young and she didn’t have a social circle. Dad was controlling and she was an introvert.

I don’t think I can truly explain the thought process that led me to accepting the fact that my mom abused me. Until I have memories come forward, this is purely my gut telling me that this is the truth and a whole bunch of terrifying flags.

Part of the terror comes from the fact that Mom isn’t dead.

She is alive and surrounds herself with children. She is a court appointed advocate  for children going through the legal system. She is a grandmother who adores her grandkids and babysits as often as possible.

This is my time to breathe and allow memories to come forward before I figure out what to do with this horrible knowledge.

I am not someone who would see the potential signs of abuse and walk away, especially if it is coming from my mother.

As a survivor, I have heard that I don’t owe anyone a confession, I don’t need to come forward in a certain timeline, so I don’t know when I will move, but know that I will move forward.

And perhaps, the way I will end this persistent cycle of abuse is by shutting down the mother who has hurt me, knowingly or not.