I asked, “Mom, did he hurt you real bad?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “It was so long ago. It really doesn’t matter anymore.”
What kind of childhood did she have?
I don’t know exactly how the conversation turned to child abuse.
We were talking about her boyfriend, Sam, and the fact that he had been sleepwalking of late. She said he had seen a picture of an eighteen-month-old baby that had been badly beaten by its father and that he’d gotten very upset. He’d said he could not understand how a father could beat his own child. Then the sleepwalking started.
Every day, she said, he talked about the little girl he and his wife had adopted when they were just a young couple. But something had gone wrong concerning the child, who was five years old. Sam always talked about his wife’s jealousy, and said the little girl had been taken away from him, but he never quite made it clear how that happened.
I told Mom that he might be sleepwalking because he wants to see the little girl again. Twice she has found him out in the hall. Since he sleeps in the buff, she gets very upset and is afraid some of the neighbours might see him and call the police. Once, she caught up with him at the elevators. She gets angry at him and treats him as if he were not asleep. I tried to explain to her that even if his eyes are open, he is actually sleeping.
I told my mom that something in the story of the little boy who was beaten had awakened pain in Sam. Something that troubled him very much. We talked about family secrets and how nothing was ever revealed when things went very wrong in a family; that nothing was ever said; that there might be such a secret in Sam’s life, that maybe there was a very sad story there. The sleepwalking was a sign that Sam was very troubled.
She went on to say that you did not tell these things to other people. She would never tell anyone about her father cheating on her mother. She would never tell anyone about seeing her grandmother with her father in the kitchen. I said as gently as I could that maybe if she had talked to her grandmother, she might have found out that she was not consenting at all but had been coerced. But she shrugged it off. It was so long ago.
If we had had this conversation even a year ago, I would have been upset at her way of shrugging off the incident as something of no
consequence, but now I know better. I can relate. I can understand how it is so much easier to believe that her grandmother would agree to oral sex at eighty-seven years of age, rather than believe that her father was forcing her. Isn’t it what I have been doing, too? I would rather believe that I invented the story of Micha than believe that my grandfather beat me, raped me and held me captive for three or four days, when I was only three-and-a-half years of age. It is called cog-nitive dissonance, I think.
I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I can never tell her about Micha, and I will never know the truth from her. She doesn’t know the truth herself.
A long time ago, when she’d been very drunk, she told me she had come home one day to find her father raping her grandmother. She was quite upset as she recalled the event, but when she spoke yesterday, she was sober and very matter-of-fact.
All these years, the stories she would tell when she was drunk, I never asked her once to tell me her own story. Now it is too late.
Nov. 17, 2000 (NSA Journal after adjustment) Today I felt…Instead of feeling like I wanted to jump out of my skin, it felt like I was trying to expand. And to do so, it seemed to me that I had to be like a snake and shed my envelope. That’s why I moved so much. Up, down, sideways, anyway possible to make room somehow.
Nov. 18, 2000 (Dream)