Today is Thanksgiving... I intended to wake up early and help my mother cook, however, I dropped the ball this year.  I am so thankful for my mother.  I love her immensely, and I continually feel like such a failure as a daughter, friend, lover, everything. 

I wonder if I can claim the five second rule?

Every time I look at you it hurts me.  I can't stand the thought of the things you have done, and will do.  I don't know who you are anymore, and that scares and saddens me at the same time.  I used to know you.  Everything about you.  Now you're just a stranger to me, one that I have no desire to know anymore. 

You used to be so sweet and fun.  Your heart was wide open, and you weren't afraid of love.  Now you're cold and distant, and always cynical. 

Knowing what made you the way you are doesn't allow me to forgive you. Honestly, I hate you and most of the time I wish you would just die, and I really wish I didn't have to look at you in the mirror every day.

My abuser is dead, but is the abuse over?  Did it ever stop?

When I was very young, I was abused, once.  A minor incident that was never repeated, and now he is dead.  I can't say how I feel about this, as I long thought the incident to be forgotten.  In fact, it had faded in my mind until I wasn't sure it had actually happened.  Until this weekend.

I'm laying on my mother's bed, she and I were going through some old family photos, when she told me "******* ******* died this weekend."

At first, I froze.  How was I expected to respond?  Did she expect sadness?  Anger?  Satisfaction and a sense of justice?  Unable to put my feelings into words, because really I was numb, I just lifted a finger in the air and twirlled it around as if to say "whooptie-do".  She then said, "I thought you would enjoy knowing that."

Suddenly, I became confused.  Did I enjoy knowing that?  Was I pleased to hear that my abuser, a man who was also a father, husband, grandfather and friend to so many had died?  I didn't know, so I just kept silent.

Later, when we were in the car on an errand alone, she brought it up again.  Not the death, but the incident itself, and what the 'adult' reaction had been, the reactions I hadn't been privy to since I had been so young.

She asked me if I remembered it at all, and I told her yes, I remember.  Every detail. 

Even now, 18 years later, I still remember that day and what happened.  I remember twisting away and running up the stairs, screaming that I was going to tell my parents.  I remember that for some reason, fear, shame, I don't know, I didn't tell them.  Not for three years. 

She told me that at the time, when I had told my guidance counsellor, who in turn called my mother, who in turn came to school and got me, then took me home and told my father, that it had been all she could do to convince my father not to kill the man who had done this to me.  I never knew this.

I understand now that I am an adult why they tried to shield me from their reactions and response to what had been done to me, but as a child, all I knew was that I had been hurt, and I never saw them do anything about it.  I thought it had been swept under the rug. 

She told me that this man, not long after, was taken to court by his son who had walked into his house and caught him with his hand down the son's daughters pants.  His own granddaughter!  She told me that her and my father decided not to take him to court about me, because they figured that the courts would send him to jail for what he had done to his granddaughter, and they didn't want to put me through the trauma of court.

She told me that she had told the man's son this weekend that she was sorry, but she nor my father would be going to the funeral home, or the funeral.  She told him that they would do whatever they could for him or his family at home, but she couldn't go to the funeral home.

At that moment, I realized where the trauma of my abuse had come from.  I'm sure it isn't this way for everyone, but for me, the trauma came not because I was forced to touch a man at so young of an age, but because after I told, I thought the matter had been forgotten.  Ignored.  Glossed over for the sake of propriety.  I had not felt shielded, I felt... alone.

When my mother told me they wouldn't be attending the funeral, for the first time in my life, I felt that what I had gone through had been validated.  That someone had stood up for me.

I know they did when I was young, but I never knew it, it was hidden from me to 'protect' me, but in the end, I think that's what did the most damage.