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The Unbearable Complexity Of Loving People Who Wound Us
Life would be so easy if I could just hate her
Trigger warning: child sexual abuse, trauma, invalidation, grief
One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that anger replaces attachment.
Ever since my father passed away rather suddenly in the middle of an ordinary Saturday two years ago, I have been wearing my emotions on my sleeves. Grief has a strange way of dissolving inhibitions that you spend your entire life constructing around yourself to survive. Maybe that is what finally pushed me towards having a conversation with my mother that I had spent decades rehearsing and abandoning. How do you tell someone a truth so devastating you already know would break you both in completely different ways?
One of the reasons why I chickened out every time was the hurt. Not mine, but hers. She grew up with close to nothing to her name, except a mother who loved her deeply and an exceptional intelligence which shone even in a low income school with a patchy roof. After marrying my father, she moved to a small town with dysfunctional in-laws. I grew up absorbing her pain of an absent part-time alcoholic husband (the love was still there, I was assured), a paranoid mother in law, a complacent father in law and her mother who asked her to adjust. It was a love marriage, you see, and you don’t just walk away from it with two young kids in tow.
Don’t get me wrong, my father loved us dearly. But, growing up with a surreal amount of yes-man-ship from his own mother and the fact that he footed the bills, made him immune to taking accountability for how he treated my mother after he drank. His words wounded her enough that the next morning I could physically see the lights dimmed behind her eyes, feel a shadow of deliberate silence over the breakfast table, and a collective acceptance of the adults that this was somehow okay.
So, in my little girl brain, by telling her the truth of what her older brother was doing to me behind closed doors every time she took me to her hometown, I was adding to her already long list of suffering through circumstances not of her own making. I felt guilty. At some point in my life, I tried to reason with myself why I needed to ‘move on’ and tried for many years to have it somatically removed out of me. I clearly failed because not only did I develop a serious autoimmune disease, but my mental health worsened as time went by.
For those of us who actively live with trauma like this for decades, it is a big deal to have the truth live outside of your body. Most days it lives inside of us as flashes of traumatic memories accompanied with nauseating physical reactions, hypervigilance, gut issues and anxiety. We do remain fully functional, participating in life with gumption and positivity while trying to suffocate the festering anger. But, the body’s loyalty to us far exceeds our loyalty to it, so it simply holds the grief till we deal with it. Eventually, it tires out and ends up making us sick.
Building up to it, I imagined how painful it would be for her to hear that I have been keeping it a secret for decades. I imagined the shock hitting her like lightning with absolute outrage on my behalf, a compassionate reprimand for not telling her sooner, maybe a bit of weeping, more shock, and shared grief for the duration of whatever lifetime we had left together on God’s green earth. I imagined her anger akin to a Devi descending from the heavens to bring justice to her little girl who was wronged.
The day finally arrived. I was about to get a huge burden off my chest, one I should have never carried. I felt wrecked in the best way. When the time came, I pushed through it — tears gushing down my cheeks, speaking through a panic attack, barely able to breathe through answering every question she had about how, where and when. Finally, I was ready for the truth to be held by someone else I loved and not a therapist that I paid to listen.
What I was not ready for was her looking me in the eye and telling me that she already knew.
I had braced myself to defend and convince her of my suffering, so I had no idea what to do when her belief was handed to me on a silver platter. I simply cried harder. I unclenched from places in my body I had no idea had hardened from years of carrying this pain alone. Finally, I was allowed to feel everything everywhere all at once.
But, then somewhere between wiping my tears and blowing my nose, I noticed she kept talking.
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Words kept pouring out of her mouth that my brain stopped processing at a certain point. She explained that it wasn’t just her. They all knew. They, meaning, his wife, his child, his brothers, their wives, their children (my cousins), a whole extended family and apparently, the families of the little girls he had abused before I even came into the picture. Yes, there were others.
Of course there were.
I remember sitting there feeling strangely calm after the euphoria melted away from my system as her words washed over me. I could hear her explain away his ‘mental condition’ and rationalize her way through decades of the family handling this by simply telling him to stop doing it. The words she did not say, however, my mind registered the loudest. Not a hint of an apology, no regret, zero accountability, and total lack of disgust around the normalcy of letting a predator loose around children during countless weddings, birthdays, festivals and ordinary life.
She simply sat justifying why little girls like me had paid the price for a family’s lack of accountability. It could have been worse, you see. Worse here meaning compared to the cases that get quoted over decades for their heinous sexual crimes. At least it was not that bad, I was told repeatedly. I had apparently made a whole thing out of something that happens to so many girls who suffer worse. Her words, not mine. But, since I was believed without a shadow of a doubt, I lay in bed all night recuperating from the evening.
It took hours before the horror of what I had heard, set in with a vice like grip.
The sun rose as I came back to my senses and I recoiled with utter humiliation. Not only by my mother’s invalidation or her family’s lack of accountability, but by an entire society that allowed a system like this to stay and continue to thrive for decades. I just sat there, feeling absurdly idiotic for all the times I stomped my own anger down for other people’s comfort. What was worse was that when I tried to get justification for my anger the next day, it was not met with a defense, but with pity. Like I was a defenseless little pup throwing a tantrum and not a lioness raging for justice.
She looked at me fully in the face like I had lost my mind. I stood there utterly blindsided and trying to reconcile if this was the same woman who had raised me to be this strong independent woman. The following days I was not met with awkward silences or avoidance, but rather gentle check ins on my mental health like I was some sort of ticking time bomb. Like somehow, I was the one who needed to be fixed.
The worst part of it was that her love never changed. Surprisingly, neither did mine.
In movies, these are the defining moments where lives are altered. Characters are left forever changed. Things long broken, get fixed or at least start to. For the lead, it is supposed to be this mind boggling cathartic experience after which she can finally move on. For me, not only did it feel like a deep violation of trust, but left a permanent stain on the foundation of the relationship I built with my mother. I fell face down in an abyss of loneliness, no longer willing to get up.
Lupus smelled my despair and rose to feast. Before I knew it, a flare so bad took over my body that I am still dealing with the consequences. This time depression accompanied it like a plus one. It scared me because I considered myself a pro at bouncing back with ten years of it under my belt. But this time it felt different, like the lingering hope I usually clung to during my recovery was somehow snatched away. I am still not entirely sure if I will ever be able to completely recover from this unexpected twist in my tale.
Late at night when I am alone with my thoughts, I still cling to the belief that my body broke because of what happened to me as a child. Maybe, just maybe, by fully resolving my trauma I could one day outlive Lupus. I had put all my eggs in one basket, banking on this chance to expel my grief from my body, and instead I ended up carrying even more. Wasn’t there a time when speaking the truth felt inherently liberating? Or is there a story I missed to read after the fact?
My mother still sounds like my mother when she laughs. She still asks me what I would like for breakfast when I stay over. She nags me about putting away the laundry and if I took my medication on time. She calls me in the middle of her work to ask me when I am coming home again. Home, like the meaning of it did not change for me overnight. I still call her at the first sign of a new symptom. I eat meals she cooks with gusto and feel relief when she assures me that I will be okay. She is still the person who read every book under the sun about Lupus and yelled at doctors till they took me seriously.
She is also the person who recently attended my cousin’s wedding and enjoyed a week of festivities with the family that hurt me. She still speaks with her brother that abused me without even a hint of fracture in their relationship. A few days later she casually said his name when showing me wedding pictures, ignoring the fact that this predator’s actions have put me in a permanent fight-or-flight mode. That honestly felt far worse than her mentioning him with cruel intent, because it meant she truly did not understand how deeply this affected me.
There seems to be no limit to the contradictions the human heart can hold. Life would be so easy if I could just hate her. Move on from the hurt like her validation never really mattered in the first place, that my truth is enough to keep me afloat. Instead, I discovered something much more difficult to live with: Trauma lives inside systems maintained by ordinary people whom we love, not only the strangers we were taught to watch out for.
But, that is still not the unbearable complexity of it all.
It is that love does not disappear after betrayal. It stubbornly refuses to.
