Child sexual abuse: The man in black

I still remember the first time I told my mother that I had been abused sexually as a child. I had prepared months for it.

It was December 2009. I was home on a break from Europe. I had told her that I had something important to speak to her about. I think she must have thought that it would be a short conversation - she stood at the door, not coming in. I remember feeling somewhat cross when I saw that; through my childhood, she was perpetually rushing out of the room I happened to be in. I would begin to say something and then would have to hurry through my speech so that I could catch her response before she left the room. I still maintain that is why I continue to speak fast even today.

Mama's face looked grim. No one likes being told that there's something that needed to be talked about. But she was fully unprepared for what I said next.

She walked into my room and sat down heavily on the bed.

She looked bewildered. "Why didn't you tell me? All these years, and you never told me!"

I started to explain about how at that point in my life, I had learnt not to trust anyone, especially adults. I was ten.

"And I had taught you, remember, about what safe touch was, remember? Why didn't you tell me?" Her face was crumpled.

I don't think we spoke about the details then. I just assured her that I was not raped although there was one incident, I told her, in which he had spread my legs on his bed, and I remember feeling desperate, even though I had no idea what was happening, that something was not right, and that this was certainly not to be done. "Please," I had begged him then. "Please don't do this." He stopped.

Our subsequent conversations then - by necessity they had to be conducted over the phone since I had returned to Europe - were somewhat strained. Her voice was flat, hurt. The usual refrain: "Why didn't you tell me?" Usually spoken in English to maintain some emotional distance or maybe in my mother's eyes, the emotional import of her words would reach me better in English, rather than in my mother tongue, I don't know.

It was painful dealing with her pain, her sense of betrayal by her blood relation - she had worshipped him so - whilst dealing with mine.

I began telling her the details - carefully - when I sensed that she wasn't going to fall into pieces.

"Mama, remember when you used to come to my room and say how much you missed him after he had passed away? It was all I could do, not to start yelling in anger, at what he had done."

Another time:

"I once dreamt, Mama, walking downstairs in the lobby of our apartment block, on a quiet evening, the sun having just gone out, and seeing a man in black in the shadows ahead of me. He had wings and horns, like the devil himself. He turned round ever so slightly to look at me and then took off, huge bat wings in the sky.

It was him, Mama."

Yet another time:

"You used to think that my going to England changed me. I was the happiest I had ever been there, Mama! Friends who were like me, nerds like me, growing up alone and liking books. I felt like I belonged there. I started painting again, Mama. Do you not see?"

Her voice was always flat, tired.

"I have stopped praying for him. Oh, if only I had known."

"No, Mama," I would say as firmly as I could. This was the man on whose lap she used to sit on; she had hung on to his every word. "Please continue to pray for him. I have forgiven him. I have moved on. You must try to do the same."

"Oh, what he did to you! He tried telling me, on his deathbed, he tried. I just didn't understand then what he was trying to say."

Sometimes when she felt that she could not get through to me, she would say in my mother tongue: "When you have a child, you'll understand my pain."

I do love her so. I understand her pain.

But I do so wish that she would understand mine.