Child sexual abuse: Grandpa


• "I am terrified by this dark thing
• That sleeps in me;
• All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity."

~ Sylvia Plath, Ariel

I am a child of the night, I told myself, growing up. The darkness, the moon in the sky.

At night, I was free. Away from the eyes of the family, sat in my study facing the moon.

I felt safe to be whoever I wanted to be, dancing in my room, enjoying the shadows respond as I move, keeping a watchful eye on the shadows crisscrossing underneath my bedroom door. When the light broke, that meant that my mother was at the door.

Sometimes, she caught me mid-pose, slightly breathless. I pretended I was doing something else.

She never approved of my dancing.

====

I had night terrors as a child.

One time, I dreamt about my grandfather, walking downstairs. My breath caught. I followed him at an uneasy distance.

He was walking on the pavement, the grass on the left side of him. I could see the sky darkening above the crown of trees.

He suddenly turned, evil incarnate. A smile.

And then he became a bat, and flapped like a giant albatross, slowly, deliberately away. Huge, black wings in the night.

I screamed. Nothing came out.

Throat silenced. Perforce.

=====

Yesterday, we talked, mother and daughter, a lazy morning conversation.

I don't know how the topic changed, but we started talking about her father. My mother reached out to touch my hand. I looked up.

"You know, Padmé, he was trying to seek your forgiveness at one point," my mother looked at me earnestly.

"He was?"

"Yes, I sat down, to try and remember everything that had happened. He tried to hold your hand and asked your forgiveness."

"How old was I?" I was incredulous. I had no such recollection.

"Maybe 13? But I don't remember. Yes, but you wrenched your hand away. And I looked at him and I asked him, what was going on. He said that he had done you wrong."

"Wow," I finally said.

I remember snatches of when he had tried to hold my hand in the past, to pull me towards him. I remember wringing my hand free and escaping as fast as I could, out of his room, away from him. I knew that he was trying to make amends but I never gave him the chance.

That's all over now. I have made peace with him, with what happened.

All this time, I don't remember how and when the abuse ended. To know that he had tried to ask for my forgiveness at the start of my teenage years, that was a revelation. If it was a timeline of "just" three years, that was comforting, in its own, twisted, way.

The blessing of knowing now. Thank you, Mama.

Read part 20 here.

Read part 19 here.

Read part 18 here.

Read part 17 here.

Read part 16 here.

Read part 15 here.

Read part 14 here.

Read part 13 here.

Read part 12 here.

Read part 11 here.

Read part ten here.

Read part nine here.

Read part eight here.

Read part seven here.

Read part six here.

Read part five here.

Read part four here.

Read part three here.

Read part two here.

Read part one here.