Chapter 1: Being Abused – Finally Understanding

You see, I never saw it as abuse. I’ve read and heard about how children are sexually abused and what happened to me was a million miles away from that. The truth of the matter is, I enjoyed what happened. I adored my older brother – and did for the next 50 years.

The first time he touched me he said, “Now you must never let a boy do this to you ever.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s wrong.”

He would stroke my pubis. I didn’t even have any pubic hair. It gave me delicious feelings – I wanted more. I used to sit and read with my feet up on the chair he was sitting on so he could easily reach under my skirt.

He wanted me to hold him but I didn’t like the feel of his rubbery pipe.

Even so, I did what he wanted. My new baby brother had his cot in my small bedroom and my brother used to offer to settle the baby down and he would sit on my bed looking into the cot so I could reach him when he unzipped his trousers. Lying in the gloom, a brown paper bag covering my light and giving an eerie red glow to the room, I listened to the baby noises coming from the cot. I held his ‘thing’ and moved it like he said, all the while waiting for my turn, so I could get the feelings again. It never went beyond that. He never put his finger inside me. I don’t think I even knew there was an ‘inside’. He kissed me once but I didn’t like it. I don’t know how long it went on for – a few weeks? a few months? – I was 10 years old.

It stopped when, one day, he followed me into the bathroom and masturbated. I could smell it. I turned and saw the milky stuff running through his fingers. Ughh! It was disgusting.

“Stop,” I said. “Just stop.”

Later on, in the dark, he spoke to me from the other twin bed (I have no idea what I was doing in his room when I had my own). His voice hung in the darkness. “You know it’s a mortal sin, don’t you? What we have been doing.”

“What do you mean?” I whispered.

“It means that if you die before you go to confession you will go to Hell for all eternity.”

Sweet Jesus,I thought, don’t let me die then. I resolved to stay awake all night, terrified that if I fell asleep, I might die.

“But what shall I say in confession?”

He said, “You say, ‘I have been impure to a boy by touch’.”

Funny sentence. How would I ever remember that? Say it over and over in your head. Stay awake as much as you can for the next three days until you can get to confession on Saturday.

I didn’t much like confession – a small musty box, dark wooden panels. Kneeling on a hard wooden kneeler. A covered window – black mesh on my side, a black curtain on the priest’s side. Rustling of clothes. Noisy breathing. Raspy voice.

Begin. Begin.

In a rush, “Bless me father for I have sinned, it is four weeks since my last confession I have missed my morning and night prayers five times – I have been disobedient to my mummy and daddy three times, I have been fighting and quarrelling with my brothers four times…” then… deep breath… “I have been impure to a boy by touch.”

There, I said it, now give me three Hail Marys for my penance and let me get out of here.

There was a pause.

“How many times has that happened?”

I froze. Oh my God. I don’t know, loads and loads of times. Please don’t ask me anything, just let me go. “A lot of times,” a tiny voice in the subdued orangey lighting of the confessional box. If he asked me anything more, I clearly blanked it out.

What I do remember is when he said, “You must promise me that you will never see this boy again.”

Oh no! Don’t say that! What am I to do now? I mumbled something. I felt desperate. I hated my brother for not preparing me for the questions, nor for not giving me the answers. Interestingly, I didn’t hate him for what he had done.

Somehow, I got out of there with a cleansed soul – I’d escaped Hell.

For many years this episode lay in the recesses of my mind. If ever it surfaced, I acknowledged it, but it didn’t disturb me unduly. It never presented as something I might need therapy for. I never spoke about it for 50 years. Then I wrote about it during a week-long writing course. When I read my piece out, the group said how glad they were that I didn’t hate my brother. Why weren’t they angry on my behalf? Were they saying I was right to not be angry about it?

I now have 62 years of life since it happened. What sense is there to be made of it now?

I don’t think I was damaged as a little girl. The incident with my brother hadn’t traumatised me. If anything had traumatised me, it was my experience in the confessional. I don’t think it affected my confidence or feelings of self-worth, neither of which I have ever doubted. But it impacted me as regards my relationships with men. It is only recently that I have been wondering if how I relate to men is a consequence of what happened so many years ago.

Boundaries were certainly violated. And yes, setting boundaries is an issue for me as subsequent events in my life would show. The line between right and wrong – regarding my relationships with men – became blurred. I became accepting of immoral and amoral behaviour from my husband and from myself. My brother had told me that what we did was wrong yet I adored him. Why was I not angry with him? Maybe I was but I hid my anger under my feelings for him and my own guilt. I would spend a lot of my life hiding anger. I could be angry on the behalf of others and angry about issues but when it came to being angry with someone I had a personal relationship with, I shied away from it. I was always afraid it would end in my being rejected.

I desperately didn’t want my brother to reject me and I think I have feared male rejection ever since.

The episode also awakened sexual feelings in me way too soon. But were it not for my fear of pregnancy, on the one hand, and the fear of hellfire on the other, I would probably have been promiscuous by the time I was 13. I saw sex as separate from love. I could enjoy sex much the same as I could enjoy a good meal without having feelings for the chef. As an adult I learned to enjoy sex without needing to feel love. The experience of sex as the expression of a deep and intimate love has escaped me. I can only fantasise about what that is like.

I also realise I see men very much as sexual beings. I have no male friends at all. The only male friend I had was my husband, and he didn’t turn out to be much of a friend at all in the end.

I wonder now if my lack of male friends is because I associate men with sex rather than friendship.

And I don’t trust men. Those early mixed messages of ‘don’t let boys do this but let me do it’ have maybe led me to distrust any expression of love displayed by a man. I knew I wouldn’t believe them. So, I always seemed to choose men who couldn’t, or weren’t, willing to open their hearts to me. But now, maybe, I think that it was me feeling too scared of rejection to really open my heart to them. I was a little bit in love with my brother when I was 10 years old and I have never been in love with a man since.

My brother and I have never talked about what happened. Only once, the night before he got married, when I was about 19, did he start to mumble something about it. He had been on his stag night (in those ridiculous days when stag nights were the night before the wedding and hen nights hadn’t even been invented) and I was still up when he arrived home. He mumbled something in his drunken state and I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. He said something like, “That thing that happened when we were kids.”

I suddenly realised what he was referring to. I stopped the conversation immediately. “Stop that. It’s done with.” I had said the same thing when I was 10 years old, in fact. I felt the mortification and the embarrassment I had felt then. We never mentioned it again. Seven years ago, my brother cut off communication with me. It was just after he had had life-threatening major heart surgery. Maybe he had been evaluating his life and couldn’t bear to go back to that dingy bedroom when he was 14 and I was 10 and it was easier to cut me out of his life altogether? Or maybe it had nothing to do with that at all. In the light of no information, we make up stories.

Just recently, I was wondering about whether there might have been impacts on me that I didn’t realise. I mentioned it to my cranio-sacral therapist, Karen, during a treatment. She said to me, “Why don’t you visualise that little girl you were when you were 10 and talk to her and ask her if she has anything to say to you.”

I tried. Sure enough, I saw her. She was sitting on a stool. I spoke to her. She turned her back on me and wouldn’t look at me. She said she didn’t trust me. I was shocked. I told Karen and she said, “Well, just keep talking to her at the end of your meditations and see what happens.”

So, every day, for 10 minutes, I would visualise her and speak to her. “Hello, little girl. I’m here. I want you to know you can trust me now. I’m just going to sit here with you for a while. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be here for you.”

As the days went on, I added, “I know it was really hard for you. Your mum and dad didn’t really notice you and the attention you got from your oldest brother was inappropriate and you were left to deal with it all on your own. Well, I’m here now and you won’t be on your own anymore. You learned to look after yourself and your strength stayed in me and I have had a good life and done many things. Thank you.”

Bit by bit, she started to look at me and eventually, she smiled. She allowed me to hold her hand. Finally, I asked her to stand, and we stood together, holding hands. I said, “It’s taken me a long time to acknowledge you, little girl, and because I ignored you I made a lot of foolish decisions as an adult. I have wanted to hide you away and appear strong rather than vulnerable. I became so independent I thought I didn’t need to let anyone in. But now you and I are going to stand together and face the world. You are so brave, little girl, and you don’t need to be brave on your own any longer. We will be brave together. And I will never ignore you again.”

She looked up at me and smiled. Then I said, “Shall we dance now?”

I put my online half-hour dance programme on the TV and we danced around the lounge and laughed together.

Photo

Me at about 10 years old.

Questions For Reflection

Is there one stand out incident from your childhood that has impacted you as an adult? How have you overcome any negative impacts?

A Blessing While You Reflect

“May my eyes never lose sight

Of why I have come here

That I never be claimed

By the falsity of fear

Or eat the bread of bitterness”

From John O’Donohue: Benedictus