Unbroken--Used, beaten but never broken. My story of survival and hope. by Madeleine Black

Author:Madeleine Black [Madeleine Black]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786064967
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2017-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MUM’S SECRET

After about a year of therapy, I told my mum that I had gone back to it again, for what had happened to me when I was younger. Whenever we talked, she would ask how it was going; I would just say, ‘Oh, fine,’ without giving any real details. Once, during a visit to her home in London, everyone else had gone to bed and I was sitting alone with Mum in the lounge when she asked me again how the therapy was going. This time I told her some details and I got quite emotional in the process. She comforted me while I cried.

And then she told me something that caught me completely by surprise. She said that when she was eight years old she too had been raped several times, by a neighbour. Her mum used to encourage her to go round and play with his daughter (who was her friend), and somehow she knew he would take advantage of her if she did. She tried to tell her mum that she didn’t want to go over, but she’d get told off for being rude.

Eventually, she told her brother, Anthony, who then went on to tell my grandparents. The man was charged and it went to court. Not only was he found guilty, but they also discovered he had been raping his daughters, too. While he was in prison, my mum and her family moved away and they never spoke of it again.

Mum told me that for years she’d thought it was her fault she’d been raped, but in time and with age, she realised it wasn’t. She explained that after he’d been arrested, she had to be examined by the police, looking for evidence; she said it was almost as bad as being raped. When I’d told her, years before, what had happened to me and that I didn’t want to go to the police, she didn’t encourage me to do so because she didn’t want me to go through that as well.

All those years of thinking she hadn’t believed me instantly melted away with this new knowledge, and I suddenly understood why she’d behaved as she had. It made perfect sense. I had held a grudge against her for more than twenty years without having any clue of what she herself had gone through. And despite having five children with him, and being married for thirty-eight years, she never told my dad. He died without knowing this about his wife. She told me that if she had said why she didn’t want me to go to the police, then she would have had to tell her story too – and that she could not do.

I felt so sad for my mum, that she had kept this completely to herself all those years without ever having received any support. Though amazed by her resilience, I was heartbroken at the same time. I wondered just how many women must be in her position, too.

She felt guilty

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