For years I have wondered about my father and how it would have felt to have a relationship with him. I questioned if that could have made a difference in the many struggles I had to go through, my lack of trust in people or simply change the way I saw myself for so many years.
The mental torture from all these negative feelings of unworthiness unlocked within me a rebelliousness fiending to be filled by love and accepted at any cost, especially in a family environment where no matter what I did, there just wasn’t enough space to accommodate my presence.
In my teen years, I felt lost almost despondent with everything about who I was and the young woman I was becoming. At home I was forever reminded how I would never amount to anything than a misbegotten…
I felt like no matter what I did or said, it was all used to defeat the very purpose of why I existed. Often with the name callings, the beatings, demeaning words and my own hateful thoughts of myself came that rebellious side of me. A side that hated my mother and called her every hurtful word that my mind could find receipt for to make her feel my pain… but did she?
My entire childhood, adolescence and part of my adulthood, I was conditioned to believe that my being here was from a forbidden love affair. Two married people who couldn’t resist the temptation of what their bodies yearned and simply gave in to that temptation. I think in a way this fictitious story that I made up to convinced myself that somehow, I was here because of LOVE between two people, gave me a purpose and confirmed for me, in a strange way my own existence… I was supposed to be here despite their wrong and that I was just a circumstance of a moment of passion and that was just okay with me!
Sadly, my world was turned upside down, when I was told something that really made me doubt and question everything about who I really was and now MAYBE am. I’ve struggled every day since and there are days when I am convinced that all this might be a lie but then I am once again reminded… sigh!
Hearing this news, I prayed hard that God would just make this another lie, because so many had already been told throughout the years but God I pleaded… if this turned out to be true, this would make everything I believed about me a just a mess, a lie, the ultimate betrayal by everyone I knew.
God please, the last thing I want to be is a “Rapist Daughter!” Sigh…so I decided to take a trip to confront the truth as brutal as it might be.
Upon my arrival back home, my once beautiful, freckled faced mother, now looked old and frail and I tried to feel enough so I wouldn’t dare ask her the questions I had traveled so far to ask but it happened.
Clenching my hands tightly together, I sat quietly at the end corner of her bed, my heart I could feel beating against the skin of my chest. I listened anxiously as she joked around with my brother and sister-in-law never once showing any recognition or emotion for the daughter who had been gone for so many years. Feeling my chest tightening, I called out… Mum, I need you to be honest with me please. This is important to me as I told her about what I had recently learned. With every word murmured to her, my heart pleaded in its own words, begging silently for her to dismiss whatever I was saying.
I kept reminding her, how people in our small village loved to gossip and even though I already know there’s no truth to it, just wanted to make sure because I never understood why our relationship throughout the years and even now felt so tense. My words were not even completely out of my mouth when she blurted out… Emma, yes, they raped me…that man raped me, while his friend watched and then they both raped me! They threatened me, told me that if I ever said anything my mother or brothers would end up hurt or jailed. I knew they meant their threats because of who they were.
What the hell was I hearing…What! My mind shocked from her words… “they raped me!”
It felt like I was floating but strangely enough I knew it was real, I realized I was physically sitting there but mentally was just not present. The conversation was long, and I held in the tears. She continued this horror story, by telling me the times she tried endlessly aborting me and it was her mother, who convinced her to keep me but sadly years after my birth she died, and she did not know how to deal with all these emotions and face her reality with me without her mother. She confessed how consuming and confusing her feelings for me became day after day and despite what happened she felt sorry for me and knew that somewhere inside she loved me, but the brutality of her memories was just too much to allow her to embrace who I was. Stop my heart cried! Okay, I get it… but she continued for the years she felt suffocated by this nightmare. I knew if I blinked or moved, the tears would never stop. My heart begged for her to stop. Stop…my heart kept screaming but it was silenced to her but loud enough for me to keep squeezing my hands until it went numb.
I am this day, the daughter of one of my mother’s rapists, which one I may never know, and I don’t care to neither. sigh! Yesterday, I was just simply Emma, your friend, a colleague, an acquaintance but today I have been labelled… a rapist daughter!
I am no longer the little sister, or that daughter who shadowed her mother’s beautiful resemblance. My family is no longer my family because I now know what their pain looks like. I am still haunted by the pain I saw in my mother’s eyes that day, the way she grinded on her bare gums with anger. I am angered by the label she involuntarily gave me…their daughter! I don’t know how to feel. Awful yes! I hate what I represent to my family, especially my beautiful mother. The fear and horror she endured breaks every fiber of my heart.
It’s an everyday struggle to keep reminding myself that I am more than the pain I represent to them. There are days when I am owned by the dirtiness of this feeling and all I want to do is crawl in a hole, lay there until I wilt and eventually die. People say life is knowledge but what happens when everything about life is feared and cannot be fully understood?
I often sit and think back of how miserable I felt, and I wonder what is really the purpose of this human experience? I’ve always believed in the possibility of change and God knows I was evidence of that but with this change I feel powerless and more loveless than I’ve ever felt. I don’t want to do the things that was able to bring me serenity. I feel isolated, betrayed in the worse way by my own family and living in a tear drop silence state still looking for a way out of this confusion and learn all over how to love and accept all the broken pieces of what makes me who I am…Emma! The darkness of my mother’s secret still at times surrounds my every being and there are still days when I’m not sure how to jump out of this box filled with so much shame, hurt and unforgiveness.
Shame… is who I am to my mother! Pain is what she sees when she looks into my eyes! Days like today, I feel like I don’t have any right to have a voice, for this world never had any intentions to embrace me. I was sent here for a reason, to bring pain and destruction to a family. Destroy a woman’s life, shred her happiness and jail her freedom …so what then?
My sense of connection on every level has faded and there have been days where I find myself thinking of ways to escape this life. I am still lost in the moment of this truth, but I also know that life must go on knowing, accepting and finding peace that it will never be the same again. Sigh
