People rarely talk about women abusing their sons. What society hears more often are stories of fathers abusing their daughters.
Both are horrific, both leave deep psychological wounds, and both are often met with silence or disbelief. Too often, the victims, not the perpetrators, are the ones shamed to silence.
My story is no different but I have decided not to remain silent.
The people I trusted to love, nurture, and protect me were the ones who harmed me. For many years, I lived with shame, worthlessness, and thoughts of ending my life. I felt like a mirror shattered into pieces. Therapy helped me gather some of those pieces, but I know I will never be completely whole.
Shock
When I told you that my mother sexually abused me, you were shocked. I understand. That reaction, disbelief, confusion, is exactly what my mother counted on. It is almost unthinkable to say, even more unthinkable to report, that your own mother abused you.
As a child, I didn’t even have the language to understand what was happening. I didn’t know the word “incest.” I only knew that what she did was wrong. She didn’t need to make me swear to keep it secret, the beatings were enough. She beat me so severely at times that I fainted.
You asked if she was my biological mother. Yes. She was.
I was her fifth and last child.
How did it begin?
My earliest memories place it around age five, though the physical abuse started even earlier. As a toddler, whenever I tried to hug her, she would hit me so hard I would run away crying and hide in another room. Yet to the outside world, she appeared to be a good mother; she cooked, cleaned, and walked me to school. I envied other children who spoke lovingly about their mums. I never had that.
When she began climbing into my bed, I was terrified. She would lie beside me naked and ask me to touch her. As a child desperate for affection and terrified of her anger, I obeyed. I thought that maybe, if I did what she wanted, she would stop beating me, stop belittling me, stop crushing my confidence.
Dad afraid too
I could not tell my father. He was afraid of her too. He never caught her in the act, and I knew he wouldn’t believe me even if I told him…several years ago when I was in my 40s and I told him about it, he did not believe me. He always took mother’s side, even when she beat me for the smallest things. He never protected me.
The abuse continued from age five until I was 14. By then, I had grown physically strong enough to shout at her to leave me alone.
But the damage was done.
As I grew older, I struggled with confidence, relationships, and intimacy. While my friends dated freely, I could barely speak to women. I carried trauma into adulthood, suffering mental breakdowns that no one around me understood until I finally sought therapy when I decided to study to become a doctor.
Once, I tried to share my past with someone I cared about. It was a mistake. She didn’t see me the way I hoped she would. I wanted to be loved, to give love, but instead I felt exposed and misunderstood.
At one point, I asked my therapist whether I should confront my mother. He thought it might help. When I finally asked her, she was in her sixties then, she denied everything. She said I imagined it. I reminded her of the nights she came to me, the things she made me do. Still, she denied it.
Explanation
It took fifteen more years before she finally admitted what she had done. And her explanation?
She said she had been abused by her own father.
But is that an excuse?
Is that enough to justify the loneliness, the emptiness, the lifelong struggle she left me with?
My mother is gone now. I do not hate her. I do not love her either. I have handed everything over to God.
As for me, I have accepted that I will remain alone for the rest of my life as relationships are difficult for me.
•Series, first published in thisislagos.ng, was written and edited by Peju Akande and based on true stories
The post My mother slept with me until my teenage years appeared first on Vanguard News.
