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Motherless

Mona Angéline

    She yelled at me that she was going to have to do it to me again, and again. I tried to hide my tears from the other, mostly male, airport passengers. The daily frustrations of a female security officer – thrust my way, and only mine, in public, with disdain.
    It was August. I was on my way home from Europe after burying my grandmother. She was the only family member who taught me what love was.
    When you think of sexual abuse, what do you see? Mostly, people see a male perpetrator.
    My abuser was female. Worse, my abuser was my mother.
    It made me not want to become a woman. That kind of torment my mother lived? It scared me more than pain would know. So pain I chose. I sent my womanhood to a screeching halt by refusing to eat. That way, I wouldn’t grow into the miserable, worthless beyond. Life was safer as a non-adult, as the untouchable in between. The soul without a body, the body without its soul. When you’re still a child, it is ok to like math, and it is ok to not know how to love. But come adulthood, I’d have to be it all. I’d have to be female.
    Scared of lifelong pain, I disappeared, swapped the threat with pain I could control.
    Who was I? Woman, I was not. Like others, I was not. Was I hollow? Why did I not feel? What are emotions? I didn’t know. My mother says I can’t love. And I believed. Unable to feel, care, live. The story of a motherless child.
    I became a woman with an outer shell that satisfied expectations. But underneath, a pain not acknowledged morphed into questions of identity that turned into more pain.
    There are usually two avenues from there: inflicting this pain onto others – or starting the seemingly endless journey to heal. Long, long ago I chose the latter.
    21 years later, after trekking across a massive mountain of growth, from a dark valley filled with trauma to the wide open, the sun, the warmth, the flowers, I rarely doubt myself. Throughout two decades of healing, I have flourished into a gentle woman, kind, astute, compassionate, and above all, myself.
    Triggers in life will always exist, and that’s ok. Triggers lose power. Sometimes though, you may have just buried another woman, an elder, who lived through as much pain as you. In such moments in life, there’s no space for those who set off the triggers. The security lady was that. Touching me just so, over and over, supposedly repeating her abuse because I twitched the first time. The second time. The thick tears that came felt ancient, generational, like those of my grandmother. We cried together, cried out, as women who never fully were.
    Today, triggers are ok. They lurk on street corners, in a vain individual, in most unhealthy people. But we are aware. Triggers teach us. We know what shame feels like, the searing worthlessness it brings about. We identify it, every time, with the acuity of an internal radar, and we tell the shame gently that we aren’t built from it anymore.
    We’ve learnt to listen. Listen to the quiet voice that knows. Our inner selves have grown in strength, immensely, vastly, in compassionate assertion, the way a knowing silence can powerfully conquer a room. The voices of our abusers, our triggers, are loud, but only in a fleeting hour. And then, allowing our tears, hugging our hearts, protecting our vulnerable little self, it all becomes ok.
    This is not the first time, and it’s most likely not the last time that abuse happens to me. To us. Us women. But we prevail. We write, we long, yearn, through the dark of the night to find ourselves, and then we awaken to flow, to dance, to sing, with ourselves and one another, once the pain has washed over and through us like a roaring ocean wave.
    We find happy endings, no matter what. No matter where, no matter how small, in the quivering of a leaf in the wind. No matter the meaning to others. Sometimes we find happy endings in the green of a tree, the subtle way we cherish a coffee cup, the pausing on a park bench. Sometimes we find them in the monumental. In outrage and cries for help. But most of the time, we find them in the calm of day.
    Because happiness isn’t loud. It’s peaceful, it’s within ourselves, it is us. It’s in how we quietly prevail.
    Truth is, we’ve never been broken. We’ve felt all along, and we’ve felt love all along. And we shall live, live this life that’s spectacular after all, or, spectacular, precisely because.

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