The Time Has Come The Walrus Said.. Part 2 - The Story they were told

Come 16, I came home from school one day and who do I find in the lounge room?

Him. The perpetrator.

My stepfather was at work, and I realised my mum had been sleeping with him while my stepdad wasn’t home. I don’t know how many days a week or how long it had been happening,

but she had sought him out.

We had shifted two homes since everything happened and there was a restraining order,

so the only way he could be there was because she let him be there.

Again, my naivety.

Good Christian girl.

I assumed he was there for me.

I ran away and stayed away for a couple of nights before coming home. I was supposed to be preparing to go through for baptism, but I couldn’t concentrate. I was living with the fear of whether I would see him again and what he might do to me now that I was older. I was completely clueless about what was actually happening.

Then one day my mum said, “I spoke to your aunt and uncle. They would love for you to come and stay with them for a while.”

She worded it in such a way that I thought they knew what had happened over the previous five years. I thought they knew everything and were trying to protect me and help me.

I had no idea until I was 27 that they were completely clueless about what had actually been going on.

At the time, I thought if I left, I wouldn’t be in danger.

But there was another kind of danger in leaving.

I had to leave my sister and brother and all the life I knew.

I thought I was escaping.

It was only later that I realised I had been abandoned and moved out of the way so my mother could continue what she was doing.

She didn’t want me to jeopardise her relationship with him again. If I was away, I couldn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t do anything and I couldn’t tell my stepdad, I didn't understand any of this.

I had recently got into a relationship with someone who potentially could have led me down a very dark road. So, for all purposes, I thought Mum had sent me to Adelaide so I would meet some nice Christian boy instead of being with a guy who had previously attempted suicide, was gothic and was secretly dependent on drugs, that was the explanation I understood.

I was actually relieved when I left.

I became caught up in doing what my aunt and uncle wanted me to do and didn't have time to process what had happened. I just allowed life to keep moving, I wrote home.

I tried ringing home.

But I never really thought twice about why my sister, stepdad or brother were never around to talk to me, I had absolutely no idea about the story being painted about me back home.

To them, I had rejected them.

I had chosen to leave.

I had deserted them.

To my aunt and others, another story had been told.

I was the wild child getting up to no good.

I was rude.

I was disrespectful.

My mother needed a break from me, none of them knew.

And neither did I.

We were all being led by a lie that allowed her to maintain her cover, so she didn't have to carry her own shame and guilt for what she had been doing for years. I wondered why I hardly went home, when I did return, I often stayed with families from church rather than at home.

I tried to catch buses and, eventually, when I could drive, I would drive back to spend time with my siblings, but I never knew what was going on behind closed doors. Eventually I moved back to Adelaide indefinitely and became busy with my own life.

But you need to understand something.

I was 16.

My sister was eight.

My brother was only two or three years old.

I left home believing one story while they were being told another.

I have spent the last 36 years trying to atone for that.

Trying to make up for it.

Trying to feel worthy and good enough to both of my siblings, as though I continually had to prove:

I belong.

I am enough.

As though I needed to make up for leaving them when, in reality, at 16 years old I didn't even understand what was happening.

For years, I carried that and I will be honest.

I prayed and prayed for my mother to pass.

That sounds horrible when you say it out loud, but what I believed was that when she died, we would finally get closure.

We would finally heal.

We would finally have a relationship.

Her death was either going to make us or break us. By then I had already completely stopped speaking to my sister. I had tried so many times to be there, but this is the part of the story I kept hidden.

This is the part that made me feel I could never share my story because it was also another person's story.

Hers.

My sister had no idea what had happened to me, In fact, I don't think it was until shortly before my mother died that she knew it wasn't just her.

She didn't know that I had gone to court.

She didn't know I had been taken away from Mum.

She didn't know there had been a restraining order.

And all this time I carried: Why?

How did I let this happen?

Why did I leave her in that house?

Why didn't I protect her?

But until I was 24, I had no clue about the years of sexual abuse and child exploitation my sister had endured.

I didn't know my mother had allowed it to happen.

I didn't know she knew.

I didn't know that she was physically there in the house knowing what was happening.

I will never understand that, I will never understand how you can let a predator back into your home knowing what he has already done.

I will never understand willingly offering your child up so you can continue seeing the person who had already destroyed your family.

Eventually, she got caught. My stepfather left her as soon as he found out, but he didn't report her either.

And that is something else I have wrestled with:

Why are we keeping her safe?

When I eventually found out, I didn't speak to my mum on and off for years. I was mortified.

There was so much anger, but also so much guilt for leaving holding it as though somehow it was my burden to bare.

Yet I watched my siblings continue having contact with her, even after I had children of my own, I would sometimes make Matt ring her because I needed to keep my distance. People might wonder why I continued any relationship with her at all, when you don't have anything, sometimes you hold onto what you do have.

The need to belong is strong.

And for me, the Christian teaching to honour your mother and father was strong too.

So I held on in ways that cost me, even after she died, my brother and sister mourned a mum.

And somehow I was still the outcast.

Still the one who was the problem.

I truly thought it would be different.

Towards the end, two years before Mum passed, she developed an infection that went to her brain. The doctors wanted to put her into palliative care. We had a group phone call, I cried on the phone and told her I was sorry she was dying, but it wasn't the crying of a mother and daughter with the relationship you would expect. It was almost the sadness you feel for another person who knows their time may be coming, or perhaps I was crying because, at the end of her life, our relationship still wasn't what it should have been.

I had spoken so many times about how I never wanted anything from her.

I didn't want anything from her will, even when she had previously asked me to be executor, I said no.

We don't have that relationship.

I didn't want to use her.

That mattered to me because of everything that had happened in the past, including the way money and affection had been used at the expense of what my sister had been put through.

My sister was trafficked.

Those words are hard to write, but they are what happened.

Then Mum got out of hospital, one day my sister rang me screaming after Mum had left her in a shop. (You see, my mother had just been told she may have six to eight weeks to live.)

Six to eight weeks.

Do you know what she chose to do with that knowledge?

She told my sister that she had gone looking for HIM.

She had been spying on him, she had even spoken to him.

Out of all the things you could choose to do when you have been told you may have six to eight weeks left to live, she went looking for the man who had destroyed her girls and destroyed her relationship with her family.

And she told her children:

“I have no regrets.”

That was the last time I spoke to her until about a couple of hours before she passed.

I only rang then so Raevyn could say goodbye, part of me even thought perhaps she held on all this time, because I had kept her from speaking to my children.

Meanwhile, almost nobody knew why I wasn't speaking to her.

Except my siblings.

Other people judged me.

Criticised me.

Blamed me.

I allowed myself to endure that without telling them why.

Without telling them what I knew.

Without telling them what I had carried.

Without telling them what it had cost.

But the time has come, the Walrus said.

For years I kept quiet because speaking didn't only expose my story.

It exposed hers.

It exposed theirs.

It exposed things that other people perhaps didn't want exposed.

But these are my words.

These are the events as I experienced them, and this is what occurred.

I don't know what story my brother shared after Mum died.

I don't know what version people were given.

He didn't know it all.

I had never really spoken to him about it in enough detail for him to know the events that happened before he was even born and I think that is where so much of the rage came from.

It wasn't only that he shared something.

It was the lack of my words.

The loss of my voice again.

It was wondering what version had been told and wondering whether the people who, for so long,

I allowed to label me, judge me and blame me while I stayed silent and kept her secrets would even care to know the truth.

Or whether the version they already had was enough.

It matters to me.

Because of what I endured.

Because of what I lost.

And because of what I carried.

For so long I thought keeping quiet protected everyone else, maybe now, speaking is how I finally stop carrying it for them.