Love in a Time of Shame

This is going to be uncomfortable.

This is going to hurt.

I'm sorry.

Mum,

I need to tell you something.

It's big.

I should start by telling you that when it happened they asked me if I wanted them to call you. They said, "At the end of the day she's your Mum. She loves you. She'll just be glad to know your safe." For the record, and I want to make this clear Mum, I know that this is true.

I know that you love me. That we are your world. But how do you shatter the world of someone you love? I guess I take after Dad in that regard because in my mind, it was simple - you just don't.

Or atleast it used to feel that simple. That black and white. That absolute. But counselling is changing that. It's teaching me to see the inbetween. See the other options available to me. So inbetween me writing this letter, and you reading it, and our worlds breaking - I know there is an alternative. That these words can be written but not read.

I like this option.

There's something else I want to make clear Mum. You didn't miss the signs, or fail to notice. I know you'll feel guilty about that, so I want you to know that your mother's instinct was in fact, as always, spot on. You must have asked what was wrong a million times - I promise you, you did. Me not telling you is on me. It's eating me alive Mum.

And I need you to know that it didn't stop you being there for me. When I came home burnout, bruised, and quite frankly broken, you looked after me. You kept me going and it meant the world to me. Then and now. You mean the world to me Mum.

So how do I say this?

Where do I start?

Maybe we should begin with the power that shame has over this family. Because another thing that I am learning in counselling is that this story didn't start when I thought it did.

It starts perhaps with our inability as a family, as a society - a very British society, to confront difficult conversations.

To say what we think.

To say who we are.

Without shame.

I want to see that change Mum. I want for us to be apart of that change. So I'm going to hang my dirty laundry on the line. Our dirty laundry.

Here goes...

At sixteen, I learnt a very dangerous thing.

I had just got off the phone to a friend and we had been discussing sex in that way that sixteen year old girls do. You had been listening at the door and you wanted to talk to me about what you'd heard. I was too young then to understand that the tears running down your cheeks as you begged me not even to discuss sex 'like that', was actually a reflection of the shame somebody else had once forced onto you.

But I didn't understand.

I learnt instead that sex was shameful.

And so I didn't tell you, that it was already too late and that I'd already had sex, because I didn't want you to be ashamed of me.

Oh, how I wish I now that I had learnt the taste of Shame's bitter pill then. Because I would have learnt that shame once confronted has no place in love. Not really.

So at sixteen I learnt another thing about my world.

The world where love is meant to last lifetime, where people who love eachother forgive and forget. The world where arguments happen in private, where there is always a compromise, and people really can stay together if they put the work in. The world where quitting is failing and failing is shameful. In this world where what everybody thinks of you is more important than what you think of yourself.

I wonder now how things might have been different if I had told you then. How many of those other lessons I might have started to unpick. Would you have forced the shame that you felt onto me, or would your love for us have forged a new path?

Would we have discussed Sex? Relationships? Love?

Would I have told you about the first time we said "I love you", the first argument, the other arguments, the apologies, the fights without apologises, the unspoken rules, the never-ending isolation?

Would you have told me that I should stand up for myself? Would you have told me that ultimatiums aren't compromises and to walk away is to know your worth?

I wonder if I would have known that girls don't always have to be nice. We don't always have to smile. Let men touch us. Lend them our money. That we don't have to cope in silence or even cope at all.

But I didn't know that Mum. Not really.

So I tried to cope with it all alone. And then he raped me.

And I tried to cope with that alone too.

I still don't understand how it can possibly be that the pain of the rape hurt less than the shame I felt, and how it is that the shame of telling you is still the greatest pain of all. Because at the end of the day Mum, I love you and I know you love me.

I think we need to talk about the shame Mum.

X.