Keep quiet.

'Don't tell anyone anything that happens in our home or within the family.' My Mum drilled this into me from a very young age. The pretext being that I would endanger my parents by spilling information that would enable the security police to lock them up and throw away the key or worse. In hindsight, I realise my Mum must have been absolutely terrified and traumatised by the situation she found herself in. She had grown up in a loving, kind family who lived an idyllic, relaxed life at the beach. Then she became the mother of her family as her Mum suffered a number of debilitating strokes in her fifties. My Mum cared for her Mum and for the whole family. Then she met a seemingly charming, redhead young minister at church. He was different from her past boyfriends. He had only recently arrived from England.

They got married after a few years and immediately she realised things were not as they seemed. Firstly, he was sent to a church inland, upcountry so she had to deal with city life and traffic, dust, heat and mine dumps instead of swimming in beautiful blue seas and walking along spectacular sandy beaches. Her Mum had passed and she was grief-stricken. Her Dad found it hard to cope with his grief and remarried a woman who had had a life full of woes. My Mum fell pregnant and gave birth to a poorly baby who was continuously ill. She found this all too much.

What did not help was the man with whom she had fallen in love. He had immediately morphed into a monster who browbeat her with emotional abuse. She was already fragile and struggling but he did not care. He had his own struggles and he took them out on her. She felt that her baby was her all. She would protect this little girl as fiercely as any lioness would protect her cub. That made the monster even angrier as he had hoped he could mould this child into his way of thinking. But a mother's bond is the strongest and that little girl learnt to observe man's inhumanity to man/woman from a very early age. She was sensitive (still is) and the loudness of wrath emanating from this man who was her father terrified her. His twisted face was the scariest thing she had ever witnessed. Her Mum was her Protector and as young as she was, she knew she had to be her Mum's Protector too.

She listened and absorbed everything her Mummy said. So when her Mummy explained about the wicked men who could do monstrous acts to her parents, she listened. She wondered what could be so much more monstrous than what her daddy already did to her with the beatings or to both her and her Mummy with the rage and shouting horrible scary threats but her Mummy was her all and so she heeded her words.

The young girl had heard her parents talking about their friends going missing or flying out of high rise buildings and that all sounded terrifying. She definitely would not say a word to anyone as she wanted to keep her Mummy safe especially and the monster too, she supposed, as he put food on the table and took them on holiday sometimes. Quite often, she would find herself sitting in the car with her Mummy outside the huge imposing police building in the middle of the city while her daddy was inside. It was okay though as her Mummy would keep her occupied playing 'I spy' and they would listen to 'Squad cars' on the radio. That was an exciting program and she still remembers the intro as she heard it so often. She would watch the upper windows though just to make sure her daddy did not fly out of one. She did feel something for him at times like those.

So she never talked. Not even to her closest friends. She felt like she lead two lives and had friends in both but never the twixt shall meet. Her Mum had also said she would protect others by not talking. So if her school friends asked questions, as they did in her teenage years, about the two men sitting outside the house in the green Peuguot, for example, she brushed it off somehow. She was and still is fiercely protective of her friends and by not talking she later discovered that she did protect them. One close friend told her years later that he went for a certain job that involved 'protecting' the country and he was surprised to be quizzed about her in the interview. He could not understand why she was the topic of conversation when she had nothing to do with the job.

Only when she met up with him years later and opened up about all that had happened, did he realise why he was asked about her. So she had protected him. She continued to protect her parents and told nothing of what happened within or without the home.

Six years ago, I started having therapy outdoors and mentioned in passing how my Mum had told me never to say anything about home or my family because of the security police. My therapist was on the ball and she stopped me from blabbing on about something else. I was surprised. She asked me to repeat what I had just said and to really think about it. I did, and did not understand what she was getting at. She repeated it back to me. My mind was blank. I was so indoctrinated, I could not think clearly. She needed to spell it out for me. [I had told her the security police always seemed to know everything anyway. If my Dad lost his tail, they would still turn up at the meeting or rally. They had snitches who would give them information anyway. Plus, they also tapped our phones and read our mail.]

My therapist asked why my Mum had told me to keep quiet. I replied 'because of the security police'. She shook her head. I just could not understand. She said if the security police knew it all anyway, why did I need to keep quiet?

Lightbulb moment.

My Mum did not want the world to know about the abuse. My Mum was ashamed, terrified and was trying to protect me in the best way she knew how. If I spoke out, my dad would have exploded and I would be no more. He came close on a few occasions but that would definitely have caused my final goodbye.

Families, hey.

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PS I think this has all popped into my mind recently as he had a real go at me the other day for chatting to the carers. I offloaded it all into a previous blog post. That jab of his really stung and I could not comprehend why. But mulling it over for a few days, the realisation has dawned. Hence the above post.