SURPRISE!

SURPRISE!

I've decided that I must have looked bored or maybe life was getting
too easy - no big challenges left - no surprises. Whatever the reason,
God Almighty has certainly come up with a good one. Yep, you really got
me this time - this was a real surprise.

Discovering that my husband of twenty-nine years has not been sexually
attracted to me for the last fifteen of those years was not the
surprise - I had kind of got the message along the way - but then to be
told that he has been sexually abusing our eldest daughter? Well, to
put it mildly, it was a mind numbing, nerve shattering bombshell of a
surprise.

My first reaction was, not knowing how to react. There she was my
beautiful twenty-one year-old daughter telling me that her father had
sexually abused her. Although she didn't use that word - that's the
technical term for it - she just said that he made her touch him.

I can almost hear you think . . . touch him . . . well, that's not so
bad . . . at least he didn't touch her . . . and that's where you'd be
wrong. Victims of sexual abuse tend not to remember everything at once
- so I've since read - they have flashbacks. And her flashbacks came in
irregular spurts but each one was worse than the last, each one was a
bombshell in its own right.

They say that you have to learn to take thel blows in life, like a
boxer ducking and weaving, but the trouble with this blow was that I
didn't see it coming. It hit me right between the eyes.

I suppose it's the thing that I've dreaded the most, that the man I
loved and trusted could betray me so utterly. How could he have done
such a thing to a child he loves? How could he have done that to our
child . . . to my child?
She trusted him completely and he betrayed that trust.

I'm trying hard to do what's best for her, what's best for all of us,
but I'm not equipped to deal with this. I don't know how I should think
or what I should do?

I have to be strong, I tell myself, support my daughter while she
struggles to cope with her memories and yet, while I listen to her
torments and try to reassure her of my love for her, my mind is in
hell. On fire with pain and hatred for the man I have loved for a
lifetime. I am being torn, ripped apart at my very soul.

It's all been a lie, you see. All those years of playing happy
families, all those years of thinking he was a good father. I've made
excuses for his failings, for the way he intimidates to get his way,
his bullying tactics to make everyone shy away from confrontations.
'He's a good father.' I'd say in his defence. 'A good husband . . . and
I love him. And besides, there are worse things than being a
bully.'

I did think it strange that she chose a university so far away from
home when she was such a home-bird and so close to me. We had a special
bond, I thought, a bond that nothing could break. And she assures me
that she loves me just as much, and doesn't blame me for what happened.
But I do.

If I hadn't have put on weight, if I hadn't got older, if I hadn't
worked so many night shifts to pay the bills . . . maybe it wouldn't
have happened. And why didn't I see what was going on? Did I have
blinkers on . . . shielding me from anything that might have seemed
unnatural? Why didn't I protect my child?

But now that it's happened I have to deal with it. Deal with it and
move on. I've helped my daughter find a counsellor, and my husband has
promised to have some sort of counselling or sessions with a
psychologist . . . psychiatrist . . . or whatever is available for
abusers.

For myself - I'm lost. For the first time in my life I'm totally out of
my depth. Who can help me rebuild a relationship that has become so
'dysfunctional'? It's like something you see in a TV documentary or
read about in women's magazines. And should I even try? Maybe I should
just walk away from him, leave him sobbing and begging for forgiveness.
The man I once loved, the bully, the child abuser, has been reduced to
an empty shell.

I've never agreed with the phrase 'hell is on earth'. Life is what you
make it, has always been my motto. But right now,
if you asked me now to sum-up how I feel about life, I'd say that
life's just one big sick joke, except that I'm not laughing any
more.