She couldn't handle the truth

My mother couldn't deal with the truth. She had to dissociate too, compartmentalizing what she knew to be true from what she wanted to believe was true. She could not believe both at once, so she chose to believe her husband, the man on whom she was dependent financially, who joked when she had to ask for money, "What did you do with the dollar I gave you last week?" The one with the power because he was a man (I do not say this as a feminist; I'm not) and because he could out-yell and out-lie her. She chose the man who told her, time after time, "I did not have an affair with that woman,""I did not touch that child." Or even, "I'll never do it again."

The man she--naively--loved.

As for me, I saw how threatening truth was. It threatened the trust between my parents. It threatened their marriage. And I learned how ineffective it was to deliver me. Neither Mommy nor I could stop a predator with truth. I had to add layers of new denial and put them in newly-constructed secret places. I had to view what happened that morning as a "safe, father-bonding" thing, G says.

If she had asked me, even in private, if I had had a stomach-ache, would I have said no--or, with hesitation, "Yes, I guess so."? Would I have told her the truth if it meant breaking oneness with him?

If she had talked to me directly at the time, offered her hand, and said gently, "Let's go downstairs," would I have gone? What if he had ordered me not to?

We'll never know whether she could have stopped it right there. And if she hadn't been able to, would she have turned him in? What if I had spent my childhood feeling guilty that my father was in prison because of me, instead of spending it sailing around the world with my family in a boat that same man, whom I idolized, had built? Four years living with him as a safe, fun, courageous father, bonding with my family, the best years of our lives?

How many others out there are, right now, enslaved without shackles, bonded to their abusers by a loyalty superseding truth and common sense--the Stockholm Syndrome.

Like me, they are learning the only place they can hide is in their own mind.