Wish I could share with my mom...

[incidentally]

My mom has been going through some hard times lately. It's been rough, but it seems like the experiences recently have humbled her and she has become less critical. We have been getting closer, which is a surprise to me. 6 months ago I'd have told you I didn't even want to TRY and have a relationship with her, but lately it has felt good to have her appreciation and attention. I don't have many friends or 'people' in my life and it is nice. She is also over 70 now and I know her time left is limited (although she's in good physical health).

But there is something I've been wanting to talk to her about for over 15 years. I never thought I would be able to talk to her about it, but the last few months have given me hope. But now seems like a bad time to burden her with it and dredge up the past. I still have been thinking about it a lot lately and just want to let the story out SOMEWHERE. So here it is. I wasn't sure if this should go under family troubles or trauma, it didn't seem severe enough for either, but shame seemed fitting.

I was 16 years old and came home one day to find the wallpaper on my computer had been changed while I was away. Someone had changed it to a picture of packets of ortho-cyclen, the birth control I had recently started taking, because I had recently begun having sex with my boyfriend. For a moment I thought it was just one of my brothers playing a joke on me but then I realized the picture showed the pills sitting on MY desk. I checked my hiding place, and sure enough, someone had found my pills, taken a picture, and set it as my wallpaper. That was actually a lot of trouble to go to, in the late 90s.

Panicking and not sure what this meant, but certain my older brother was to blame (the only one in the family with the technical know-how), I went to go find him, but it was too late. There was my mother and it was worse than I thought. Not only had he discovered and told about my birth control pills, but he had found and printed a journal entry he found on my computer. The journal entry mentioned having sex with my boyfriend and something about the fact that my boyfriend had told me he wasn't a virgin before we had sex, and later admitted that it was his first time.

The things that happened after that are blurry to me. My mom called me a slut and a whore and took away my driving privileges. She told my dad, which was humiliating. She told me that the least I could do was keep my claws out of the nice virgin boys, as if I had held down and raped my boyfriend.

My mom rarely talked to me about sex, before or after that, but I always had known it was strictly forbidden before marriage, and that my mother herself found it disgusting. I remember her talking about one my cousins with a look of loathing and disgust on her face because my cousin had developed a problem with her cervix and it was clearly from "having a penis bang up against it before she was old enough." I remember being only 12 or 13 years old, waaay before I wanted to have sex, with no particular man in mind, trying to come up with a plan in case I got pregnant in the future. Not because I was afraid of an abortion or giving birth but because I was terrified of what my mom would do, if she knew I had consensual sex before marriage. In my 12 year old mind, I had a plan to claim rape if a future me ever turned up pregnant. So her finding out I wasn't a virgin at 16, was literally the worst thing I could have imagined at the time. It was a lifelong nightmare come true.

I couldn't face her for years, even though I had to. I avoided my house like it was going to give me cancer, from 16 to 18 and moved out shortly after my 18th birthday. I never kept a journal again and still don't. I've struggled with associating sex with guilt and shame.

I want her to know how much she hurt me and all of the consequences it had on me. But I don't know if that's really a healthy thing to want, or realistic. In the past she has responded with denial or saying things like "I know I was a terrible mother" or "if I ever hurt you then I'm sorry" but that's not what I want. I want her to KNOW that it hurt me, that the scars on my arm from cutting as a teenager came from HER. I want her to REMEMBER calling me a whore and a slut. Sometimes I get so angry. I feel like I was in such a delicate vulnerable place, just discovering my own sexuality, when she stomped on it.

I know she has her own childhood trauma that she dealt with, and I've wondered before if she ever in her life had a single positive sexual experience, or if it was just a wifely duty. My brothers didn't get in trouble for having sex, that was just a normal "guy thing."

But I feel like I can't ever really be close to her unless she can see and apologize for that incident or at least truly understand why she felt so repulsed by me.

[oak]

Hey! Thanks for sharing! I am really glad you did.

I must say... wow. May I speak frankly?

That is some next level misogyny. I was reading along and then...pow!

I hope you have found some healing and acceptance regarding your body and sexual choices. These are your own.

As far as saying something. That is a tough situation. I am of two minds:

1. Generally, I favor getting the truth out, then starting from there. Generally that is good.

2. The generation currently aged 70+ is super duper (generally, IME) unwilling to say "Sorry". I have no idea why. Pride? Post-war hubris?

My parents are the same age, lovely people, but they simply won't apologize, even for little things. If something is swept under the rug, then there is nothing to talk about, right?

Perhaps hope can triumph over experience, and your mother will apologize.

While I don't know if your mother will ever apologize, I do know that we are only as sick as our secrets, and you are much healthier for posting here! I am very proud of you. Well done.

Also, I encourage you to journal. It is a wonderful thing, and you deserve wonderful things. If you choose! It is up to you!

[oak]

No sooner than I posted this, did I regret lumping an entire generation of people who are unwilling to say "sorry".

To demonstrate that I am indeed, sincerely, willing to say sorry, I do offer that apology. I am sure there are many people 70+ who take the strong moral stand of apologizing when their conscience convicts them.

[HowDidIGetHere]

But I feel like I can't ever really be close to her unless she can see and apologize for that incident or at least truly understand why she felt so repulsed by me.

This is a really hard place to be in, needing someone else to understand something that they may never be able to understand. Even worse to need an answer that they genuinely may not be able to provide. For my part, I think the important thing is to say what you need to say without regard to how she reacts. At least that way you can know that you've done your part and not kept it inside anymore.


Unsolicited input warning:

Based on my own experience growing up in an extremely repressed and shaming environment, I think it's very likely that your mother was abused at some point in her past and either never told anyone or tried to tell and was dismissed or shamed for it. Blaming you for having a sexuality but not your brothers would make sense in terms of her projecting her own guilt and shame onto you, as well as the old school idea that it's a woman's job to protect her virginity and a man's job to try to take it.

Also, your brother's idea of a "joke" also shows some really poor boundaries and an invasion of privacy that absolutely should not have been allowed to pass without comment, no matter how supposedly awful your behavior was. But again, in true old school sexist fashion, "boys will be boys" but girls are sluts and whores. Totally not okay.

End unsolicited input.