I just need to put this somewhere. When I was a child, I was molested by a neighbor. It was not violent sexual abuse, but certainly it would have been enough, even by the standards of the day, to land the man in jail.
My parents eventually learned what was going on. My mother went and talked to the neighbor and his wife (I'm not sure that my father went), and it stopped--sort of. The man continued to watch the upstairs of my parents' house from the upper porch of his house (which was an apartment over a garage). He told me that he watched. We grew up without air conditioning, and there was a second-floor porch off one of the bedrooms. Throughout the summer, that porch door was left open, and it was directly opposite the man's porch. It was really creepy to see his cigarette in the dark on his porch.
Neither of my parents ever said a word to me about what happened. When the man died, I said to my mother that he was not a good person and I was not sorry that he was no longer on earth. She asked me why. I said, "Well, he molested me." She said she didn't understand why I had to bring that up, since it was nothing important, and that I shouldn't be so mean about the dead.
In the subsequent years, my father died. My mother, very lonely and socially inept, started spending time with his wife and her sister. Those two women have become my mother's main social support system.
Now the man's wife is dying. My mother has asked me to attend the funeral. Although I would certainly survive the experience, I'd rather not. I just don't want to honor these people in any way. I don't wish them harm, but I'd rather keep my distance.
I told my mother calmly that I just didn't want to attend the funeral. I asked if she could get one of my sisters to go with her. She said she didn't understand why I was being so cruel to her and keeping alive events that were "nothing" in the first place.
I have to admit, I feel very betrayed. I was somewhat surprised when my mother started to pal around with this man's wife. If it were my child, I would have never spoken to either of them again. I might even have moved if I could afford to do so--especially once I knew about the upper-porch thing.
Believe me, this has not been a dominant force in my life. But it did happen, and I feel pretty lousy that even after all these years, my mother won't understand that it had an aftermath.
If anybody reads this and thinks I'm just being ridiculously sensitive, I'll understand. Maybe my perspective is just wrong. I don't hate this man's wife--I asked her to my mother's 75th birthday party, I send her Christmas cards, I always speak politely to her when I'm visiting home--but I also know that she stayed with a man known throughout the neighborhood as a child molester. And I was one of his victims. And that makes me shudder a bit.
