Tag: family Christmas

this time of year

For as long as I can remember, the holiday season has too often brought with it a pervasive melancholy. When I was little — before going to live with my father at age six — Christmas could feel uncomfortable for me: as the only grandchild for a long time, all eyes were on me, wherever I celebrated. There are numerous photos of me in front of my grandparents’ white artificial tree, this last one when I am six years old, back in Texas for Christmas, two months after moving to Virginia.

Thereafter, Christmas becomes outright fraught. With my sister and brother and stepmother and father, the dynamics intensify. I am aware of being ‘the stranger’ in the celebrations, and I remember one particular photo of my stepmother cuddling my brother and sister on the sofa to one side, while I stand in front of the tree, my tightly clasped hands behind my back reflected in the mirror behind me. Just thinking about it breaks my grown-up heart.

I have been reading The Child Safeguarding Review Panel – I wanted them all to notice over the last couple of weeks. This UK report came out in November (2024), and focuses exclusively on Child Sexual Abuse within the family. It’s a depressing read in almost every way: what is missed, who isn’t believed and why, the devastating lack of resources for abused children and families, the over-reliance on ‘evidence’ and on the children themselves disclosing. However, a couple of aspects have struck me with force: first, that so often neglect is a hallmark of an abusive environment. If a child is not neglected, if a child is being cared for, watched out for — sexual abuse is much less likely to occur.

I was emotionally neglected throughout much of my childhood, and when I was living with my mother, physically neglected as well. Despite growing up in a firmly middle-class household, it’s clear that some basic needs weren’t met. This in turn contributed to making me vulnerable; I welcomed any attention I could get from my family, specifically my father. I now see that he groomed me by showing me attention, and then manipulated this into sexual abuse.

Pretence is another common denominator in abusive households. In my life, these layers of everything having to appear ‘fine’ and ‘happy’ seemed to triple at Christmas. We often went to family in Alabama, Florida, or Texas for a week over the holidays. The strain of having to appear ‘just fine’ cast a long shadow every year. The sheer irony of opening presents, having to ‘be a child’ amongst other children haunted me from the moment my father started abusing me. I wasn’t like other children — and I knew it. My childhood was irretrievable. I knew this too.

At Christmas, I often felt trapped. The family was forced into close proximity. I had no friends nearby, nowhere to go, nothing (except reading) to distract me. And I absolutely dreaded nighttimes. I was utterly terrified that my father would come into the room I was inevitably sharing with my siblings or with cousins — he’d done so before — and that then they would ‘find out’ what was happening.

The awful thing here is: I really felt it was my responsibility to keep up family appearances. It was my job to be careful, to make sure no one found out, because otherwise…..otherwise what? All these decades later the only answer I have is that if anyone found out they would simply hate me. Hate me for ruining their lives. Blame me for everything going ‘wrong’.

I am lucky now to have my own healthy family, my separate family traditions — which I created alongside my husband and children and extended family. I am lucky that I no longer feel in danger, or have to pretend for days at a time. I cannot and will not pretend about anything anymore.

So. Please remember that at this time of year there are children for whom Christmas is an ordeal. There are children who have to work extra hard to maintain the pretence, or who are afraid in their beds at night — doubly so, because there is nowhere else to go. Some children — like me — are happier at school, or at friends’ houses. For some children being with family is the last place they would choose to be.

Please remember too that as upsetting as it is to grasp: all of us — you, and you, and you — will know people who are perpetrating sexual abuse. At least 10% of the population is sexually abused before the age of 16. The vast majority of this abuse is perpetrated by family men. They do not appear to be ‘monsters’. They do not appear to be ‘sick’ or ‘unusual’. They make sure that they cultivate looking like a ‘normal’ family. Yet they commit abhorrent crimes. These are the facts.

Due to Gisele Pelicot’s courage, over 50 families (who no doubt consider themselves ‘normal’) must come face to face this Christmas with what lies beneath the surface of their ‘ordinary’ lives. It’s the tip of a huge iceberg, the excavation of which is long overdue. These families are not the exceptions — they are in fact now experiencing what is for large portions of society the hidden norm. Although the road ahead is long and distressing, I join with so many in hoping that this uncovering now has some momentum. Children — and victim survivor women and men — deserve a life free from shame and blame. Shame Must Change Sides.

celebrations

We have had a really lovely ten days in our household: one ‘child’ and partner with us for Christmas, and the other and his wife surprising us with a visit from the US tomorrow. I have loved every moment of stringing fairy lights, having sherry (yes, my American and elsewhere readers: it’s a thing, and a very good thing), eating good food, going on some walks, and opening some presents.

Overall, and as is the pattern for years now: we are so relaxed, so easy, so loving and full of good humour.

In the last few months, I’ve had a couple of Twitter conversations about celebrations in families where Child Sexual Abuse was a feature. My own memories of Christmases, birthdays, Thanksgivings, etc are opaque. I remember them — such as they were — as fraught times, tense times. Never daring to put a foot wrong, say the wrong thing — or worse, attract the ‘wrong’ kind of attention, whatever that might be.

My family was not violent. I remember one tap on my bottom my whole childhood. There was no corporal punishment of any sort, ever.

Yet I was afraid. All the time. And especially at celebrations, which seemed by their nature to threaten to spin out of control. And I was certainly afraid of anything out of the usual routine. Anything I could not predict. Because that unpredictability might lead to more abuse — out of sight, under others’ celebrating noses. Anything different just seemed to produce an opportunity for my father. Maybe it was the enforced proximity — more chances to strike? I don’t know. I know I tried anything and everything to avoid being alone with him. Mostly — I think — this involved always being around other people, always talking (so that I would be missed if not there, perhaps?), and always volunteering to help.

I remember almost nothing tangible about the 11 Christmases I spent with my larger family. I only remember one present, one that didn’t happen: I remember desperately wanting an opal necklace one Christmas. When it came to it, my stepmother received an opal necklace, and I did not. I was cut to the quick, and knew even then, age 13 or 14, that someone was putting me ‘in my place’. I had bookmarked the page in the catalogue and everything…. But I didn’t get the opal.

I was a child my father abused, and claimed to be in love with, most nights. But I wasn’t his wife. Someone — whoever bought the opal — was telling me that. I knew this of course, but the icy isolation of this punishment made me feel like it was all my fault: I was being punished for having his attention, no matter that I didn’t want it. It somehow seemed the natural order of things that I be ‘frozen out’ of Christmas celebrations.

As for birthdays and Thanksgivings, I think I’m right in remembering we barely celebrated them. No birthday parties. And no Thanksgivings? Can this be right?

It is as if — in my waking, daily life — every effort was made so that I NOT feel special. It worked. In my daily life I felt almost invisible at home, unimportant, damped down. Yet my father claimed otherwise at night.; he sought me out, he gave me gifts, he said he ‘loved’ me. In the day I felt punished, ignored. At night I wanted nothing more than for the attention to stop.

With all of the abuse and twisted loyalties going on in our household — against the background of that — I can’t seem to settle in myself how much of this bleakness, fear, tension, is actually ‘normal’ in families around celebrations. What do the children in ‘ordinary’ families feel? Do they have fun? Or are they always worried? Do they like being around grownups? Or are they just waiting for it all to be over?

Once again, I have no bearings when it comes to any of this. I have no idea how much conflict is to be expected around celebrations and holiday times. All I know is that I dreaded trying to find my way through it, all the while trying to avoid my father. I even hated it anytime he spoke directly to me in front of anyone else, family or not. My fear of him ‘giving it away’ by too much attention, and how that would shame me, was profound. My ‘double life’ was completely entrenched.

And yet: were these tensions actually present? Were they able to be perceived by others? Or were they all ‘in my head’? It’s so easy to fall into believing that I’m making something out of ‘nothing’, much like how my unspoken fears around the first steps of my father’s grooming and abuse were waved away: it’s no big deal, it’s ‘natural’, ‘I’m just preparing you for when you are older’.

In other words: what you feel isn’t real.

It is so so hard to believe your feelings again after such gaslighting. Even harder to stretch your perceptions back in time, and believe those feelings are accurate reflections of how things were generally in those years, and how we did Christmas. I just don’t know. Those years feel so emptied, the cold wind whipping through them, that every last bit of warmth, of possible care, blew away long ago. I don’t know what to think.

I am relieved and proud that my grown up family and friends — our celebrations — are authentic. I trust that now. But to get here, I had to start from scratch, had to learn over and over that that there was nothing secret going on, nothing unsaid. I had to start over, and did.