My mother's phone call startled me awake. It wasn't early; I had been sleeping in late to make up for a string of anxiety-laden nights of insomnia. I figured the was calling to talk about the letter. I was right.
Her voice sounded excited, almost overjoyed. "I wanted to let you know we read your letter and I want you to know what we did with it!" Anyone listening in at this point would have thought that I had sent her the most wonderful news, and she was so happy that she had put the letter in a scrapbook or framed it on the wall.
This was just the beginning of a surreal conversation.
Sounding almost gushing, she thanked me for the letter, especially my expressions of love. She thought the letter very well written. In fact, she read it twice, very carefully. So did my father.
Then she burned it.
"I've put it behind me!" she said with great enthusiasm, as if announcing something I should take great delight in. "You should too! It's in the past, it's forgiven, it's over and done with. Time to move on. I'm over it and I hope you will get over it too."
She's over it? She is over it?!! She reads about how her son sexually abused her daughter for years and, just like that, she is over it? Not a twinge of grief, not the slightest moment of compassion, not a bit of concern, not a moment of anguish? Just like that, she is over it?
Another woman I know found out, decades after the fact, that her son had molested her daughter. She hopped on the next available plane and flew clear across the country to hold her daughter in her arms, weep with her, and support her in whatever way she could. "I didn't know then, or I would have stopped it. But I know now, and I will do anything to help you heal," she told her daughter. And she begged her forgiveness for failing to protect her...for anything she did that made it possible for such a tragedy to occur.
Such a response, obviously, is utterly foreign to my mother. She let me know she was not at all to blame. Her conscience was clear. She was at peace. All was well in her world. She was sure I was fine...after all, I have Sheldon and my therapist...and she was not going to give the contents of the letter another thought.
"It's buried in the past!" She said this several times. I think she was disappointed that I wasn't excited, overjoyed even, that she was able to get over my years of sexual abuse so quickly. "It will never bother me again!"
I honestly think she wanted me to be happy for her...happy that my long hellish nightmare had mattered so little to her, that she was not going to allow it to intrude on her happiness, that she really didn't care.
