I was a teenager when a family member looked at me across a kitchen and asked: “So you really think you had a bad childhood?”
This was not a stranger. This was someone who had seen the case file Child Protective Services collected on my stepmother. The case file with the photographs. The photographs of my injuries — taken by the state, when I was small enough to need protection from the people I lived with. They had seen those photographs. And a few years later, in a kitchen, they looked at me and asked if I really thought I’d had it bad.
I remember the moment more clearly than I remember most of my adolescence. Not the room — the question. It felt like a slap that landed a few seconds after the hand had already moved on. I couldn’t understand, then, how anyone could ask me that and mean it. I realized in that kitchen, fully for the first time, that to some people my pain had become invisible. Even when it had been photographed. Even when it had been documented by the state. Later, I would realize it wasn’t some people. It was most people.
This post is about that. Not the abuse — the dismissal. The way an adult who has seen documentary evidence of what was done to you can, a few years later, ask a younger version of you whether what happened was real, and mean the question.
But before we get to that, you need to know what was being not-remembered.
My stepmother — call her O — had been adopted into a home that abused her, and she took whatever had been done to her out on me, almost daily. She hit me with her hands. That’s what most people picture when they hear the words “child abuse,” and most people stop their imagining there. She also hit me with a belt. A power cord. Her shoe. The plastic rod from a mini-blind. There were other things; I’m not sure I remember them all. The mini-blind rod was the worst. It left welts from my shoulders to my ankles — long purple bruises that didn’t have time to heal before the next round. I was so afraid of her I would pee on myself.
She did worse things too. She kicked me down stairs. She poured liquid dish soap down my throat until I vomited bubbles — not the dab-on-the-tongue version some people half-joke about. The kind I would later learn could have killed me. The first time I ever remember thinking about doing violence to another person, I was about to turn seven.
She denied me food, sometimes for days, and made me watch while she and her own kids ate in front of me. I have a problem with food to this day. I might have developed that problem like a lot of people do without her help. She made sure of it. She sent me out into a Northeastern winter with no coat. Many times I had only one or two sets of clothes. Mostly from her daughter, who was two years younger than me. When O didn’t have a reason to hurt me, she invented one — sometimes by telling my father a thing I hadn’t done, so he would whip me for it. That one always hurt my heart.
There were other things — ones I’ll write about another time. This is the abbreviated version. The non-comprehensive list.
This was what Child Protective Services photographed. This was what was in the case file. This was what was being not-remembered when, years later, a family member asked me across a kitchen if I really thought my childhood had been bad.
The thing nobody says about being remembered
You can sometimes survive what was done to you. With luck, with one good uncle, with a few brave teachers, with the right combination of accident and stubbornness, you can sometimes get out of the room you were trapped in as a child. Without that uncle and those teachers I’m not sure I would have made it out before I was dead, or O was.
What is harder to survive — and I am only telling you this if you already know it — is the discovery that the people who could have remembered, who saw some part of it or who had been shown some part of it, will at some point begin to behave as though it didn’t happen. They will minimize the parts they remember. They will say she had a hard life too.They will say it was a long time ago. They will, eventually, ask you — with what they will believe is sincere puzzlement — whether it was really that bad.
This is not a thing strangers do. Strangers, told the same details, generally don’t argue. The not-remembering is something done by people close to you — people who, if memory served them faithfully, would have to carry something heavy. So they don’t.
Some of them don’t really forget. They decide to forget. They decide it slowly, over years, the way a person decides not to think about a thing until the not-thinking becomes the default. And then, one day, in a kitchen, they ask you a question they could not ask if they had been remembering. The photographs the state collected on your behalf, when you were small and could not speak for yourself, are filed somewhere. They have been, by then, unconsulted for a long time.
What it’s done to me
Some of the damage from those years is the obvious kind. Food is complicated. Sleep is sometimes complicated. My nervous system reacts to specific cues — a tone of voice, a particular smell — in ways that have nothing to do with the present. I have, for most of my adult life, mistrusted women in positions of authority over me. That surprises people when I name it, because it cuts against the standard narrative about who abusers tend to be. The standard narrative is wrong. The federal Child Maltreatment report — the one the Children’s Bureau publishes every year — finds that more than half of the perpetrators of child maltreatment are women. The most recent edition puts the number at 51.6 percent. Most people would lose money betting on this. (Sexual abuse is the exception — those perpetrators are overwhelmingly male. The rest of the picture isn’t.) The largest perpetrator of abuse in my life was a woman. The mistrust isn’t philosophical. It lives in the part of me that learned what it learned before I could read, and isn’t easily talked out of it.
Here is what that has cost. I cannot make myself work for other people. Especially not for a woman. I have had female bosses in the past, and I had a lot of trouble with that — the kind of trouble that ends a job. My husband and I are struggling financially right now. I still cannot make myself go back. The mistrust of women in authority is not theoretical. It shows up in the bills.
Some of that damage is from O. Some of it is from later — from the people who, by the time I was old enough to talk about any of it, had already begun the long, slow, willful work of not-remembering. I’m not sure which set of damage has been harder. Some weeks I think it’s a tie.
A landing
I’m not a narcissist about this. I understand that other people have their own lives to get on with, that nobody owes me sustained attention to my history, that everyone has reasons to look away. I get it. I do.
But how, in God’s name, could anyone forget? It wasn’t a small thing! It was huge! And it has had huge consequences! The case file existed. The photographs existed. Someone made the choice to not-remember anyway.
If you are reading this at 11pm because nobody else is going to tell you tonight — what happened to you is not made small by the people around you treating it as small. It is not made small by their not-remembering. The not-remembering is its own injury. You are not making it up that it stings. You are not making it up that the second injury has sometimes been worse than the first.
If you also know what it’s like to have the people you trust dismiss your pain, please leave a comment and share with the community.
— S. Solomon
If you are in crisis right now, the resources listed on the Contact page are faster than I am. In the United States, 988 (call or text) reaches the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, the International Association for Suicide Prevention maintains a list of helplines by country at iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/.
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