The phone call. Part 2

............In true stepfather style, he stepped over the decent limit of what is natural and good. I stopped him, but that wasn’t enough, I was caught, we were both caught, in a web of lies and blackmail that has lasted all this time.........

“Don’t tell your mother” He'd said afterwards, when I was 13 “She’d make me go away and that would make her very unhappy”. So goes the speech of many a ‘bad’ daddy. And so I didn’t tell, we, him and me, keep the secret, because we know, I knew, he was right.

Eventually though, children do tell, though it is common for them not to be believed. About 4 years later, in a fit of temper one day, in the middle of an argument, I told my mum. Not all of it, that only happened tonight in the phone call, but I told her enough, or so I thought. I expected something to be done, I'm not sure what.

She did nothing.

I left home when I was 17.

Apparently, what I'd told her, still protecting her even when I was angry, was merely that he had had intentions. Perhaps that is just what she chose to hear, but that is what she believed until the phone call. Was she naive? Perhaps she didn't want to face the truth. "It's not been easy living with him over the years" She said to me last night on the phone. I know that it has been hard for her, but it was her choice.

I said nothing.

Like a large black crustacean, clinging to the back of our minds, scratching and pawing to be released the memory lingered. During the following uneasy years after I left home, we buried it, slowly. We kept the secret and the creature diminished with the years. Untalked about it faded. Perhaps that was for the best.

I was never close to him, could never be close. We never hugged like ‘normal’ families do, or touched or kissed goodbye. It was OK, we could do this, on the surface everything was fine. We looked like any other family, from the outside. Though I did sometimes wonder how my mum could stay. How could she know what she knew, and still be with him? I still don’t have the answer to that question.

Yet I have accepted. I have accepted and forgiven. It is water under the bridge, gone now, and there is nothing to be done. You can't change the past, you can only make the future, and bearing a grudge is not my way, it is not healthy. I do not hold it against him, it is far too long ago for all that.

The nasty dark creature was safe in it’s box for quite some time, until I had my own children in fact. My daughter. How could I protect her? (Let me tell you now, I never ever leaver her alone in his presence) How could I make sure that nothing like that ever happened to her? She was still a baby when I asked that question to a councillor. He replied that by the time she was 13 my step father may be dead! He is not. Though one day inevitably he will be, and that was how the phone call began...........

You can read Part 1 below, or here.