Why Didn't You Tell

So this week brought another rehearsal for the Vagina Monologues.  This year the women presenting are sharing their own stories.  And, as usual, it's stirring up some deep shit for me.  

"Why didn't you tell?"

That's a question I hear over and over.  Who should I have told?

My MOTHER?  I still can't decide if she knew all along and turned a blind eye or if she was genuinely clueless to the abuse happening in her own home.  I try to puzzle out if this is why she acted so horribly toward my abuser.  I can't imagine a scenario where she believed me over her precious sons.  Her precious sexual abuser sons.  Could she believe a truth that shatters the veneer of her life?

I will finally tell her when I an 47 and she is 79 and she will become another of those to ask, "Why didn't you tell?"  The truth is an answer she doesn't want to hear.  She will ask me to leave her home  two weeks after hearing it and then pretend she did not ever after.  On that day she will tell me, "I just can't look at you."  And these will remain the most hurtful words anyone has ever uttered to me.  I know what she means, that I have disrupted her golden years with my ugly truth.  I will move out, move on.  But I will carry the hurt of those words to my grave, "I-just-can't-look-at-you."

Should I have told my FATHER?  My dad owned a gun, had fought in WWII, had an old-fashioned pedestal view of women and girls and a lightning-qick temper.  His daughter supreme among them all.  Knowing his son had deliberately and cruelly hurt his daughter repeatedly in THAT WAY would have resulted in the death of my brother, the imprisonment of my dad for murder, and further estrangement from my mother for daring to pull back the curtain and reveal the seamy inner workings of my circus freak show family.

Should I have told a TEACHER?  A nun?  Yeah, asked and answered in one.  I do wonder why no one ever remarked on the previously tidy child who arrived daily from the fourth grade to the eighth grade dishevelled and disarrayed.  I'm sure they just blamed my mom for going back to work and leaving her children home alone.  As if we weren't alone anyway.

I did try to tell my PRIEST.  But he laughed at me and dismissed me.  He single-handedly killed God and any hope of ever gaining relief from my abuser in one tiny dark moment.

So I stayed silent.  I didn't tell.  Because there was no one to listen.  I was just a girl, a less than commodity in 1970.  I protected my abusers for 40 years.

Now I protect me.  I make my own safety.  I honor that brave little girl and listen to what she says.  I believe her when others wouldn't, couldn't.

And now when people ask me, "Why didn't you tell?"

I always answer, "I'm telling you now."