I keep going back to my mother, to the thing that haunts me everyday; to better explain, I felt like I needed to peel back one more layer for you guys… because this is the part that fuels a lot of the anger and confusion I’m sitting with today.

I’ve talked before about how I came forward to my mom about my own sexual abuse — how I told her what my brother’s father did to me when I was 3 until I was 8 or 9. And even now, as a grown woman with kids of my own, I still can’t make sense of her reaction. She didn’t respond like a mother protecting her child. She confronted him, sure… but that was it. No police report. No boundaries. No “you’re never seeing my daughter again.” Nothing.

Instead, life just kept rolling like nothing happened. I don’t think it was ever mentioned again until after she died and I talked about it with my brother.

What hurts the most is that I’m pretty sure I was 8 when I told her, because shortly after that… she moved us to another state, nine hours away, where the only person we knew was the same man who had molested me. And of course he was around — he was my brother’s dad — so everyone just slipped right back into pretending none of it ever happened. Like it was easier to ignore the truth than deal with the reality of what he’d done.

Sometimes I try to rationalize it. Maybe she didn’t believe me. Maybe she thought I was confusing one abuser for another. Maybe she told herself a story that made it easier to cope with her own trauma. But I know what happened to me. I know what he did. I know what he tried to do after she died. There’s no confusion. No mix-up. No blurry memory. Just truth.

And still… I can’t wrap my head around how a parent — especially one who lived through so much abuse themselves — could willingly put their child right back in the line of fire. How do you ignore something like that? How do you not see the danger? How do you not fight like hell for your kid? How do you just choose not to protect them?

I want answers so badly. I want some kind of explanation that makes any of this make sense. But this is one of those wounds where grief settles in like a guest that never leaves — because I know I’ll never get the answers I crave.

And that’s what I’m wrestling with today: the ache of the unknown, the anger of what was allowed, and the strange, heavy grief of loving a mother who couldn’t protect me… even when she should have.

XOXO, The Healing Wildflower