Alice Munro’s Daughter Hits Close to Home

I could read only so much of the OpEd penned by Alice Munro’s daughter.  I might have gotten a hundred words or so in, and I had to stop.  It was too close to the bone to continue.

The OpEd, entitled “My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child.  My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him,” appeared in the Toronto Star  on 7 July 2024.  The drama and trauma appeared in many of my social media feeds, along with the usual idiotic commentary on how Alice Munro’s daughter should have kept her mouth shut, why did she take so long to say anything, and so forth.

All the victim blaming.  All the usual.

I wish she’d “let well enough alone,” as she calls it. I can’t express to her what thoughts of Bobby do to me, even after all these years, even at this age. I’m quiet, but I cannot shake the rage just below my surface. — Midlife Visions

People who haven’t been there don’t understand.  For me, it wasn’t my dad or a stepdad who was my abuser, but an elderly (to me, at age 11 to 13) uncle who was highly revered in my family. I’ve written extensively about it over the years in an attempt to heal, and I’ve heard all the same things as I now hear about Alice Munro’s daughter:  the victim blaming, the “you should’ve spoken up (I did–SO many times), the gaslighting that I was being ungrateful or whiny or disrespectful when I was simply trying to keep his hands out of my pants.

If only all the people who have tried to silence me, all the way back to when I was 11 and pleading for help from adults around me, had put a smidgen of the energy to keep me quiet and not embarrass the family into actually protecting me!

Back around 2005, I started writing a healing journal in blog format and shared it with a limited group of women who were healing from their own traumas. We were all on Livejournal back then for that reason.  I held so much resentment for my tyrannical father and my passive mother for not lifting a finger to save me from the family pedophile and, if anything, actually pushing me into his clutches with guilt for not being nice to the old man my dad adored and doing whatever was necessary to avoid him on his weekly visits, not to visit my parents but to visit me with gifts of jewelry and clothes.  My counselor suggested I write the story of how my parents did save me from him, so I could ease my mind with a better ending, and I did.  In that story, I imagined my parents defending their little girl, even kiling the predator and disposing of his body.  Unfortunately, for all the abuse victims who totally understood and applauded this healing exercise, a couple of predators found it on a private site–yes, they were lurking and enjoying our conversation–and began harassing me privately but viciously.

I’m sure there was some kind of catharsis for Alice Munro’s daughter to go on the public record like this.  There sure was for me, even if I got flak for it. It’s finally having a voice, finally being heard.  You can’t always do that when the other person is still alive because those old family dynamics don’t quietly disappear.

Fast-forward to 2018 and my widowed mother had a series of strokes that began a long and painful journey with progressive dementia. Over the few year before that, we’d had a couple of pretty bad arguments–the only ones we every had in our mother-daughter relationship–because she FINALLY wanted to talk about my predator and I finally didn’t.  About how she’d “suspected” — yes, even with me telling her, begging her.  At the same time, she double-downed on how it wasn’t as bad for me as someone she’d read about, even someone fictional, and did her best to discount my childhood trauma.   I knew that she had been terrified of defying my dad. I understood how weak she’d been when it came to defending me, not against strangers, but against predatory family members.

But all I wanted was for her to acknowledge that she’d failed me, to acknowledge her role in what had happened when I was a child and she was too afraid to stand up for me. That was it.  Just to own it, so I could get closure and move on.

I never got that closure, and at some point, maybe six months into her growing dementia and diminishing memory, I had to accept that I would never get it.  She no longer remembered when I couldn’t forget. Letting go of that need for justice was hard.

As always with me, my catharsis comes through my writing.  It’s how I work through the hard stuff.  I will rarely write the actual story as it happened, but I’ll create a story framework that allows me to work through the same emotions.  For the third book of the Rites of Passage trilogy I was writing, I drew heavily from my experience with my predator and found a way to make peace with my mom because in real life, that was never going to happen.

They say the human brain experiences the past as the present and locks into moments of trauma as if they were happening now. All I know is that it’s been years since I’ve been this angry, and it’s all because I remember my helplessness as if it happened yesterday when I was too young to know to be angry. The only thing that’s worse is the growing rawness of emotion toward my feeble mother for something she did—or didn’t do—forty years ago. — Midlife Visions

I started writing the series a few months after my mom passed.  The childhood abuse appeared in reference in the first two books, which begin with the protagonist not being able to speak up for herself and witnessing something related that happens to her daughter at the same age and yet takes longer than necessary to act. I cast the protagonist as a modern-day witch, which is what I like to do to show the magic in a woman at midlife as well as her being shunned or made an outcast for being different or for speaking up for herself. Regardless of your religious beliefs, it makes a great analogy.

In the first book, Midlife Illusions, she stands up against her verbally abusive husband and teachers.  In the second, Midlife Mirages, there’s far more suspense as she deals with deep loss and letting go of people who mean the world to her.  The personal development and coming to terms with deep trauma ends with Midlife Visions.  Even though there’s a lot of suspense and a second-chance love story in this third installment, it’s the closest to my own story that I’ve written.  It wasn’t easy, and I cried through some of the chapters because it was so close to my own experience with my mom’s fears, her dementia, and my getting closure.

In my own life’s story, as opposed to my fiction, my predator never took me on a camping trip and I never crawled through a swamp to escape. Oh, but he had plans!  My dad had already agreed that I could/should accept the invitation to leave the premises with my uncle for a trip to town.  The physical assaults had become more and more blatant on his every visit, and he was givien time alone with me each time, even against my protests–which always got me into trouble for being disrespectful.

I was super-sheltered and naive at that age, but I knew something was bad wrong. I knew from his last visit that he was going to take me off the premises and rape me on his next visit.  The next Sunday.

Other than his emphysemic tongue down my throat and his wrinkled hands down the back of my elastic-waist shorts set and inside my underwear, the thing I remember most was my anxiety over his next visit and my inability to escape the inevitable.  I remember sitting at my open window on the edge of my bed and watching the all-night twist of the constellations in the west, the gentle sway of the sycamore tree in the front yard, a young pecan tree that looked like someone playing a guitar.   I remember praying, pleading with God, to save me from my uncle.

He died before that next visit. For years, I thought my prayers had killed him.

When I wrote Midlife Visions, I was able to get the closure I needed with my mom and understand her inability to act, even to protect me, and her inability to take responsibility for failing me. The book turned out to be twice as long as I had planned, but I finally got to a place of peace with a past that never found closure where I had always needed it.

I hope Alice Munro’s daughter and all the other victims whose pleas went unheard find the peace and justice they long for as well.

 

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