shame of trauma

          Even though I have read several books about sexual trauma, I was ashamed that I could not put two and two together. It is only recently at age 30 and in 2019 that my sister led me to the truth. In retrospect, the signs were always there. Even from a young age, I found my mom's actions to be different. Seemingly trivial events could make her hysterical.  Often she would cry when we are leaving her older sister's house after a long holiday. There was another time when she broke down after hearing someone who sounded like her late mother. Sometimes she would also fake cry. When a distant relative died, she told my sister and me to feign crying on the phone because it would show the family we cared. My mom was also a master liar. She usually lied to shelter us from family secrets such as if a relative was an alcoholic or going through a divorce. She would also lie about more mundane things but always repeated that she was the only honest woman in our family because she had never uttered a lie in her whole life. We were told to never trust anyone else but our mom. Even religious texts were used to hammer home the point that a mother's love exceeds even that of the father. Mother elevated herself above all other authorities in our early lives, including our dad.

            A lot of psychologists assert the importance of secure childhood attachments as an essential factor in the development of healthy adult relationships. My mom lost her father when she was six months old. Her mother died when she was thirty. Being the youngest of eight with seven other siblings (five sisters and two brothers), she was raised solely by a single mom. My mom loved her mother deeply and sunk into a deep depression for more than two years after her death. Her second oldest sister, Rita, died when she was 25. Rita's son was my mother's favorite nephew, and he committed suicide six months after aunt Rita's death. I learned about this from my other cousins because my mom never talks about any of these incidents. To this day, she hates talking about anything negative or tragedies. If I tell her, I am feeling depressed or anxious, she would say, "It's all in mind, listen to some music, or go for a massage." There is a belief that all negative emotions can be controlled by the subject, and any deviance is a detrimental character flaw rather than something that is a healthy portion that all individuals have to negotiate. Despite my mom being overly sensitive, we were really allowed to only show positive emotions as kids.

            In 1996, my mom's oldest sister Divya got cancer and was receiving treatment in the Hyderabad Railway Hospital. Her oldest sister was ex-communicated from the family because her husband divorced her in the late Seventies. None of us ever got to see aunt Divya. My mom would go every Saturday to the hospital to drop off food and spend time with her oldest sister. I only found about this from another cousin recently. My mom would always shelter us from anything she found socially unacceptable (like her sister's ex-communication), but she would continue to maintain those relationships. It was probably because she only wanted us to be exposed to the positive. Anyways, my mom saw aunt Divya every weekend for two years before our aunt died in 1998. By the time my mom was 35, she had lost her mom, dad, and two older sisters. 

            Despite have a Master's degree and being able to speak English fluently (a vaunted skill in 1990's India), my mom was never able to hold a stable job. The gender patters in India in the late '80s and early '90s were changing. Women were gradually taking up private-sector jobs. However, unable to clear the bank exam like my dad, my mom became a homemaker. In a way, she sacrificed her career for us. She would make food and bring it to our desks while we were doing homework. When I am with her, I don't think I have ever missed a single meal. Her commitment to our health and us was/is remarkable. Yet, it was overbearing at times, it came at the expense of our dad and extended relations with our family. It led to maladaptive behaviors on our part, like being distrustful of people, passive/aggressive, emotional, and in my sister's case, being overly sheltered. I also rarely saw her be intimate with my father. Ever since we moved to America in 1999 when I was 11, my parents slept in separate beds. She also had volatile, intense relationships with her sisters and our first cousins. She could oscillate from incredible generosity to her sisters to eventually souring on them because of a perceived offense. Her constant need for attention and affirmation was noticeable throughout our childhood. It only got worse as we grew up. We are at a point now, where other than a handful of people, the rest of the family in her view is "jealous" and cannot be trusted. I cannot disagree with her assessment about a lot of people in the family, but I wonder if a less sensitive person could have maintained the relationships more effectively.

            Despite my mom's inability to hold jobs, she was a moderately active homemaker through our teenage years. In India, she mostly kept the house functioning while my dad was working. Organizing the home was not her core competency; therefore, the house though operational was always a bit disheveled. We had great neighbors to help her out. They helped raise me. They showed my mom how to bathe me, what type of foods I could eat, how to hold me, help soothe me when I was crying, etc. . . At that point, both my grandmothers had short stints to help her out as well. It takes a village to raise a child. However, beyond raising us, my mom was never really able to do anything much. My dad, on the other hand, was a very resourceful man. He grew up under my grandmother, who operated the house like a six-sigma optimized factory. She was able to raise four kids with my grandfather's salary of less than a dollar a day. My dad eventually worked at a bank in India for 20 years, bought a house, and supported a wife and two kids. In 1998, he moved to America with a hundred dollars in his pocket and a job prospect in IT. We came over a year later in 1999 with my mom after he was able to secure a job. He came despite having a partner who was inadequate in offering him support financially or emotionally. My mother was barely able to keep our house clean and give him space to think and thrive.

            We were taken in by our cousin's family in Philadelphia, and we stayed there for a month. It was winter soon after we moved on our own into a small two-bedroom apartment, and my mom sunk into a deep depression. She couldn't drive anywhere and had no friends. Our cousins who took care of us a month earlier were written off by my mom as "jealous" and "elitist." Over the years the depression and mood swings would manifest in fights with my dad, conflicts with family members, inability to keep the house clean, phantom pains, and a desperate desire to be taken care of.  In the early days, my mom would hit herself after an intense fight with my dad. It was infrequent but noticeable. She would quickly apologize after these incidents saying she didn't know why she behaved in that manner.

            My mom never showed any physical affection towards my dad. Even my from my earliest memories, I can't recall if they've ever held hands, kissed, or hugged. Even when we continued watching movies together as a family, she would make us forward through any kissing or intimate scenes. She has also never talked to us about sex. I always, more or less, saw my mom as asexual. But, sexuality not something a woman can fluidly develop in India. When I was recently reading about the Delhi Gang Rape 2012, it occurred to me that India for women in the '60s and '70s must have been significantly worse. I was shocked to recently learn from my sister that one of cousin's Snehal (who passed away in 2015) sexually molested my other cousin Anita while she was staying at his place. Snehal was married at the time of the assault and had a one-year-old kid. My sister wanted to tell everyone about Snehal before his death and tarnish his name, but my mom told her to be quiet.

             I can only imagine what it must have been like for my mom growing up being the youngest of eight children without a father in the late 1960s. Her childhood must have been filled with predators lurking everywhere. I can't say with 100% certainty that my mom faced sexual trauma during her childhood or adolescence, but I am considering it as a strong possibility.  My mom's narcissism, her extreme mood swings, her depression, her lack of being able to do things on her own, and her treatment of my father like a doormat could indicate she experienced sexual violence growing up. Also, the way she treats and talks to my sister, I feel more than likely that this was the case.

            My sister told me this year that my mom would always tell her, "You can't trust any man in the world." My sister found this odd and asked her if she could trust her uncles and males in our family, but my mom apparently told her, "Absolutely not, no one will protect you." Up until very recently, she wouldn't even allow my own dad to hang around my sister or other women who came into the house. Interestingly, while I was sent to co-ed school about 10 minutes away from my home, my sister was sent to an all-girls institution that was a 30-minute commute each way. Now I am wondering why my sister and I weren't sent to the same school. Again, her comments and actions with regards to my sister could all just be because she is crazy. But, craziness doesn't arise in a vacuum, people who endure trauma become paranoid and crazy. This does not mean that crazy people without any family baggage don't exist, but, it just makes them very rare. Even most hardened criminals have often been through abuse, neglect, and terrible early childhood attachment situations.

            There is research that shows when babies are left alone to cry for longer than 10-15 minutes because the parents can't attend to them, they became numb to emotion in the future and can turn into sociopaths. Now, my mom is not a sociopath. She loved us with all her heart and gave us the best she could. However, sometimes I wonder if she was left alone for hours as a baby because her mom had seven other kids to take care of?  I can't be sure, and it is possible that physical neglect and not sexual trauma led to her poor emotional acumen. However, it does not explain why she became so distrustful of men. Her number one goal was to "protect" my sister at all costs. Even today, she implores me to financially support my sister. She has sheltered my sister so much that my sister now resents her. I believe the reason she did that is that no one was able to protect her when she was a young woman, and she wants the best for her daughter. She gets excited every time I offer to go out with my sister in the city; she assumes I'll be there to protect her. An essential part of her identity has become protecting my sister and teaching me how to be a caring and compassionate person. She had limited positive male role models growing up.

            One of her brothers also passed away recently. He was a stellar student who finished his Masters in Physics at age 19 but had a mental breakdown and became an alcoholic and chain smoker. Her other, younger brother, suffered from PTSD and was also an alcoholic and smoker before he quit both at the age of 48. She would often make comments that neither of them could protect her until later in life when they paid for her marriage. They were both loving uncles and tried their best, but they were only teenagers who lost their father when my mom was a toddler.  My mom also always mentioned her own mother was very "naive" and could quickly be taken advantage of.

            Again, I can't be 100% certain that the way my mom operates is because she's been through sexual trauma. But, she definitely has PTSD from growing up in abject poverty. She is obsessed with me making more money, always worried about our resources, and still prefers the company of older, wealthier women. It is an exaggerated response to much of her feeble adolescence. As a 60-year-old woman, she refuses to stay alone at home. If my dad is planning to go away on a trip, she makes sure someone (my sister or I) can stay home for the night. My mom was considered a good looking girl during her teenage years: she was tall, slender, and her skin tone was lighter than most South Indian women in Hyderabad. India in the '60s was not safe for such women.  And because of the shame any such event or events would have, my mom probably never discussed anything she encountered with anyone. She did reveal to my sister that one of my first cousins, who is ironically her age, took my mom under "her wing" and taught her "how to behave like a woman."

            Interestingly, my mom was very close with her sister closest to her in age, the 7th youngest child, with my mom being the 8th. My aunt Sapna, whom I used to spend months at a time with as a child, is a loving woman. She resembles my mom most closely in looks. However, aunt Sapna's demeanor is entirely different. Our uncle Rama was a delinquent who had a mental breakdown in the 1990s, and aunt Sapna supported both her kids as a school teacher. My first cousins grew up incredibly poor and always cash strapped being raised by a single mother. Eventually, my father helped fund their education when we moved to the States. The point is that her sister was able to hold a job,  and was stable enough to raise two kids on her own. Did my mom turn out differently because she went through a trauma (physical, psychological, or sexual) that her sister did not endure? Did this allow her sister to survive on her own and flourish in a terrible situation, and my mom, despite having the support of a wonderful husband isn't able to overcome her demons?  Trauma is enduring. It is intergenerational. It destroys lives and something that happened years ago can sap the energy and the intellect of someone who is in their sixties.

            I have only begun thinking about ways to uncover what really happened and what this means for us. I love my mom, and I am proud of her. I will always support her and help her overcome her demons. She learned to drive in Nashville, and there was a brief period of 4-5 years where she drove us all around town. She also chaperoned me when I got my learner's permit. She worked a couple of jobs at Vanderbilt. She finished a Master's degree. She produced a music CD with Carnatic songs. She's developed a decent friend circle and convinced my dad to financially support her sister's and extended family.

            Most importantly, she took care of all of our basic needs. She "protected us" in India and abroad. She fulfilled her duty: which is to care for us and love us deeply. It was at the expense of my dad, who not only had to be her husband but also serve as the father figure she's never had. I can't imagine the stress that this puts him under, but that's something he has to work through. For a long time, I thought because we weren't a dual-income family, my mom held us back. I blamed her for me being a middle-class nobody.  I assumed her working would have taken the financial burden off of everybody in the family. However, after therapy, I realized that she probably could have not have sustained a career with her emotional issues. I am glad she was there for us, always. I also understand that trauma is intergenerational. I have inherited her misery and trauma, and there are times when all of her worst qualities are also present in me. However, I am also not her. In a sense, she sacrificed her life so that my sister and I could become different. We can look to our future without being burdened by our past.