What do you say when your 12 year old asks ‘was I sexually abused’?

I am longing for a ‘simple’ week.

Lola’s therapy is continuing to be really tough, which seems an understatement. Tough doesn’t seem to do justice to her talking with her trauma therapist about how she felt when the abuse took place.

She has hardly been in school, at one point voicing that she can’t be in a place where people don’t believe her / she hates (read: Head Teacher). She tells me she doesn’t know why she feels so bad and she’s hardly out of bed. I am resorting to buying meal deals to make her eat. Her BFF is the only one to make her laugh - but I am so thankful she has that one person that can do that for her.

At points she hasn’t even been on a TikTok loop as she lies in her darkened room. I caught her counting her fingers, a technique taught by her therapist to control waves of panic - not something she normally does unless it is to steel herself for school.

I explain I know it, when it was me, that my CPTSD healing left me doing the bare minimum but work (work is a saviour for me - I love it in the main and can hyperfocus). But I also know my trauma is nothing compared to hers. However, when she came out of therapy this week she told me - and she doesn’t share much from it - that they had been focusing on her future. That her roadmap was a year out with her BFF, career, marriage and two kids. And I LOVE that she is there.

Coco, on the other hand, has been upset with school test results. She is working so incredibly hard. She has always been clever, but six years of supervised contact has left her academically fucked from the loop of trauma that the courts forced her to live in. I tell her that her brain will catch up, that trauma changes the way we grow -but it breaks my heart to see.

She also asked me this week if I had been sexually abused. I said no (well, I have - but at parties, in the 90s, at work - but that doesn’t count). She had been sexually abused. Coco was surprised. I asked her: why else did she have PTSD?

Has she buried it?

She was four at the time.

She clearly remembers one thing he used to do, and it was so strange talking about it with her now - as we haven’t for years. We had a very different conversation than when we last spoke about it six years ago. We laughed. That probably sounds weird, but what he did was so fucked. She did remember Lola protecting her, trying to shield her sister by telling her to hide behind the sofa.

This has always been the hardest thing for me to imagine: my seven-year-old having such strength and love that she tried with all her might to protect her four-year-old sister.

It’s unimaginable.

And this is what makes me the most angry when school negates her trauma.

And work. Work has been shit. Having a narcissistic boss is no fun at the best of times, let alone when I am exhausted. But thanks to my hyperfocus, it does give me some mental escape from the girls.

It means I haven’t been as present for them - my overwhelm leading me to fail in my Lorelai Gilmore aspiration. After the run-in with the school last week AGAIN, I had a few days of feeling dissociative and drained (a win, however, as I only made two Vinted purchases in that time). But in those days I focused on #glimmermoments even though I had to dig very deep:

• Dancing in the kitchen with Lola to Fleetwood Mac. If nothing else, I have given her good music taste and justified that I refused to spend her formative years listening to anything but good tunes; there were no nursery rhymes for us - she was lulled with proper Paradise Garage disco.

• My peonies' first bloom.

• And kind words on Instagram from someone who thanked me for sharing as the Practical Mermaid with such honesty.

XOXO