Sliding Doors; ‘Could I have stopped the sexual abuse?’
Over the last couple of weeks, watching my daughter confined to her room with anxiety, hearing her utter the words “I just can’t fight them anymore” following the latest school debacle has sparked my grief.
Grief at her lost childhood, lost school years, and grief at the threat to her future. It hurts - it’s dull and hollow, it’s painful.
Quite by chance, our latest Book Club novel is The Names, a story told over the course of a lifetime from the lens of three different narratives — all resting on a mother’s decision about what to name her son and the impact it has on the domestic violence she faces at the hands of her husband.
The thought had already crossed my mind: what if I hadn’t left him? What if I had stayed? Would he still have committed sexual abuse against my children? Or would the emotional and verbal abuse inflicted on me have been enough for him?
I chose to leave him when the girls were young because I could see the impact of his abuse on them. I could see my eldest — pale, withdrawn, crouched in front of Ben and Holly - while I stopped arguing with his outbursts, realising it was futile.
But what would their lives be like if I had stayed?
I asked my daughter. I said I hated seeing her like this, wished I could take it away, wondered what would have happened. Her reply was almost instant: “But we wouldn’t have had the fun times.” And as she said it, I felt a kaleidoscope of memories — picturing when they swam in the VIP pool amidst the gold bikini-clad dancers at the ages of five and eight in Mykonos, the kitchen discos, driving with our bell tent ready to erect on weekends away.
I was amazed. Amazed she still carried those memories with her, as she seems so entrenched in her darkened room with a vape and TikTok for company. Amazed that they still sit true with her when she is so engulfed in PTSD symptoms. And it made me realise that those glimmer moments - those sparks of joy - can still be seen by a teen with trauma, not just my glimmer-trained mind.
I’ve seen a quiet change in her too. She is talking to me more, as if the adult-child is emerging from pure teen terror. And just when I felt I couldn’t face her pain anymore, I see a lightness and emotional maturity. It has coincided with nearly two weeks of school refusal, developed from the last catastrophe, which demonstrated they have a pure vendetta against her - and me - for fighting.
And I hope that, in time, she’ll see those sliding-door moments for what they were: choices we made to survive, to protect, to keep moving forward. I hope she’ll understand that walking away isn’t the same as giving up, and that even in the darkest chapters there were memories worth holding onto. And when she looks back, I hope she still says:
