Tell Me Why, Mummy: A Little Boy’s Struggle to Survive. A Mother’s Shameful Secret. The Power to Forgive.

Every time I see him I long for a stronger bond between us, but it never happens. I wish he would cuddle me or sit me on his knee, but it hardly ever happens and it makes me feel sad.

* * *

My parents separate around 1973 when I am five but it isn’t until many years later that Dad tells me that even though they both knew their marriage was over, it took some time for them to be able to sit down and talk it through because it could only be done when she wasn’t drinking.

Even by the age of five there is a definite hole in my life developing. I am happy when Mum helps me to fill it by the way she pays me attention. She doesn’t come to me and make me touch her every day – sometimes weeks go by without her coming to me in this way. But when she does, it somehow fulfils a need in us both.

She needs it for reasons that I am too young to understand. The reason for my need is much more simple: I need the attention. Even at this early age, it helps to build a bond between us. As she is now the only active parent I have, I instinctively understand the importance of this.

At the end of those times we spend together, when she wants me to touch her, she never thanks me but she doesn’t tell me off either. That’s to become the norm and that’s how I want it to be.

I have always worked harder to avoid criticism than to chase praise.

I am too young to know that, in reality, my mother is taking advantage of my submissive nature, committing the worst abuse of the power she has over her child that any parent can. I will soon come to realize this, and that’s when the problems really begin.

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