My Mother and Alice Munro

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash When I was a very little girl my mother used to take me over to the neighbor’s house down the street. Susan* (*not her real name), the neighbor was twenty or so years older than my mother and had a forty-year-old son who lived at home with her. He used to take me upstairs and molest me while my mother drank with Susan and their friends on Sunday afternoons. They drank whiskey in a glass while cigarette smoke filled the kitchen, in a house that was fascinatingly clean and empty where I was led up the stairs to the man’s bedroom. I told my mother what happened, but nothing changed. We still spent Sundays there. This ritual seemed sanctioned, somehow, like a powdery aunt kissing your cheek or an older cousin who tickles too hard. It was sanctioned in the way that so many terrible things that happen to children—generation after generation—are, and it turned my generation, Gen X, into great, winged, helicopter parents who never let our kids out of our sight., We try to protect them, yes, but also, impossibly, we try to make right the wrongs that were done to us. When I sat in the parlor of my best friend who lived across the street from the man who was molesting me, I told her mother what was happening. I told it like it was a joke, something funny that happened to me. She was horrified. She told the appropriate people, including Susan, who then put her son into a group home. She didn’t abandon him; he came home on the weekends. And so there he was every Sunday afternoon when my mother continued to bring me over to the house while she smoked and drank with his mother. Sadly, this was not the only time I was left to fend for myself while my mother retreated into the oblivion of alcohol and her own private pain. It was not the only time I begged my mother to not force me to go places where I was abused or […]

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