A shorter version of this article appears in The Guardian
A winter’s day. My father in the dark room of my memory developing photographs. The door is shut. My sister stands with him. He aims to teach her the essentials of photography. How to turn a black and white negative rolled from the interior of his camera, unspooled in the dark, then bathed in trays of chemical, to bring the past back to life in black and white.
My sister’s special treatment as the only one of nine siblings to learn this skill does not go unnoticed, by me at least. I am ten years old and long to be included even as I want only to be an insect in the corner watching unseen.
My father taught me fear. And in his height and isolation he added lashings of desire. Small children rely on their parents for sustenance and survival and when a parent is abusive, where the only love a child comes to know is corrupted, it comes with a sense that other siblings, who also seek his love, are rivals.
Writing about incest is hard. Writing about the unfathomable, yet surprisingly common jealousy experienced as the sibling of an abused child is even harder. This is what I aim to do here.
When you’re little you look up at the mountain of your father, his shoulders high in the clouds. He does not stoop to meet you but stands erect, determined to let you know who’s master. You develop an inner fear. A scurrying mouse-like feeling in your heart who seeks cover, or like one of Janet Frame’s migratory birds, flies ever higher to the ceiling in search of escape. Out through a window and off into the cold of Antarctica where nothing can touch you for the numbness that pervades your every bone.
The pecking order of people fascinates me from the days when I was one of the small ones perched on a bench at the kitchen table, back against the wall. Four children, two boys and two girls, we dangled our legs and looked at our plates still empty until our mother piled on a mountain of potatoes mashed with carrot and onion. Hutspot, a Dutch delight designed to fill empty bellies with basic nutrition and as easy to assemble as cheese on toast, except when she forgot the potatoes and the water boiled away.
My mother scraped chunks off the top and left the blackened base to soak overnight. The rescued potatoes looked good enough to eat but not to smell. The whole dish once combined with carrot and onions, and seared with the taste of charcoal, was hard to get down. But we ate it, at least when we were small enough to sit on the bench opposite the bigger kids, two tall boys and one adolescent girl, alongside the two tiny ones elevated in highchairs.
Look around this table. Note the parents at either end. Mother closest to the kitchen sink, father at the head. A constellation that speaks to the order of things. Migrants to Australia from Europe after the war. The parents still spoke with a guttural cadence from the Netherlands. The children adopted their best BBC British learned at primary school in the suburb of Camberwell in Melbourne where the parents had landed during the early 1950s.
Imagine this family and consider which of these children has the hardest time. Is it the girl who sits beside me, who when she was nine travelled alone in an ambulance to the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital and stayed there for three months in the women’s dormitory with Rheumatic Fever, a strep throat gone wrong. Her fellow patients loaded with other communicable diseases. To be excluded from society, and for short times from each other.
Who had the hardest time? Could it be her tall brother on the other side of the table, who some months earlier as a sixteen-year-old copped the same fate? Only his rheumatic fever morphed into osteomyelitis after the infection travelled from his heart to his feet. He nearly lost a leg, but doctors had discovered penicillin which dragged his life and limb back from the brink. Still functional, despite the crater in its centre.
Or was it the boy on the other side of me? The one christened the family genius, who scooped prizes in his final years at St Patrick’s College, in Latin, French, English, mathematics, physics and chemistry. He was left-handed in the days when left-handedness was a curse to be ironed out. This boy became ambidextrous to beat the system but in the process lost his ability to communicate. Although he could form words when addressed, he responded in monosyllables and unless alone with one other safe person, he said nothing.
Or the other boy on the bench, the one christened the ‘runt of the litter’ because, unlike his four brothers, he failed to grow tall. He struggled to read in a family that valued literacy. He sat at the end of the table after dinner alone reading out loud for the father. Each time the boy stumbled over a word his father rapped a fork over his knuckles.
The chosen one
None of these. From the oldest to the youngest, the one singled out for the prize of victim, if such a label should land on any one person within the pecking order of a family riddled with incest, goes to my eldest sister. She in the dark room. A red globe in the corner, the only light as my father touched her body in secret. It took fifty years before she could tell me.
‘The past is beautiful,’ writes Virginia Woolf ‘because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.’
One such beauty lies in moments of understanding, when we can unite two opposing sensations held together within the haphazardness of experience. Like the idea I could be jealous of an elder sister for having something I never wanted and yet at the same time longed for. My father’s abusive ‘love’ and my mother’s gratitude towards her for enduring it.
When Haruki Murakami’s character Kafka, in his novel, Kafka on the Shore, experiences a stab of jealousy, Murakami reminds us, jealousy is like ‘a brush fire. It torches your heart.’ Heat that rises from your core. If there is any emotion that dogs me beyond shame and occasional deep longing, it is jealousy. And to understand this complex emotion I join with another for a deep dive.
Research on non-abused, non-abuser siblings within incestuous families
We met online. Anais Cadieux Vanvliet had read my book, The Art of Disappearing and was interested to discuss the impact of childhood sexual abuse on what they call non-abused and non-abuser siblings. Cadieux Vanvliet uses the term with reservations, as it fails to include the fact such siblings are also indirectly abused. As yet we have no language to describe such experiences.
Cadieux Vanvliet in Montreal, and me in Melbourne. Continents and oceans away. We meet on zoom to navigate around stories of people who, like us, have witnessed sexual abuse in childhood and suffered the fall out.
How can we tell the difference between one story and another while also reflecting on similarities and variations in experience?
It comes in the story telling, the stirring up of emotions that emerge out of those details. So, we explore what has long been hidden: the experience of those on the sidelines of familial sexual abuse whose traumatic experience tends to be overlooked by caregivers, policy makers and within the popular imagination.
As part of their research, Cadieux Vanvliet has interviewed clinicians to ascertain how they consider the experience for non-abused, non-abuser siblings within such families.
Although clinicians might understand the vexed position we non-abused siblings find ourselves in, others are more circumspect. Maybe more concrete in their understanding. As if the abuse matters most to the people within the abused/abusive couple, primarily the victim/survivor. The rest becomes collateral.
One of the hardest things to understand, the extent to which a person who survives abuse by avoiding it, one who sits beside or witnesses the abuse like me, or who like Cadieux Vanvliet learns about it later, carries a question: ‘What about me?’ A tingling of jealously we find hard to understand because we know we’re also the lucky ones to have been spared.
The secrecy of abuse
My father never showed me love. He had eyes only for my big sister and although she and I did not talk about it until I was in my fifties, I knew what had happened between my father and my sister even as a ten-year-old when we shared a bedroom. I had no words for it then.
How can we call abuse ‘special treatment’? In the mind of a child this is how it seems. Your father chooses you, or at least he chooses your body on which to focus his attention.
As the psychoanalyst Maurice Whelan describes it, for the abused child a deep confusion ensues. The father visits in the night, in secrecy and does things with their body that trouble, and disturb them, even as this touch might arouse them in ways they cannot understand. Then the father swears them to secrecy and in the morning and in days to come, says nothing. He treats them as usual – whether coolly indifferent, or ostensibly friendly – but his behaviour is cut off from their experience at night, until the next time.
The non-abused sibling may not be aware of this. May not see it happening, as I did, but all non-abused siblings live in a hot house of repressed sexuality. It erupts in secrecy and silence in the shadows. A sexuality that is confused with power and shame. The abuser who cannot deal with their own internal struggles with desire and a sense of inadequacy – most likely based on their own traumatic childhood experiences – draws their child in, one child, or in some families more.
My younger sisters it seems have different stories from what they’ve told me. They too came close to being sexually abused by our father, only the eldest directly so. The point is, non-abused siblings, whether they consciously know or not, are overtaken by an atmosphere of secrecy and violent underpinnings that speak to something dangerous going on. It does not feel safe in such a household. There are constrictions we may not know about, but we sense them. The unspoken family rules to stay silent.
Most parents experience some modicum of desire for their children that sits on the edge of incestual longing. Think of a breast-feeding mother who experiences bodily arousal as her baby sucks from her nipple. Most manage to overcome such impulses by sublimating them into what the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi describes as an attitude of tenderness towards their child. This tenderness holds a vital energy of love and affection, but usually fails to slip into the behaviour and language of adult passion and desire.
Ferenczi describes the sexually abused child’s experience as a ‘confusion of tongues’. For instance, my father told my sister, he was stretching her vagina to prepare her for marriage. As if he was doing this for her good.
Then when I was fourteen, my sister told me the so-called facts of life as relayed to her by our father. He had given her this information to help her grow, he said, because our mother came from a repressed Catholic household and did not know what a man needed before they married.
He therefore taught my sister about his desire, confused as hers. And she in her turn, wanting to shield me from the pain of his lessons, told me repeatedly, ‘If he touches you, scream’. At the same time, she told me how men and women enjoy intercourse, the penis in the vagina.
My mind sealed over in disgust even as late as fourteen, when she told me, as if I had taken on the role of my prudish mother, and needed my well-informed sister, channelling my father, to educate me. I was both resentful and grateful for her instructions. Grateful, as when she told me the facts she urged me not to tell our younger sister who was not yet old enough. I felt a familiar pleasure in holding knowledge over my little sister while inferior to my big sister who knew it all.
This is our story. And the way it evolves and continues to evolve into the next generation can only be improved by better understanding the extent to which sexual abuse in families affects every family member, all siblings, not just the chosen one. And can continue into the next generation, from previous generations.
Layers of jealousy
My sister was on the cusp of four, the year I was born. Already she knew how to change a baby’s nappy, or so she told me years later, with two younger brothers, a year apart, and each needing attention in the way of babies who excel at helplessness. We’re all helpless then, even my four years older sister, who seemed ancient and loaded with wisdom. Her body years ahead of mine. At first in height and then later as it filled into those womanly curves my father so admired.
From the get-go, she was much more able than me. Or so I believed. She spent her earliest years surrounded by males, my father and four brothers and their impulses, until I came along. Impulses that puzzled me. The way my brothers had penises and exuded more energy, but even as I write this I find myself questioning these so-called gender differences that in my family brought on a division of labour which was endlessly unfair.
When you’re a child, the life you lead is the only life you know. You catch glimpses of other people’s lives from a distance. We were unique in our foreignness, in the abuses my father meted out and it shamed me when I looked at the fathers of other children at my school and feared their derision.
My father’s choice was my fault. If I behaved in a different way, if I was more like my elder sister, if I offered him more by way of interest, or body shape or beauty then he might not only notice me but also he might be kind and not fly into rages at the simplest slight. My mother’s overcooked steak. Dishes piled high in the sink. Any child who did not behave as they were told.
When I was twelve and shared a room with my elder sister I went to bed ahead of her. Alone under the blankets I imagined myself as Maid Marion from Robin Hood and his merry men. I hid in the forest terrified the Sheriff of Nottingham might carry me to his castle and ravage me. Somewhere in my unconscious mind, I knew what was happening to my sister.
The thought both terrified and thrilled me, but the greatest thrill came in the knowledge that Robin Hood in green tights, with quiver and arrows clamped on his back and bow in hand, would leap from trees, and carry me deep into the forest where he would caress and love me.
The sexual energy of these fantasies deepened as I imagined huge breasts on my thin body. Then reality returned as my sister switched on the light in readiness for bed. I stayed under blankets before the second episode of the evening.
I was almost asleep to the soft thud of his bare feet on the carpet between our beds. My sister asleep or so I imagined. I did not want my father to take me in his arms and possess me. I did not want whatever it was my father did to my sister on those nights, night after night when he came into our room while the rest of the house slept. And yet, I wanted to turn him into Robin Hood. I wanted my father to want me. I wanted him to see me but did not want to be seen.
Looking back, it was as if any woman who commanded my father’s attention was one who evoked sexual feelings in him. The rest of us were dispatched to the role of servants. People to cook and clean. Even my mother bore babies for him, but those already born were of no consequence. Except my sister.
My mother believed our father had stopped visiting my sister in the night. She caught him earlier in our bedroom, my father hunched over my sister while I was in the next bed pretending to be asleep.
‘If you ever come here again,’ she said, ‘I’ll kill you.’ Her threat did not stop him, but my mother could not bear to believe otherwise. When you’re desperate, you’ll do anything to survive.
I was in awe of my sister’s courage when she stood in front of my father’s chair and sometimes asked for money. I could not ask for anything of my father beyond the good night gesture my mother forced onto us younger kids. My father stretching up from his chair to make the sign of the cross on our foreheads as some type of fatherly protection, or priest-like when on Ash Wednesday Father Walsh dabbed a fingerprint of black ash on our foreheads to commemorate the death of Christ.
I despised this ritual. The rasp of my father’s fingers on my soft forehead, the croak of his words, goedenacht, the air puffing back into his seat when he flopped down, and we, my younger sister and I retreated to our respective rooms, ready for the dangers of the night.
On jealousy, the colour green
Bless me father for I have sinned against my younger sister for wanting what was hers. I borrowed her dress when she did not give me permission. Then I ruined it. My sister’s dress was too small. I slipped into it well enough, but the buttons were tight and could not hold against the pressure of my first attempts to skate around the ice rink at St Moritz in St Kilda with school friends one summer holiday.
I came home in the dress, its underarms ripped from their sockets and my sister was enraged. I had destroyed her favourite dress. Blue denim with buttons up the front.
Jealousy ruins things. Ruins people. But my therapist reassured me it was a feeling, and not evil, however painful. It’s bad enough to endure this feeling, she told me, but ten times worse if you’re given the message it’s wrong to feel it in the first place.
It’s not wrong to feel any way, my therapist told me. We feel as we feel. And feelings matter. Feelings are human. They come upon us with a reasoning all their own. We can’t control them however hard we try. It’s what we do with our feelings that counts most.
My therapist helped me understand we can only do our best to let the feelings in and experience the full thrust of the jealousy or shame or whatever grief assails us and let ourselves recognise the feeling. Give it words in our head. Try to understand why this sensation has come upon us. Only then, is the feeling likely to move. To shift and sway, to flit in other directions.
If we squash it because we believe it’s wrong then the feeling will bury itself inside, until the sinews of our hearts are like shards of stone that form into sediment and harden like volcanic rock. Only an explosion can shift it.
Explosions are dangerous. They can destroy everything in their path. Better to feel the tug and pull and pain of jealousy than to let it enter the vaults of the hidden and forgotten. If not exploded into existence in our time, the feeling might then get carried into the next generation, where one of our children or children’s children winds up carrying it to their detriment. As we carry that of our ancestors, and the whole cycle repeats itself.
In the theatre of family life, we take on roles, we position for main character or understudy. We jostle for longer lines. Some hide behind curtains preferring to control the lights while others insist on being the first or last to speak. For some to speak is a joy, for others it brings sorrow. None of it happens without the process of shifting from small to bigger over the course of many years, and as Helen Garner writes, it never happens without pain.
For me, one of the greatest pains came scorched as jealousy. The desire to have what those older than me enjoyed, those seemingly in greater control of their lives. Those below me as much as they were still babies might attract more care and attention, it did not stop them suffering a helplessness greater than my own.
I learned there are some who can become scapegoats, those singled out for ill treatment. Those directly abused, and for the rest of us untouched children around the table, we still copped the fall out.
My father in the dark room of my memory holds my sister close and I shudder, relieved to be spared while sad to have missed out. Only in writing can I reconcile these two opposing emotions.
When you know something is wrong. It surrounds you every day and yet not only are you silenced in the childhood of your home, but you’re also silenced throughout your lifetime, because it hurts other people to hear. But on the page, we can see it, the marks of memory. The open secret of incest. The weird jealousy of an unloved child. The colour green.
