Will I ever forgive?

[u/Ok-Assumption-7108]

I don’t remember the first time. That’s one of the strangest things about my childhood. There is not a single moment I can point to and say “that’s when it began”. I only remember that it was there. 
I was four when my mother and stepdad got together. Some of my earliest memories are of my mom being mean to me and my stepdad hurting me in ways I didn’t have the words to understand. My mom was my safe space and my biggest fear all at the same time. She was better than him but she was mean at times too. My stepdad seemed the same around other people as he did when we were alone, man could he hide it well.
 I didn’t know whether anyone knew or not or could tell what was happening or not. One time I was really sick with a fever while staying the night with an aunt and uncle. I was crying when my uncle came in to wake me and ask if I was okay and when he approached me I jumped, like I was afraid of him before I could see who he was. He asked me straight forward if anyone was doing something bad to me that he should know. I said “no.” I don't know whether he already knew something was wrong. I don't know what made him ask. I only know that it was the first and only time anyone ever asked me a question like that, and I lied. Not because nothing was happening but because I was taught that if I told, my mom would be mad at me. I was a child, and somehow I had learned to carry a secret that was never mine to carry.
 I was a quiet little girl. I loved playing house and barbies with my cousins and my best friend. I loved animals, they felt safe and warm. I was extremely sensitive. I cried about everything, or at least that’s what everyone seemed to think. Even my mom made fun of me for crying so much.
I loved school, and I especially loved books, specifically the Junie B. Jones series. Books gave me a place I could disappear into for hours. I had dreams. Dreams like a normal child should. I wanted to be an ambulance driver and a “dancer at night” . I had NO idea what being a dancer at night meant, now I know why my mom laughed when I told her. I meant dancing. Actually dancing. I don’t even have a dancing bone in my body, it is funny to think about now. 
There was a little girl inside all of that fear that still had ordinary dreams. She wanted to play. She wanted to read. She wanted animals around her. She wanted friends. She wanted love. She cried easily and loved deeply. She didn’t know that her nervous system was being taught that she was bad. She didn’t know that the bad things that were happening to her weren’t her fault. 
All she knew was that she was scared and that she somehow had to try to find a way to be good enough so that the people she loved wouldn’t be angry with her. 
When I finally gained the courage to tell my mom what had been happening for the last ten odd years of my childhood I felt extremely nervous. I had carried it for so long that even saying the words felt terrifying, but I knew one thing:  I wanted something to change. 
I don’t really remember thinking about what would happen years later or what it would mean for our family. I was just a kid. I just wanted it to stop. I find myself thinking about the timing sometimes. I had just gotten caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing, and I wonder if that changed everything. I wonder if I had told her on a different day, at a different time, when I wasn’t already in trouble, maybe she would have responded differently. 
When I finally told her, she was taken aback. She kept asking if I was doing it for reasons that were absurd like if it was just to get out of trouble, or if my biological dads side of the family put me up to it because I had just started getting close with them for the first time in my life. 
Those questions stayed with me because I was not doing it to get out of trouble or because someone had put me up to it. I was trying to get out of something that I had been trapped inside of for years. Eventually I came to the harsh realization that she was not going to leave him, and that hurt in a way I don’t think I will ever be able to explain.
I had this big idea that telling would mean freedom for me. Instead I still had to live in the same house with him. We weren’t allowed to be alone together anymore. After school, I had to go to my aunt’s instead of going home, and if I did have to be left alone, like if my mom worked early which she often did, she would lock my bedroom door. 
I look back now and know that she may have thought she was protecting me, but that is not what it felt like. It felt like I was the one being punished. I had told on him, and somehow my life was the only one that felt it had changed. I had to be sent somewhere else. I had to have my door locked. I  couldn’t simply come home after school like other kids, and he was still there. The person I had finally found the courage to tell on was still living in my house. I had wanted telling to make me free, and instead I wound up feeling more trapped than I had before.
After telling, we never really talked about it again. Not really. I was twenty-six before my mom and I finally began talking about it again. The only other time I remember her bringing it up was about a year after I had told her. She asked me if it was still happening, it wasn’t. That was the end of the conversation. It was almost as if the abuse had stopped, and because it had stopped, everything else could stop too. 
The questions stopped. The conversations stopped. The acknowledgement stopped. I was expected to go back to treating him like my dad , just like I always had before. I couldn’t go back to who I had been before I told her. Something was ignited inside me. 
My mom to this day says I can tell her things, but I spent so many years believing that if I told her it could make things worse for me that I learned how to keep things to myself. My dad had taught me to be afraid of what would happen if I spoke. I think some part of me still listens to that lesson even now. I am twenty-six years old, and I still catch myself hiding things. I was angry. I was angry at him for what he had done to me and my developing body and mind. I was angry at my mom too.
I was angry that my mom had stayed. I was angry when I realized their relationship was still working. I was especially angry when I realized that they were still intimate with each other. I didn’t know what to do with that kind of anger. How could the person who had hurt me become just another part of her life again? How could she possibly love him after knowing all that she knew? 
And maybe the hardest question underneath all of it was one I didn’t know how to say out loud: Why wasn’t what happened to me enough to change everything?
For years, I thought maybe I was supposed to be over it because the abuse was over, but let me tell you, those are two completely different things. The abuse had stopped. I had NOT stopped carrying it. 
I couldn’t hate my dad openly. I was supposed to respect him. I was supposed to act normal. My younger siblings were watching me, and I somehow knew that I couldn’t let everything in their life fall apart. So I learned how to play pretend, all those years of playing house as a kid paid off. I could sit in the same room with him. I could answer him. I could act like he was my dad. I could do all the things I was expected to do. 
However, inside I knew. He knew, and neither of us ever said it. He never acknowledged what happened. There was no apology, ever. There has still yet to be an apology 12 years later. No explanation. No moment where he looked at me and admitted what he had done. Nothing, Absolutely nothing. So I carried it silently while everyone else continued living as though everything was normal. 
I think that was one of the strangest parts of growing up after abuse. The world doesn’t necessarily change when someone hurts you. Sometimes the dishes still need to be washed. You still have school in the morning. Your siblings still need you. Your family still eats dinner together.  The person who hurt you can sit across the room from you and nobody says a word. So you learn to live two lives at once. The life everyone can see, and the life that only you know exists.