This story from KansasCity.com reminds me of many cases I was involved in through the years where female adult relatives turned a blind eye to the abuse of grandkids, or nephews and nieces and sometimes of the their own children by the adult male child sex perpetrator living in the household. The stories are tragic enough but to add the layer of the so-called loving mother-figure permitting it, is almost to much to bear. No wonder so manyof these victims take their lives. How do you bear the conscious awareness of your mother's abandonment of you into the hands of an abuser?
In the case reported at the website of the Kansas City Star a "boyfriend" but his girlfriend's young children in a hot dryer.
But it most reminded me of my much older first cousin Nancy (long deceased) and her children: Tammy and Jesse. Sharon was a single mother, abandoned by the father of her children in the 1960s. She lived upstairs in a duplex we lived downstairs. All of us were dirt poor. Nancy subsisted on welfare and handouts. My father was too proud to take "charity"--so my family, full of young kids subsisted on squeak.
Nancy had a succession of hillbilly/pieces of shit-boyfriends that exploited her and molested her children. Why do these women permit this exploitation and sexual abuse of heir children?
Fear.
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Fear of being alone, I guess. I would absolutely crucify anyone who hurt my kid. I'm always so stunned by these stories--because I know exactly what that "mother bear" instinct feels like--it's visceral, and ferocious. It seems incomprehensible to me that some women just don't have it. But I suspect that their own mothers didn't, either. So damned sad.
ReplyDeleteI had "scheduled" this post to go out sometime mid-day on Friday, so what you're reading was purely fragmentary that I had no intention of publishing when it "posted." Oh, well, there is the nub of a simple reaction and thought that I'll revisit in comments or a further post. Obviously the referral to my family's poverty seems disconnected to the larger point.
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Wow, this was pretty damn fragmentary...my lovely sister, who read this blawg sent me a note, telling me that I mis-identified the cousin--which I have now corrected, but I want to talk a little about he poverty issue at some point when I have a chance. I can not emphasize the impact that that childhood poverty has had on my spirit and how I view all of this.
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