trampus

I was completely transported by this film, and I didn't expect to be. Hepburn just drags you in. And the sex stuff is so open and progressive- given the time I was really shocked by that, haha. Hard yes.

Oh, yeah. Really fascinating episode.

Oof. Becky, your post hurts to read a little. I can tell that that's a sentiment that will piss you off; I'm not here to get sanctimonius with you or tell you how to feel, but I ask that you hear me out. This is my mother's story. It's very different from yours in a lot of ways, except in her reaction to it, which I painfully recognise in you. My grandmother, like a lot of people in our family, was high functioning autistic. This was in the days before anyone, least of all a woman, would have received that diagnosis, but enough of her descendants now have been formally diagnosed that retrofitting that label onto her doesn't feel like an unreasonable thing to do. This context is important, because my grandmother was not a bad woman, in the sense she never intended to do harm. But she was a person of firm and strange convictions about how the world should be, in a way she could not articulate to her partner or her children. This meant they were constantly infringing on rules which she took very seriously, and they didn't understand. My mother was the oldest of three children. And until my grandmother died, I never had any sense that their childhood was in any way unhappy. My grandmother came over every christmas, bought me many of the books I loved and remain in my llibrary to this day, and taught me to speak decent anglo-saxon, which she was (now that I think about it) strangely passionate about. (I think in the modern context this would have racist connotations, but my grandmother was simply a massive beowulf fan.) And if she flew into odd rages sometimes, mum and her siblings just laughed it off. They all respected her, and defended her as an eccentric too intelligent for the rest of the world to understand. Her influence on them is clear and massive- they are all intellectuals with firm political beliefs and discomfort with emotional expression. My mum really does idolise her mother in a lot of ways- the mother is a powerful figure in anyone's imagination. But in the years since my grandmother's death, as I've become closer to my mum in a more adult way, I've started to get a sense that my mum is struggling with her evaluation of her mother. Not the least because, as it turns out, she could be savagely violent with absolutely no warning whatsoever, and my mum had had to fight for her life on more than one occasion. They never knew what would set her off. Mum recounts in a strangely normal way how, when she was eight, my grandmother chased her to the bottom of the garden with a kitchen knife because she'd brought friends over- friends my grandmother knew very well, friends who came over all the time without incident. This violence only ended when my mum got big enough that the fights they had ended with her winning- my grandmother was 5'1'' and my mum hit 5'10'' at fourteen, fortunately. My mum was genuinelly surprised I sounded shocked by that. But then a few weeks later she started saying things like, 'that wasn't really right, was it?'- like the idea hadn't occurred to her before. It was treated as such a matter of course in the family home, and has become such a joke between the siblings, that none of them have ever seriously confronted what was happening. Our relationship with our parents defines our sense of normality. Violence can be normalised. Sexual violation can be normalised. The stories that would pain a listener the most are the ones that come out of our mouths the most casually, are the most integral to our ideas of ourselves. "Yeah, that happened- what's so weird about that?" And we think that because we can reflect on these events without pain ourselves, that we haven't been damaged by it. But that's not how it works. That you can look on your abuse without pain may mean you are still not feeling the pain that warns you away from bad situations. Those who received violence as children often have no defence against it as adults. I'm not saying you need to identify as a 'victim'. I actually think that's pretty unhealthy. But you might consider reflecting on what happened to you from a perspective other than that of the five year old child you were at the time. As an adult looking in on that scene, what would you have seen? What would you feel about it now? How would you feel if it were happening to your own children?