As a feminist, I often spend my time talking to others about the many difficulties and mitigating circumstances of women’s lives. The horrors, big and small, that women face that make our lives more challenging than that of men. I talk about these things to educate others about what it means to be born female in our society, and how those big and small challenges can have large impacts on our lives.

I do this to educate, to advocate, and to help others gain a deeper understanding of themselves or the women in their lives. More recently, however, I’ve found that perhaps I have not applied these ideas and tenants to one of my earliest and most important female relationships- the one with my own mother. My relationship with my mom has always been a tumultuous, complicated, often ugly affair. My childhood was spent walking on eggshells to avoid traumatic outbursts, and then comforting my mom as I assured her she wasn’t actually a bad mom, all while wishing I could have had anybody else as a mom. I saw my mom as mean, cruel, emotionally abusive and manipulating. When she wasn’t those things she was sad, guilt-ridden, and often drunk.

These things are all true, and I cannot sugar-coat my childhood nor try to rationalize my way out of these facts. All of those things happened and all of the damage done is there. I have spent the better part of my adult life trying to undo that damage, and to somehow find my own peace with the trauma I experienced alongside my three younger sisters-who will surely spend their own adult lives trying to fix their broken parts, just in the way I have.

In my own journey, I have come to a point where I can no longer find anger in the memories of my childhood. Becoming an adult and a feminist, I have begun to understand the own mitigating factors and horrors of my mother’s life; horrors that have left her with her own brokenness. In my adult life, I have learned that my mother was sexually assault by her own father, that shortly after her divorce from my dad (a divorce she never wanted) she made the hardest decision of her life- to go against her Catholic faith and have an abortion in order to devote herself to caring for me and my sisters, and that these events have scarred her in ways that as a child I couldn’t fathom, and as an adult make me want to cringe.

Even after learning these things, it took me a long time to understand and appreciate how this must have affected her. After learning of her sexual assault, my first (selfish) thought was not sympathy or understanding, but why didn’t she get help? Why didn’t she recognize her own damage, as I have done, and seek healing? Why couldn’t she let herself off the hook for her abortion, one that allowed her to marry my stepfather and have my youngest sister? Why did she believe that she deserved all the pain and heartache she endured, instead of fighting for herself? At the very least, couldn’t she have gotten help for me? For my sisters? Weren’t we worthy of that?

As a feminist, I know that sexual assault (particularly in childhood) often leads to Borderline personality disorder, anxiety disorders, control issues, drug and alcohol abuse, PTSD, and many other emotional issues that take years of deep-digging to even scratch at the surface of. As a feminist, I know that many women feel so heavily the stigma surrounding abortion that they never tell anyone, instead living in guilt and fear of being found out. As a feminist, I know that going to therapy means re-living the trauma of your abuse. And I know, as a feminist, that sometimes that trauma is too much to try to endure. That it hurts so deeply and so profoundly that it is often easier to bury it deep, where it (supposedly) won’t hurt you.

But it hurt me. And it hurt my sisters. And it continues to hurt my mother. So what do I do with that? As I continue to grow in my feminism, the more I recognize that I cannot begrudge my mother her own self-protection. I cannot blame her for how she chose to cope with her trauma, and I cannot hope to ever understand how much these events caused her pain. What I can do, as a feminist and as a daughter, is recognize that my love and understanding are what she needs. She needs to be told that her mistakes are forgivable, her trauma was not her fault, she is deserving of the love and care she should have received as a child and as an adult. I hope to heal myself and move past anger and into forgiveness. I only hope that I can continue to grow in my feminism and in my relationship with my mother, and to someday be able to bring my sisters into the fold of understanding that I have come to be a part of.

Author’s note: I have made this piece anonymous for the simple reason that my mother, as a victim and as a person, deserves her privacy. I am one of three people who know the facts enclosed. Not even my sisters fully understand the reasons behind our childhood, and while my heart aches for them to know and understand what has happened to our mother, I’m not sure they are ready to find forgiveness. They still live in anger, and until that day when they are ready to forgive, this piece will remain a secret from them. This will most likely stay secret from my mother for the rest of her life.