You know those people who are extremely religious and act as though the world will end if they allow themselves even a little freedom? The ones who constantly tell you what you shouldn’t do, what you shouldn’t wear, what you shouldn’t watch, how you shouldn’t behave? Sometimes I wonder how much of it is actually genuine because some people are quietly doing the very things they condemn everyone else for doing.
I recently discovered a dark secret involving my parents, something I probably shouldn’t have discovered at all and I think it’s okay to say that I am traumatized.
My entire body has felt numb since I found out, and I’m still trying to process it.
I’ve written a few times about how extremely religious my parents were when we were growing up. My dad, especially, was the strictest that it was only when he left the house for work, we could finally breathe. My mum would let us watch cartoons, play with the children in the neighbourhood or even run around in the rain. But the moment we heard that Dad was coming home, everything changed.
We were expected to be sitting quietly, reading the Bible or studying. My mum used to tell us that if Dad ever caught us doing the things she allowed us to do while he was away, we were on our own. She wouldn’t defend us because she was scared of him too.
My mum got married at sixteen and became pregnant with my eldest sister almost immediately. From what I’ve come to understand, theirs was something close to an arranged marriage, which wasn’t entirely unusual in the 1990s. My dad is thirteen years older than her. Even thinking about that now makes me uncomfortable.
We were all born and raised in a different state from where we live now, and life was actually good in many ways. My dad worked for a prestigious company at the time, but at home, he was incredibly strict. We feared him. Sometimes, I think we even loathed him. He always wanted us reading the Bible, studying our books or doing something he considered productive. If we wanted to watch television, it had better be the news or a Christian channel.
Weekends were the worst because he was usually home with us. Even my mum seemed different on those days.
Then, one Sunday morning, something strange happened. My siblings and I had already dressed for church when my mum came into the room and told us we weren’t going. I had never heard those words in all my eight years of living so we were all speechless.
My second sister asked why, but I can’t remember what Mum said. What I remember vividly, though, was the way she looked. She had a shawl wrapped around her head, her face looked swollen, her eyes were bloodshot, and she had this pale, exhausted look that I now recognise as the kind of expression you see on someone who has been through something deeply distressing.
It was strange but we simply changed out of our church clothes and whispered among ourselves. Then weeks passed. We stopped attending church. Even Bible study disappeared from our routine, something that would have been unimaginable before then. My dad used to punish us for being late to church, sometimes in front of everyone so this sudden disappearance was confusing and we didn’t get any real answers. Until one day, Mum told us to pack our things into boxes that we were moving back to our home state.
All I could think about was my school, my friends and the church I had grown accustomed to. I didn’t want to leave but I was a child. What exactly could I do about it?
So we moved.
According to what I later discovered, the decision had been made almost entirely on impulse. There had been no elaborate plan to relocate. We first stayed at our grandmother’s house, and a few months later, my mum got a place and we moved into our own house. My dad eventually joined us and for a while, everything seemed normal again. Except it wasn’t as my parents started arguing occasionally, something I hadn’t really seen before.
Years passed. Fast forward to yesterday, I needed to find my primary school results for something important. My mum wasn’t home, so I went into her room to look through the pile of documents she kept, hoping to find it there. While digging through a pile of old papers, I found a diary and it belonged to my eldest sister. She had been around thirteen when she wrote it.
I started flipping through the pages and, somehow, got completely absorbed in her writing. I kept reading until I reached a page in the middle that seemed to have been deliberately sealed so I removed the glue and read it. That was how I discovered the real reason we stopped going to church. The real reason we moved back to our home state.
According to my sister’s diary, my father had been suspended indefinitely from the church because he had been sexually abusing her. His own daughter. The diary said it had gone on to the point where she became pregnant and had an abortion. My mother had apparently caught him in the act but couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone. My sister, however, was so traumatised that she eventually told a pastor at the church because she couldn’t carry it alone anymore.
I’m shaking as I type this. Because suddenly, I see my father differently. All those years of Bible reading, all those rules, the sermons. I mean all that righteousness and behind it, according to what my sister wrote, was something so horrific.
Was all of it just a facade?
I have just been thinking about that little girl I was, the one who was terrified of her father, the one who thought the worst thing that could happen was being caught watching cartoons when she wasn’t supposed to. I had no idea what was actually happening in that house and now I can’t stop wondering about my mother.
Why did she stay? Why did she never tell us? How could they all sweep it under the rug like it never existed? Now I see why my sister resents my dad. There are so many questions I want answers to, but I’m not sure I’m ready to ask them yet.
For now, I still have the diary and I still don’t know what to do with what I’ve learned. Some things you discover about your family don’t simply change the way you see the past. They change the way you see everyone standing in front of you.