I Finally Told My Mother I Was Mo!ested.
And I Think I Might Have Undiagnosed PTSD.
AN ACTUAL LETTER I WROTE TO MY MOTHER A WEEK AFTER TELLING HER I WAS ABUSED BY MY MATH TUTOR AS A KID :
Dear Mummy,
I do not know how to begin this letter, only that it must be written. The weight of it has been pressing against my ribs since the 17th of March, since the words first left my mouth and entered your world. I remember your voice then, the way your breath seemed to falter for just a moment before you braced yourself, the way your deadpan tone searched mine as if hoping, perhaps, that I might take it back. I did not. I could not.
There are things we do not talk about in our family. Things that happen in hushed tones, in silences that stretch over years, in the careful Ghanaian way we step around pain as though it is furniture we have learned to navigate in the dark. I have spent most of my life trying to be a son you could be proud of. The son who excelled, the son who made you laugh with his so-called charisma, the son who carried his grief quietly so you would not have to bear it entirely with him. But I can no longer carry this alone.
I told you that day about my math tutor. About the afternoons at home when the lessons blurred into something else, something I did not have the language for then. I’ve had flashbacks—difficult visual analogue memories I wish to incinerate but that my mind simply recycles. About the hands that were not supposed to touch me, the words that were not supposed to be spoken. I told you the truth, Mummy. And in telling you, I perhaps shattered something—something you might have thought was better left unbroken. But I could not leave it buried inside me any longer.
I do not know what you felt in that moment. Whether it was numbness, sorrow, rage, guilt, or the unbearable weight of all of the above pressing into your chest. I only know what I felt: the terrifying relief of finally saying it out loud. The fear that my truth might be too heavy for you to hold. The desperate hope that, even in your grief, you would not completely turn away from me. Take all the time you need to process. I respect that.
I have thought of that day every morning since. I have thought of how I wanted to reach for your hand but didn’t. Of how I wanted you to tell me that it was not my fault. That I was still whole. That I was still yours.
I am still yours, Mummy. No matter how far I go, no matter how much of myself I unravel, I am still your son. But I am also something else now—I am someone who has spoken the unspeakable, who has refused the silence, who has placed his pain in the open air and dared it to breathe. I do not know what comes next. Maybe another diagnosis… maybe. I only know that I need you to understand why I have to do this, and that the God you serve will shine His light upon my path. My strange, crooked, mangled, soiled path.
With all my love,
Joseph
