This is an essay I never thought I’d write on a topic I’d never imagined I’d discuss in public. My closest friends knew about my family’s deep dysfunction, but not its root cause. But, this summer, when Andrea Robin Skinner came forward in the Star to recount both her stepfather Gerald Fremlin’s sexual abuse and the refusal of her mother, Alice Munro, to support her, silence no longer felt like an option. My grandmother responded in exactly the same way Munro did when my mother told her about her own abuse. My mother’s family lined up to support the predator, an uncle who was in his twenties at the time of the abuse. My mother was seven.
Childhood sexual abuse is a crime against our most vulnerable, those who have zero defences in the one place they should feel most protected. In my experience, those who can turn away from the crime, do. But the level of detail in Skinner’s essay forced many to confront the horrific reality of abuse and its aftermath: the indelible images made imagination unnecessary and denial impossible.
“In the car, he asked me to play a game called ‘show me,’” Skinner wrote. “When I said no, he made me tell him about my ‘sex life,’ prying me for details of innocent games I played with other children.” At the time of the abuse, Skinner was nine; she’d only just realized she “couldn’t grow up to be a sheep-herding dog.” By the time she was 25, she had dropped out of university due to deteriorating mental health. She wrote that she “couldn’t picture a future” for herself.
I know the emotional wreckage of that crime intimately. My mother’s family never reported her assault; instead, she was forced to be civil with her abuser at family gatherings. The predator was free to slip from the frame and live in peace while my mother, and later, my father, sister and I, were left to try to heal from trauma we hadn’t caused and that no one wanted to know about.
That collective denial caused my mother a lifetime of insecurity that made our home life deeply dysfunctional, and which metastasized into a personality disorder that got worse as she got older. She alienated most of our extended family, swiftly terminated new friendships if she felt slightly threatened and recounted her stories of triumph over those who wronged her around the dinner table. She believed someone was always plotting against her; she quit her community theatre group when she didn’t receive the award she felt she deserved. I learned to walk on eggshells. Before I was out of my teens, she told me about the abuse. From me, she sought the emotional sanctuary my grandmother refused to provide.
When my younger sister was assaulted at 13 by a trusted adult in the community, she became the sexually abused child of a sexually abused child, and the damage compounded. We believed my sister, but my mother didn’t have the emotional tools to support a child through the same trauma. My parents reported the assault to police, who did nothing. In the 1980s, “he said/she said” was the acceptable response from law enforcement, even when it came to the sexual assault of a child. It was too difficult to prove, they shrugged. Couldn’t she just get over it? How bad could it be? I was 16 and still believed that adults knew best.
Within a year, my sister and I both developed eating disorders. I became anorexic, anxious and quiet: I withdrew to the world of books and buried myself in academic achievement. Intrusive thoughts and panic attacks hunted me for more than a decade. My sister’s bulimia flew under the radar, but her acting out didn’t. Police brought her home in a cruiser after she was caught stealing an eye shadow, a pack of gum. Now they cared.
The damage festered through my sister’s adult life. She wrestled with addiction, starting with alcohol, when she was still a teen. For decades, I tried to help her in every way I could. Nothing worked, or worked for long, because the damage was too old and too deep. Around 2010, she started going to AA. I celebrated her one-year milestone with her, naively believing that was the end of her struggle, but her mental health continued to decline. In August 2023, I found her collapsed on the floor of her apartment. As I walked home from the hospital, I dreamed of a future in which we could watch “Barbie,” laugh at the patriarchy and finally form an unbreakable bond. That time never came. My sister died a month later at age 53 and left no diary and no note. The official cause of death was advanced liver disease and severe malnutrition, but her actual cause of death was shame, and it had occurred decades earlier. It broke my heart when I discovered that since childhood, she had always slept with the light on.
Because of the letters Fremlin wrote brazenly admitting to his crime, the Ontario court charged and sentenced him in 2005 for sexually assaulting Skinner in 1976. This kind of proof is rare and didn’t exist in my family. The only record of what happened to my sister was the tattoo on her forearm that read nevertheless she persisted.
It should be astonishing that Fremlin felt that his words and those photographs would exonerate him, that everyone would see that he was powerless against the temptations of a child. But for anyone raised in the patriarchal system that made his thought process possible, it isn’t. He knew the system was rigged and it made him bold. My mother’s uncle and my sister’s predator knew that too. Those men were raised to understand that their desires would always supersede those of women, that they were not responsible for their own actions, and that the girls — children! — were to blame for bringing shame on the family.
I always believed my mother and my sister, but I know now that I was too young to help them find healing. Tending to their untreated trauma led to anxiety-related issues that I carry to this day because I didn’t have the training to protect myself: crushing insomnia, chronic stomach problems and generalized anxiety that I’ve tried and failed to outrun. At 57, I finally understand that yoga and meditation and medication will only keep it at bay. It feels petty, listing symptoms of my own pain in light of the life-changing trauma they endured, but I know I’m not an outlier. The circle of damage is wide.
My mother now has midstage Alzheimer’s and requires long-term care; alcohol use was a contributing factor. She can’t remember that my sister has died. If she dies of that terrible disease, her death will be recorded as a dementia tragedy, but it will only be a partial truth. Her brain was marked with trauma long before Alzheimer’s arrived.
For a long time, I felt that I shouldn’t lay my heavy truths on others, that this was a shameful family matter I should shoulder in isolation. Skinner’s essay gave me courage. Though my mother and sister tried, again and again, they can no longer can tell their stories.
