When I was 7 years old, me, my three younger brothers, and our mother, witnessed our father’s death by suicide, changing the course of all our lives. In the 1970’s, ‘trauma’ was used only to describe physical wounds and those of the mind caused by crime, war, and natural disaster, while ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder’ (or PTSD) wasn’t recognized by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980.

Our mother’s PTSD remained untreated and unchecked. For the first 15 months our mother was in a sort of functional catatonia, going through the motions of feeding us, clothing us, but detached from her body, rarely speaking. During this time a pedophile took advantage, zero-ing in on our mother, and molesting me in our mother’s and father’s bed—in the same room where our father had died—while our mother watched, but wasn’t watching. Just as I floated over my body, dissociating from what was happening to me, our mother was floating somewhere else too.

When we finally moved from our apartment to a new apartment and a new town, our mother’s PTSD led to violence—10 years of physical and emotional abuse toward me and my brothers through young adulthood.

Six months after I married my Maine high school sweetheart—my youngest brother still in high school—our mother borrowed the neighbor’s luggage, placed a California address on her kitchen table, and left. We would never hear or see her again, a letter my brother sent returned to sender.

Our mother out of our lives, I had space to heal from my own PTSD, through 11 years of counseling, 8 years of acupuncture, reiki, therapeutic massage and chiropractic, and finally, 11 months of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).

By the end of my 20-year healing journey, I had reached a place where I had unburdened myself from grief, anger, and resentment I felt toward my father, my mother, and myself…anger and resentment, I didn’t know I had been carrying.

Forgiving myself was the hardest part. I had held unknown anger and resentment toward myself from being raped and beaten by adults I thought I could trust—rather than protected. In the deepest places of my self, I felt like nothing rather than someone, and that everything that had happened to me was somehow my fault. Until I got help, deep inside, I thought this was true.

I forgive my father for dying by suicide—he was sick with his own PTSD and depression. But I’ll never forgive him for what his death did to and took from my mother and my brothers.

I’ll never forgive our mother for the beatings, berating, and belittlings my three younger brothers received. When our mother hurt my brothers over and over again, it felt way worse than anything she could do to me. No matter how sick our mother was, I’ll never forgive this. And if my brothers never forgive our mother either, this is obviously okay too.

I wanted to travel from Maine to California to tell my mother, that as far as me and her were concerned, “there’s nothing to forgive.”

And, I knew that when I traveled from Maine to California, I would not really be asking for my mother’s forgiveness—none of this was my fault. But, I wanted to tell her I was sorry she saw what she saw when my father died. I was sorry she went through what she went through. “I hope you’ve found peace, and I love you.”