“Not My Responsibility”

The Enabler Who Never Stopped Making Excuses

Trigger Warning: child abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, references to exploitation and family violence

“You’re a whore just like your mother!”

It was a lie of course, but one my maternal grandmother said so many times eventually I too believed I was deeply tainted, even deserving of it. Even of everything she did to me.

It wasn’t even within the top ten cruelest things she ever said. Not even close. I wouldn’t repeat those things here.

This level of cruelty towards me by my grandmother started when I was seven. Had it started sooner my mother would have cut her off but she died when I was seven, three months before my eighth birthday, so that was when my grandmother’s mask came off and I became a scapegoat replacement.

The screaming was so loud and quite cruel. She was quite confident that no one would intervene. She was right, of course.

It was a near daily occurrence after my mother died when I was seven years old. Her mother. The screaming. Needling. Throwing things. Beatings. Literal torture.

My reactions, of course, weaponized. Condemned. Not allowed yet exploited explicitly.

My grandfather was the quieter one in the family.

As a child I thought that quiet made him safe but it didn’t. It made him more insidious because I didn’t expect his cruelty, quiet as it was, like I did hers.

His quiet let me hope and hope can be the cruelest blade of all when wielded by some people. As it was for me.

I was a child so when, after I tried going to him with things she’d done, he stood by her as she condemned me for ‘trying to come between us’ by trying to go to my grandfather with her horrific abuse, I tried to find what I did wrong.

It didn’t cross my mind that the wrong was with him. With her. That my trying to go to him with it wasn’t the wrong being done.

I was a child being told I didn’t deserve to be protected and I believed it like the child I was. As children often do.

When my grandmother scapegoated my mother at twelve — labeled her a whore for telling the truth about her uncle’s attempted assault — his reaction was markedly absent in the story. I didn’t think about that back then, when listening to her tell it. How his role was so… unspoken. Not even a footnote in the telling.

Almost as if he wasn’t present at all though he surely was. Certainly my grandmother couldn’t have thrown my mother out of the house multiple times without him knowing.

Households don’t work that way. Claims of ignorance can only go so far, and he attempts to stretch it well beyond where such can even remotely be reasonably believed even given the most grace to ‘his side’ of any such event.

As an adult I know the pattern. I know the most likely scenario is that he did the same thing to my mother he did to me after that same grandmother allowed someone to pay her for access to me, put sleeping pills in her own food and his so they wouldn’t wake, and set me up.

By the time I knew he’d already set upon whatever narrative would let him excuse his behavior after that and I already knew he’d never believe me. So I never told him. I never will. It’s not worth the argument and he doesn’t want to know. I already tested those waters, told him there was something like that. He actively chose, discouraged telling him.

Maybe he knew/knows. Goodness knows he still wouldn’t care.

He didn’t intervene. He didn’t comfort his daughter. He hid his wife’s diagnosed personality disorder “to protect her” and offered no protection to his children or, later, to me.

He wasn’t going to intervene when it was me either.

My grandmother often told me ‘If your grandfather leaves me he won’t take you with him. He will leave you here alone with me.’ I feared it. Deeply. She knew exactly where to strike and she did it with precision, as many abusers do.

He excused what he saw. He deflected blame. He prioritized the appearance of a stable family over actually making it stable.

She exploited it but he made it easy.

He never helped with a single school assignment. He never taught me to drive — said my aunt and uncle had mishaps learning(aunt apparently ran over a mailbox at some point and my uncle ran over a curb at some point, stupid stuff), and those were his excuses to not even bother teaching me, nor allowing others to do so.

My grandmother was more honest with her reasons, at least to me: it was about keeping me from leaving, from driving away and never coming back. “Just like your mother”, a mantra that often exited her mouth. I’m rather convinced she was utterly incapable of saying even a single kind word about my mother. Her own biological daughter(I had wondered, and through that wondering found out long after my mother’s death that apparently my mother had also wondered and checked and no, sadly my grandmother was indeed my mother’s biological parent).

Maybe my grandmother herself told her own lies enough she may even have begun to believe them herself. I doubt it. The truth didn’t matter to my grandmother as it does to me. It mattered to her how she could spin it.

He just didn’t want the effort. Birthdays were canceled. No friends allowed over, no cake shared. No prom. He stood by and made excuses for her as she robbed me of every milestone.

When I was eleven and asked simple questions — why are you lying about the value of these supplies, why isn’t this fair? — he accused me of ruining his deal, called me malicious or incapable, and never took me along again.

He never explained. He never apologized. I, the child in that scenario, was utterly baffled and then left holding the emotional bags feeling like the villain, like I’d done something terrible for trying to understand what was happening. Something I now know, as an adult, is the most normal of normal things a child can do.

He was the one reacting badly. That child asking questions wasn’t wrong. He was. That child didn’t know that though, and that will never change. Nor will the imprints left by those experiences.

That was childhood.

Performance

Sometimes, in high school, my grandparents would show up once a year, at least in high school, but that was for appearances for the awards ceremony while I was in ffa.

In freshman year I’d gotten a couple extra awards that were freshman specific. I actually had more of the more substantial awards the year after, proficiency and such, in my sophomore year of high school, but you wouldn’t know that.

The door was barely shut on the vehicle before my grandmother was scolding me because I had one less award vs the year before. It was one more major award than the previous year but that didn’t matter. Optics did. Optics said I got one less award.

I wasn’t useful to her if I wasn’t either cripplingly sick or excelling beyond reason(and it should be noted that the year after this I did manage to increase the awards but that didn’t bring praise, only icy silence, the kind that feels like you have done something terribly wrong but no one will tell you what it is).

No one had more awards than I did that year in that ffa chapter and plenty of the others had family connections and support I specifically lacked. A fact I was often reminded of, told I could go further if they’d just show up even as simply a presence. A sort of side-long ‘support’ by bothering to show up at all.

They did not otherwise show up, either of them, and I was explicitly told that was why I was passed over plenty of times for things I worked harder for but lacked the connections others had, the family support they had.

I didn’t get my awards through connections, didn’t get them as some back handed handshake behind my back to please some alumni standing behind me. Because no one was standing behind me. I worked for them.

If there were trips, things that needed paid for, my grandparents did not pay for them. Would not. Even when they could they’d refuse and claim hardship to any adult listening. It didn’t much matter that they could because they wouldn’t. So I did every single fundraiser. I worked the plant sales, kept cash box, held signs in ridiculous heat for car washes, did every single community service opportunity. Everything.

I worked hard. When that wasn’t enough I worked harder. Through burnout, in desperation, but I did it.

Often against people who did have those connections, did have those support. Often harder than anyone. Often staying later than anyone. Often passed over for things I worked for years for more often than I succeeded too. Despite my efforts, not because of them.

I worked until every adult around me at school knew me as a hard worker, ‘teachers pet’, hard enough I was often told to convince them to come to offer that support because there were people who thought I deserved to succeed like those kids who did have people behind them.

Harder than people who didn’t have to hide so no one would ask why they sat outside the school upwards past nine or ten at night.

Weaponized Time

Oh and if you are curious I did. I had a whole system to avoid detection after some teachers who left around when the sun started setting started asking questions too.

I couldn’t go anywhere, wouldn’t be allowed to stay back to do any after school activity if I did and considering the kinds of phone limits I had were stricter than actual prison in the first place, I also had no one I could turn to for help if I did either. So I’d go to the gym where the teams worked out, work out in the same place the sports teams did for a time, read for a bit, sit in different spots. Try not to be noticed. That let me avoid that one kind teacher who bothered to notice and asked questions, which my grandmother directly blamed me for and put on me to avoid.

It didn’t start that late. At first he’d pick me up roughly when the sun was setting or about it. Mostly in freshman and part of sophomore year. After the rape though, he became much more prone to acts of cruelty veiled through ‘favors’ he’d convince himself and tell me, he didn’t really ‘have to do’ like leaving me there late into the night wasn’t a literal form of abuse/neglect of a minor (it was).

Eventually though, when grandfather would go home after work, eat dinner, have his nightly ice cream, watch tv with my grandmother. He knew the whole time that I was outside waiting. He simply didn’t care. As far as he was concerned I wasn’t really his responsibility and everything he did for me was ‘extra’. Something I owed him for.

When I brought it up my grandfather would scold me for being ungrateful for him picking me up, would tell me to stay back. I’d point out that he was punishing me for staying back at school for the extra curricular and I’ll never forget the response ‘Then don’t stay back at school.’

I continued and his retaliation via time spent waiting outside late into the night continued until I graduated.

And oh did he never let me forget picking me up back then, like it was a favor. It’s even how he’d later justify stealing from me outright.

My mother’s ring, the photos of my mother holding me as an infant, even putting down my dog after denying me even seeing her for years(a retaliation for going nc with my grandmother before she died and daring to have him on an info diet because otherwise he’d feed her info, be her flying monkey as it were. For daring to have boundaries).

My knife set from college, which he stole with all the items I’d added as well, and sold, selling my personal property he had no right to take nor do away with let alone the ill gotten gains he obtained doing so.

I find his audacity and entitlement exhausting even as he pretends it isn’t exactly what it is. But it’s as his enabling has always been as well, cruel.

For him to justify these things, to himself, to anyone at all, he first has to not see me as a person like himself. First has to dismiss my person-hood over his own comfort, his own gains. When you consider that then it’s not really surprising where it goes.

A much younger me did not know that though. A much younger me had hopes, dreams, and wishes that one day he’d treat her like other grandfathers treat their granddaughters, or at least like family at all.

Younger me would have been happy had he simply treated her like a human being at all, rather than as a resource to be exploited.

“Not My Responsibility”

When I was barely a legal adult and being exploited — trafficked, hurt, scared beyond reason — I called him. My grandfather.

I was so terrified calling anyone else didn’t even cross my mind. I was naive. I was still under the illusion he’d care. I didn’t have much time and that was simply the first number that popped into my brain, a number I’d memorized since early childhood.

Somewhere in my heart I was still convinced that as long as it wasn’t her, wasn’t my grandmother, he might actually care, might actually act like a grandfather. Like he cared. He did not.

I begged him to do anything. Even just call 911 and tell someone I needed help. He told me it wasn’t his responsibility. He said if I needed help, I should ask the government, not him. He didn’t call. He didn’t come.

He didn’t act until my life was close enough to ending that it became inconvenient for him and even then he didn’t once stand up for me.

Not during medical malpractice being found and covered up right in front of him, not about trafficking. Nothing.

Then he did the bare minimum to keep me alive — not to protect me, but to avoid the consequences of my death.

It took multiple escape attempts where I managed to be hidden by a neighbor of the traffickers, to call from there, and even then he only showed up when I was so sick I was becoming jaundiced.

He’d spoken to those neighbors before during previous attempts.

By that time he long knew where I was, address and all, who was holding me(full government names and street names they went by both), that they’d come hunt me down and drag me back by force when I ran away, that the neighbor had kids and couldn’t hide me for long to avoid danger to her own children, and simply put, just as he did in my childhood, decided to do nothing.

Later when I reported it to police, after I was out, he did not offer up anything he knew then either. The case eventually came to ‘if they don’t admit it we won’t do anything about it’.

Hearing what happened to the girl after me made me physically ill. It confirmed how little anyone cared to stop them. I got real sick after hearing that, all up in the bathroom, because suddenly comments they made I’d not understood made sense. Very horrifying sense. That girl’s tattoo was a trophy for those boys.

They weren’t stopped and they didn’t stop just like my grandmother didn’t stop until she was dead.

I still live looking over my shoulder.

“Still not my responsibility”

When I was fighting for my kids, when I needed him to testify in court, he refused. His excuse didn’t hold water in the least. It was the same untenable excuses he’d filled my life with.

The only time I ever asked to borrow money from him, was also when I was fighting that desperate fight for my children, and the only time I’d ever even broached the topic, was that time and it was to try to get a lawyer.

He, of course, refused and cited how my uncle had borrowed money he never returned as had my aunt, as excuses for how I would be the same.

He left out, of course, that I am a completely different person than them and of course left out that my mother had paid him back when she borrowed from him, so if we were using other people as excuses for how he treated me he should have at least been fair about it by including not just the ones that he could use to excuse himself.

Not that the behavior of my aunt and uncle or even, yes, my mother, should ever have had a rat’s behind to do with decisions to do with me in the first place.

I begged, pleaded, even tried to simply ask for what he and grandmother had taken from me, stolen from me, even under the ridiculous notion that I’d even give THAT back to them if I could just get enough to get my children home.

I meant it too. I’d have done absolutely anything and he knew that. He simply didn’t care.

When even that wasn’t to be done I asked him to write a letter, anything, just a statement. Something. He refused.

Too much effort for him. Same excuses with different words.

That was adulthood.

Crumbs

He never knew my favorite color(he still doesn’t — I could write it here and he’d still not find it important enough to note in himself at all). He never asked. I told him many times but he never found it important to know any actual detail about me the person. Little or big. Child or adult.

But he always knew exactly what to say to make sure I understood, from childhood to adulthood, that help and care were optional, he was opting out of it, and I was on my own. That anything he did for me in any capacity was a boon I owed him for, even things he was legally required to do under penalty of prison and then some.

Naturally this never applied in reverse. Of course. It never did.

Sometimes, when I’d stop trying to earn his love, his affection, he’d drop me a bone, and I held to each crumb of affection like it held the deepest most profound meaning. He’d throw me a bone, enough I’d keep trying, keep hoping, enough to string me along, then go back to ignoring anything that happened to me and supporting whatever grandmother did or said without exception.

As an adult I have long gone NC(no contact) with him because I needed to. The gaslighting, constantly trying to re write history into something more favorable to him rather than face what did happen… well let’s just say he’s incapable of existing in a context that does not hurt me.

He seems to love trying to mess with my head, and I resist but it always leaves me in a terrible place mentally and emotionally, spiraling and such, realizing things. He has this way of revealing things, cruel things, at times he knows will hurt me most.

It’s his retaliation for my lack of silence about grandmother, because even when she is long dead he stands by her and by proxy, the horrors she inflicted. In his mind, at least by his own words as he’s said them at me many times, this justifies his behavior towards me.

This is what the enabler does

They don’t scream. They can but he only has raised his voice at me twice, once to yell at me for thirty minutes for telling him his behavior was ‘asshole behavior’ and once after I was raped. To tell me I was dirty. That I must have wanted it. That I must have done something to cause it. Before I knew it was her who had set it up. And it’s always cut deeply.

He didn’t hit me. Not ever. What he did was worse. He simply refused to see me even when I stood before him.

Enablers. They erase you. They don’t consider the cost to you worth fighting for because it’s easier for them to pretend and justify even the most heinous actions rather than face them. And they keep refusing, year after year, until the refusal becomes a lifetime.

Enablers are cruel, simply a quieter cruelty, and it is often a cruelty born of apathy and cowardice.

That was my grandfather.

You’ve made it. This has been both long and heavy. I promise next week will have a lighter topic and I hope someone finds this helpful if they are dealing with similar dynamics! Here’s a cat pic!

From Author’s personal collection. This is an older photo, a bit degraded from being backed up and re downloaded too many times, but this is a much younger black and white kitty, Lucky(he’s geriatric now but was not then), playing and having a grand ol time in his favorite kitty cat pop tent, which is shaped like a candy corn with a candy corn plush hanging teaser inside, which he is playing with in the photo.