The Ones Who Should Have Been Watching

They were in the next room. They were always in the next room.

That’s the bit that gets me. Not what happened. I’ve processed what happened. Therapists have had their go at it. I’ve sat in enough rooms with enough professionals to paper a house with appointment cards.

What gets me is the proximity. The nearness of safety that never arrived.

He was the same age as me. A family member. People hear that and they expect a monster. An obvious villain. Someone you could point at and say yes, there, that one. But children don’t look like monsters. Children look like children. And what happened between us looked like playing to anyone who glanced in from the hallway.

Nobody glanced in from the hallway.

My parents should have seen it. I don’t say that with anger any more. I used to. I’ve burned through the anger and come out the other side into something quieter. Something more like bewilderment.

How do you not see? How does a child change and you don’t notice? How does a girl who used to talk all the time go quiet and nobody thinks to ask why?

Because it’s inconvenient, is the answer. Because seeing it means dealing with it. And dealing with it means admitting something happened under your roof, on your watch, in your family. And some people would rather redecorate than admit there’s a crack in the foundation.

I became sexual too early. That’s what the books call it. “Sexualised behaviour in children.” A neat clinical phrase for something that felt like a wire being crossed inside me that nobody could uncross.

I didn’t have words for it then. I have too many now.

The adults who should have been watching were making dinner. Were watching telly. Were arguing about money. Were doing all the normal things that normal families do while something not normal at all was happening ten feet away.

I don’t blame them the way I used to. But I don’t forgive them either. I just carry it. Like everything else. In that place between anger and acceptance that doesn’t have a name but takes up most of the room.