The Shame Was Never Mine

I ran away four months before my nineteenth birthday, and with it, I lost a future.

I was at university studying languages. I was talented. My exams had placed me in the top six students, and I was offered two years abroad instead of one.

That could have been my escape.
My route out.
My proof that I was more than what had happened to me.

But my fear and pain could not survive another few months.

So I ran.

I left university because I had to find work. I was homeless. I had no friends. My whole life, I had barely been allowed any because my parents had either prevented friendships or destroyed them.

I was only ever allowed to leave the house for school. I was not allowed out afterwards, although in time I found small ways around that, but only for short moments.

When I was thirteen, I became friendly with two girls in my year. Stupidly, I talked about them at home.

Within days, my mam went into school and told the head of year that these girls were bullying me, even though those words had never been said. She asked for them to be kept away from me.

I could not keep friendships.

And I was bullied horrifically at school.

I did not fit in. My mam decided my haircuts. She would not let me shave my legs for PE, so I resorted to desperate little acts in which I would scrape my legs with scissors. Just to try to look like everyone else.

If other girls forgot part of their netball kit, they would take mine. I would be left humiliated.

At shower time, girls would snatch my towel and throw it between themselves.

If I dared to walk into the dinner hall, some of them would throw food at me.

I did not fit.
I was different.
I had no confidence.

I only knew how to accept my fate.

Children can sense difference. They can pick out the one who has already been made small, and I had been made very small.

Not because I was born weak.

Because I had been carved into fear.

I had been taught to lower my eyes, keep quiet and endure.

I should’ve done better.

At eighteen, I ended up in a relationship with a man in his forties.

He took my money. He used my vulnerability. He let me walk the streets at night with nowhere safe to sleep. My clothes were kept in his garage, and I would wait until he woke up just so I could get changed.

On the nights he let me stay, he expected things from me I did not yet know how to question.

Age and therapy have taught me he was not loving.
He was not kind.
He was sadistic.

He saw a broken young woman and took what he wanted from her.

The lowest point was when he filmed me and told me it was private.

It was not private.

Men came into my workplace and told me they had seen it. I worked in a local takeaway. It was hard to escape the locals.

The shame went through me like fire.

My colour drained.
My body froze.
And still, somehow, I believed the shame belonged to me.

I should’ve done better.

And so I drank.

I drank to excess every day, trying to suppress the burning fullness of pain inside me.

I drank before I could face the day.
I drank before I could shower.
I drank before I could think.

I drank because alcohol gave me a few moments where the world went quiet.

I went to work drunk, or worse, I did not turn up at all.

I lost my job.

My own fault, I told myself.

I had no sympathy for myself.

I should’ve done better.

But I was trapped in a world where alcohol took away pain that felt worse than anything physical. It softened the humiliation. It blurred the degradation. It gave me a false pocket of peace in a life that had never taught me safety.

One afternoon, the man I was seeing attacked me.

That was the last time I saw him.

By then, he had sold my belongings for money.

At one point, I had fallen pregnant with his baby. I was too naive to realise at first. I was just very ill. Then I found out I was pregnant and miscarrying within the same hour.

I was in hospital, bleeding heavily, frightened and alone in every way that mattered.

He was not kind.

He was not gentle.

He was angry.

He took my last five pounds and went for a pint while I sat there waiting for the bleeding to settle. I needed treatment, and if a nurse had not stepped in, I would have left without what I needed.

At the time, I felt heartbroken.

I lived off scraps of what felt like love.

It is only through extensive therapy that I have slowly realised it was never love.

I was eighteen. Nineteen. Emotionally immature. Naive beyond naive. And although I hate the word, it is the truth of the situation.

I was vulnerable.

But I should’ve done better.

And so it continued.

The alcohol.
The vicious cycle.
The men.
The absence of boundaries.

I did not know what boundaries were. I did not know I was allowed to have them.

At nineteen, I met the man who would become the father of seven of my children.

He was fifteen years older than me.

At the time, I thought he was good for me. He helped me stop drinking for a while, and I believed his words and actions were in my best interests.

I wanted so badly to believe I had finally found someone safe.

But over time, over many years, I realised he was not the person I had needed him to be.

He was sexually abusive.

No did not matter.

He did it anyway.

Words like, “You know you want to,” and, “I’d never hurt you,” echoed around the room. Even when I was hurt, I believed I was hurt because of me, not because of what he had done.

He was controlling.
Coercive.
Abusive.

For years, I believed that was because I let him.

But that is what abuse had trained me to believe.

The truth is, he was abusive because he chose to be.

I had nobody, and he isolated me. Any friendships I formed, he crushed. He made up lies. He went through my phone. He accused me of things I had not done.

He followed me.
He chased me in my car with my children inside it.
He turned up unannounced.
He kicked and bashed at my doors.

He moved from the front of the house to the back, making sure I knew there was nowhere I could feel safe.

The police became involved. His key was taken away. I was directed to a solicitor. An injunction was issued.

But my resolve never lasted.

I was scared of him, yes.

But he was also all I had.

We had so many children together. He did not truly care about them. I do not think he cared about me either. He did not want me, but he did not want anyone else to have me.

He married someone else, a fellow Muslim and set up home with her, but he still kept up the abuse at my end.

Sitting outside my house until the early hours.
Coming back.
Leaving.
Returning.

Haunting the edges of my life.

And I let him back, time and time again, hoping it would be different.

Hoping he would care for his children.
Hoping he would be a dad to them.
Hoping there was still something human inside him.
Something fatherly.
Something kind.

But it never materialised.

One of my children was conceived after I had fallen asleep and woke to realise what had happened. I took the morning-after pill, but it did not work. Nine months later, I gave birth to my fifth child.

When I was pregnant with my first child, he wanted me to end the pregnancy. I could not go through with it. He was furious. He smashed up my bedsit and told me he would never touch me again.

Then, not long after, he did.

That was the pattern.

Rage.
Control.
Apology without change.
Harm dressed up as love.

There were other things too. Things I still struggle to write.

Times he treated me like something to be shared, not someone to be loved. Times he placed me in situations with other Asian men and I did not know how to fight my way out.

I was young, isolated, frightened and so deeply trained to comply that I barely understood I had the right to refuse.

Shame lives inside me because of it.

For years, shame has told me I allowed it.

For years, guilt has told me I was pathetic.

But I am trying to understand that a person can be grown in years and still be emotionally trapped in childhood.

I was not free.
I was not whole.
I was not standing on solid ground.

I was still that child facing the wall, waiting for the floorboards to creak.

I should’ve done better.

For twenty years, on and off, I entertained the father of seven of my children.

Each time, I hoped for change.
Each time, I hoped for a different outcome.
Each time, I believed there might be something better waiting inside him.

Something human.
Something fatherly.
Something kind.

But it never came.

Eventually, I decided I never wanted to see him again.

I blocked him.

Even now, he still makes life hard. He still comes near my house. He still lingers like a shadow that refuses to understand it has no right to be there.

But I will not go back.

Not to him.
Not to those two decades.
Not to fear.
Not to harm dressed up as need.

I wish I could be confident.

I wish I could find my spark again, if it was ever truly mine to begin with.

I wish I could become a better version of myself. Not polished. Not perfect. Just lighter. Stronger. Less afraid of the world. Less afraid of myself.

And I know there are no easy excuses.

I have made life complicated at times. I have put eight children before my own needs. I have given every ounce of energy I had to their happiness, their safety and their emotional stability. I have tried, with everything in me, to make sure they become far better versions of me.

But actually, that is not quite right.

I do not want my children to be versions of me at all.

I want them to be themselves.

Fully.
Freely.
Safely.

I do not want my children to follow my dreams. I want them to have their own.

I want them to believe they are allowed to want things. To try things. To fail and still feel loved. To be scared and still keep going. To know that love does not disappear because they make a mistake.

I did have dreams once.

I tried.

But so often, I failed. Or I gave up when things became scary. I was defeated too soon at times. Not because I did not care. Not because I did not want better. But because there were always so many battles to fight, and each one left me with a little less strength than before.

There are no excuses.

I do not pity myself.

I do not want to spend my life blaming other people for where I am.

I may have had to survive things I never asked for, but it is still my job to heal from them. It is still my job to be as accountable as I can. To look at the parts of my life that are mine to change and try, even now, to change them.

But accountability does not mean pretending the damage was not real.

It does not mean carrying shame that never belonged to me.

It means telling the truth.

When I became a mam, love was never in doubt.

From the moment I held my children, something in me ignited. Some maternal switch flicked on in all its glory, and my love was immediate. Fierce. Unwavering.

But love alone was never enough for me.

I knew that.

I knew love did not automatically make me safe. It did not automatically make me patient. It did not automatically undo what had been done to me.

So I worked.

I worked so hard to learn how to parent as effectively as I could. To prevent damaging my children with the parts of me that were still damaged. To become the mam who did not destroy them. The mam who did not make fear feel like home.

And that has been a lifetime of work.

Work I still do.

I read.
I educate myself.
I listen to understand, not just to respond.
I apologise when I need to.
I reflect, even when reflection hurts.

I have never been a perfect mam. I do not think perfect mams exist.

But I have been a trying mam.

A learning mam.

A mam who knew she had a choice.

I could pass the pain down.

Or I could stand in front of it and say, it stops with me.

And God, I have tried to make it stop with me.

I have put years into therapy.

Years of sitting in rooms, saying things out loud that my body still wanted to hide. Years of trying to ask for help, even when asking for help felt like the last thing I had the power to do.

I am stubbornly independent. Sometimes to my own detriment. Even in suffering, I would rather hide away than be seen in my worst moments. I have always found it easier to disappear than to need anyone.

But today, I am learning to stand against bad things.

Against the things that happen.

Against the people who do them.

I am learning to empower myself to speak up when something is not right. Not loudly, maybe. Not perfectly. Not always without shaking. But one small step at a time.

And it is not easy.

It is painfully brutal.

It goes against my better judgement, but I am having to accept that my judgement was heavily flawed. Not because I was stupid. Not because I was weak. But because I never saw through the eyes of someone who believed they had value.

I accepted things I should never have had to accept.

I normalised things that were never normal.

I mistook survival for consent.

I mistook silence for agreement.

I mistook endurance for strength.

And now I am trying to learn something different.

I am trying to learn that my voice matters, even when it shakes.

I am trying to learn that no is a full sentence, even when my body wants to apologise for saying it.

I am trying to learn that being difficult is not the same as being unsafe.

I am trying to learn that protecting myself is not cruelty.

I am trying to learn that I do not have to shrink myself to make other people comfortable.

I should’ve done better.

That is what shame says.

But shame is not truth.

The truth is, I was a child who should have been protected.

I was a young woman who should have been helped.

I was vulnerable.
Isolated.
Abused.
Coerced.
Frightened.
Trained to believe that survival was somehow failure.

I did not fail because I stayed silent.

I did not fail because I drank.

I did not fail because I went back.

I did not fail because I did not know how to save myself sooner.

I survived in the only ways I knew how.

I have carried things no child should carry.

I have walked through years I should never have had to survive.

I have made mistakes, yes.

I have complicated my own life at times, yes.

I have fallen into old patterns, yes.

But I have also tried.

I have loved.

I have learnt.

I have fought to understand.

I have fought to parent differently.

I have fought to keep going, even when keeping going felt impossible.

And maybe the sentence was never meant to be, “I should’ve done better.”

Maybe the sentence was always meant to be:

“They should have done better by me.”