Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?

In the grim locked-down winter of 2021, I drove three hours to Wales where I sat in an isolated cottage and wrestled with a memoir I could not figure out how to write. While I was there, my mother sent me a link to a two-page personal essay she’d published in a tiny but venerable magazine called the Literary Review of Canada. It was entitled ‘This Story is Mine’. After a preamble about feminism and #MeToo, she cuts to the chase: ‘In June 1964, a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday I was raped by a man old enough to be my father.’

My mother then went on to tell her life story, or the story she understands to be her life. It’s a story I’d heard many times before, one she’d published other versions of in other places.

The story is this: from the age of 12 to 15 my mother had a sexual relationship with a much older man – her riding instructor, a man I’ll call the Horseman. He was 45 and married with four children of his own, two of whom were older than my mother and attended her country school. When my grandfather discovered the relationship, he grounded his eldest daughter for two weeks and banished the Horseman from the club and the county, but unbeknownst to him the affair continued in secret. My mother and her father never spoke of it again. When my mother was 16 she met my father, a handsome boy from the wrong side of the tracks. They were engaged at 18 and married at 21. She had me and then my sister in quick succession. Twelve years into my parents’ marriage, my grandfather died and my mother bolted, leaving us, her family, behind for a glamorous life in the city.