Mum was always overprotective – I found out why on my 18th birthday

As a teenager, I felt trapped by my mum’s rules.

Boyfriends were forbidden. She rarely let me go out alone. And I was never allowed to go for sleepovers.

I was 14 when I finally convinced her to let me stay at a friend’s house, but in the middle of the night she had to come and pick me up.

I pretended I was homesick to hide my real reason for not being able to sleep – I was scared that my friend’s dad would creep into the room and do something to me.

There was nothing in his actions that alarmed me, but I’d had this festering fear of men for as long as I can remember. I could never understand why.

My childhood was un-traumatic, and although my parents divorced when I was 11 there was no experience in my own life that I could point to that might be the root of these feelings.

Then in 2012, when I was 18, my mum took me to a restaurant and said: ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you, but I felt that I should wait until you were old enough to understand.’

She went on to tell me that one night – when she was 11 years old – a man took her from where she slept and raped her. She believed that man to be her stepfather, who her mother was still married to.

Having picked up on whispers from family members as I was growing up, I was already aware that this was a man who had been physically violent to my mum and my grandmother, as well as having sexually abused other children in the family. But I hadn’t known the full extent until then.

Tears streamed down my cheeks as I listened to her story. It was extremely painful to hear.

Yet, there was also a strange comfort in finally understanding her experience. She confirmed what I subconsciously already seemed to know – that I had to be wary of men.

In April 1994 – just a few months before I was born – my mum and dad moved to the UK from Sri Lanka. They were in their mid-twenties and my mum had been desperate to leave her stepfather behind to start a new life.

She tried everything to convince her mother to come with her, but she chose her husband again and again. In the years since, I remember my mum working hard to maintain a relationship with her, even forcing me and my younger sister to speak with her on the phone at Christmases and birthdays.

But I always felt that my grandma was a stranger.

Then, in 2018, while completing my BA in Fine Art, I made a short film that depicted a real conversation between my mother and aunt about how they first met in their early twenties – my aunt had been abandoned by my grandmother when she was two years old.

By making the film and sharing it with family members, my mum and her sister were able to discuss their fractured childhood for the first time in their lives rather than brushing it to the side.

With this success in mind, I decided to go to Sri Lanka with a friend the following year, camera in hand, with the intention of reuniting the generations.

Having only met my grandmother a handful of times in my life, I was excited to spend quality time with her and she, in turn, was excited to tell me about her life.

Incredibly naively, I believed a few conversations with my grandma would be all it took to get her to understand that she was hurting my mum by staying with her husband. I thought she’d apologise, and we would all be happy.

Of course, it didn’t quite play out that way.

My grandma doubled down on her decisions, and I simply couldn’t get through to her.

But during the five years I spent filming, bouncing between the UK and Sri Lanka, I came to see that I couldn’t judge my grandma in such binary or simplistic ways. 

She had agency over her decision to stay with her husband, but she had also been abused herself.

At the same time, she was a victim of a much larger patriarchal culture that upholds violence against women.

It’s a culture that exists today, and shaped the way my mum raised me.

Over the course of making the film, I had countless conversations with my mum about things we had never discussed before. Particularly, I came to see how her childhood assault had reverberated through her life, and consequently through mine.

I spoke to her about the time I tried to tell her about my first boyfriend when I was 17; she had refused to accept it, referring to him only as my ‘friend’.

I questioned her about why sex was never discussed, recounting that she once found a packet of my contraceptive pills and instead of having a discussion with me, became angry and confiscated it.

I recalled things my mum taught me – how my smile could be dangerous, to make sure I always kept my legs crossed in public, that I should never sit on uncles’ laps – and suddenly I was able to see many of the experiences that I’d had with boys and men in my adolescence and beyond in a completely new light.

It’s something I reference in the title of the film: The Taste of Mango.

The Taste of Mango comes from a story I tell at the beginning about how my mum craved mangoes when she was pregnant with me. My grandma was the same when pregnant with her, too.

This simple fact alludes to the idea of inheritance and, as the film goes on, viewers learn about the many complex things we have inherited from each other – our smiles, music, stories, pain, and fear.

I ended up using the film to reconcile with my grandma and understand why my grandmother would stay married to such a man.

More than this though, I used the film to understand why my mum raised me the way she did and begin unpacking the root of my fear and distrust of men.

However, I wanted to make sure that these experiences ended with me. I had been thinking a lot about having a child, but I wanted to make sure that I didn’t raise any future children with this lingering fear and anger.

Thanks to the process of making the film, I was able to work through many of the painful knots that I was carrying and to really consider how I wanted to be a parent.

Six months ago, I gave birth to my son. I know I will not be a perfect mother – and perhaps he will reflect back in years to come about all the ways that I could have done things better – but I feel incredibly grateful to have had these five years of making The Taste of Mango and untangling the past.

Although the film began from the impetus to examine the violence that three generations endured at the hands of men, what it has come to be is a testament to the joy and vibrancy in our lives despite the violence.

It’s a celebration of familial love, resolve, and hope. And if it can help just a few other people feel less alone, then I will consider it a success.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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