Yes, I knew what a mistress was when I was eight

Everything stopped making sense

I remember the first time we had dinner as a family after I found out. He was home unexpectedly early that day. I hunched over the coffee table in the living room, trying to work out a math problem with my pencil. My sister sat across from me, her eyes darting nervously at the sound of the door.

He left his phone on the table and went to his room without a word. Bored from wrestling with equations, I picked it up and caught fragments of the message. My sister slapped my hand and told me to put it down, just in time for dinner.

We gathered around the dining table, with family photos hanging on the wall in front of me. They hung like art pieces in a museum, with identical wooden frames and smiles from a family standing in front of three different Asian tourist landmarks.

I questioned if I had really been there.

My sister and I stood between our parents, carefully positioning ourselves and our matching dresses in the centre of the photos. Beyond these captured moments, I barely remembered anything about each trip, making it surreal to see myself standing beside a man I was supposed to know.

The irony was obvious, with perceived happiness in the photos contrasting the reality of our everyday life. I always knew that my family was less happy than others; I just didn't know how much.

I thought it was normal for fathers to never come home. I thought it was normal for children to wish their fathers never came home anyway. Most of all, I thought it was normal for sisters to communicate through warnings and knowing glances.

Our dinner ritual would begin with us sitting in silence as we waited for him to make a decision. There weren’t signs to leave clues about what was going to happen next. Perhaps it was karma from invading his privacy, but it turned out that I was the chosen one that day.

As I reached out my spoon to scoop a piece of chicken, he grabbed my arm and shook it. He always opened his eyes wide before he yelled at me, as if to warn me about the emotional punch he was about to swing.

Who do you think you are? You don't even greet me when I come home.

If you're so unhappy here, I can kick you out anytime. You hear me?

I don’t need to deal with a kid like you.

He pushed my arm back, sending my elbow knocking against the wooden table with a dull thud that rang through the silent room. The chicken fell outside of the plate, leaving a greasy stain on the blue placemat.

I looked at my mum even though I knew her response. She shook her head and told me to continue eating. We would sit in silence for the rest of the meal, until he asked my sister how her day was.

And in return, she would plaster a smile across her face and answer him as politely as she could, her voice pitched high as part of her rehearsed performance. The silence continued.

It was at that dinner, on the day I saw the messages, that I realised his behaviour was a choice. It was a choice to physically threaten your children, just as much as it was a choice to spend a week with your mistress in Bali when you told your wife you'd miss her birthday due to a last-minute work trip.

Every outburst, every cold shoulder, and every threat were not accidents that adults made them out to be. They were conscious decisions to tell two kids that the life they had was the way everyone else lived.

I think about my grandparents who told me to bear with it because he was putting a roof over my head. The family friends who told me he was a good man who didn't know how to express himself. And every other adult who had seen his outbursts in public at restaurants and clinics but chose to look away.

Through their actions, they taught my sister and me a lesson that we would carry for the rest of our lives. To survive, we must bury the truth. Even if it meant sacrificing any belief we had in our own senses, and any desire to put into words whatever we went through, whatever that was.

The lack of language to describe what happened to us bothers me till today. I struggle to put a label on it without making myself seem overly-dramatic. Even as time washes out the sting of each wound, it remains.

At a recent Christmas gathering, my eyes met my sister’s in the crowded room. I watched as she stood near him and the woman he went to Bali with, maintaining conversation with the same rehearsed smile she had since young.

Neither of us approached the other, and we understood why. Sometimes the only way to protect our wounds is to guard it with the very silence that created it. I thought about the family photos that once hung on the walls of the apartment that is now sold, how the photographs framed our childhood and the rest of our lives. In the tapestry of moments that make up my life, a stubborn stain remains as a reminder of stories that we choose not to tell.

This article is my reflection on “Did You Know What a Mistress Was When You Were 8?”. It was the first time in my life I read an article about infidelity from a daughter’s point of view, which inspired me to tell my story even if it has a less-than-perfect ending. What are the odds, I found out when I was 8 too!