I guess I was about fifteen when the abuse stopped. But the fact is, for a long time it really made very little difference. I was afraid all the time. Afraid of the dark. Afraid of any hour or minute which left me alone with my dad. Afraid to be alone: in the house, in the yard, or on the street because he might show up.

Sitting in the therapist's office, I was struck by how central my father had been to the definition of my life and my future. I was living my future.

"And your mother?" the doctor asked, his voice neutral.

"My mother? She was nothing. She was less than nothing to me."

"And why is that?" asked the doctor.

I had no answer.

Why is that? I asked myself all the way home. My mother, now in her late seventies, is a smaller, frailer version of the sad, stocky woman who sent me off to Sunday School and went out to work in the 1950's when everyone else's mother stayed home.

The transit strike was on, and the traffic on Oak Street crawled north. I tried to picture the house in the old neighborhood, the small white frame house with green trim, the apple trees and dahlias in the front yard, the winding, bumpy drive, the sheds out back. I could see mom, in my mind's eye, her housedress held together at the shoulder strap with a safety pin, her weariness evident in puffy legs and dark shadows beneath her eyes. Looking back, I was amazed at how little I had appreciated how hard it was for her, working, having five children and an alcoholic husband.

Nothing. My mother was nothing.

A car roared up beside me and whipped in front of me, cutting me off. Minutes later he was careening into another lane. A cacophony of horns trumpeted as he whipped through a red light at the intersection. Jerk.

I tried to remember some teenaged interaction with mom. I had a vague recollection of a conversation in which she had offered to pay my tuition if I wanted to go to university. Something about me being smart enough. Smart enough, perhaps. But I couldn't concentrate. A's and D's, that was my grade twelve report card. It would be a waste of her money and my time.

So, this hard-working, Christian woman who offered to work to put me through university was nothing to me? I struggled with the concept. Was I that callous, that self-centred?

And then I got the visual.

My mom and a no-nonsense cop confronting me. The friends who had taken me in, standing beside me. The policeman saying that harboring a minor was a serious charge and I didn't want to get my friends in trouble now, did I? And my bitter, tearful response, the reasons why I couldn't go home.

Then mom blurted out: "I'm not stupid you know." As if what had happened was something dirty and sly I had done behind her back. As if those moments of embarrassed fumbling on the sofa under the newspaper he'd placed on my lap, or the sweaty grunting mauling on my grandmother's bed were some treat I'd stolen away from her.

In the car, now, August 2001, I felt a sharp pain in my chest and realized that I had stopped breathing. Traffic lanes reeled as my lungs opened and I inhaled deeply, gasping for air like a diver who's gone too deep.

Those words severed us more unalterably than the cutting of the umbilical cord. Whether it was pain or despair or denial that made her believe that I was to blame did not matter. The tired, middle-aged straw that I had clutched against the deconstruction of self and social structure was blown away.

As I numbly followed the vehicles ahead of me, I became cognizant of that moment as a crossroads in my life, from which point I ceased to trust my own understanding of personal relationships. In the congested traffic of that stifling August afternoon, I realized that every wrong man I married, every friendship that blew up in my face came from that look, those words. The birth of self-doubt.

I pulled into the underground parking lot with no memory of coming up Thurlow or Nelson or the alley. I was just suddenly there and making the right moves, adroitly manoeuvering the car into position.

Nothing. My mother was nothing to me.

Wrong. She was everything.

The end.