After Andrea Robin Skinner, the youngest daughter of Alice Munro, was sexually abused as a child by her stepfather, Gerry Fremlin, her father told her siblings not to tell anyone. For nearly 50 years, they kept a secret that in various ways shaped each of their lives. Only in the last decade, after seeking therapy to work through feelings of guilt about their roles in Andrea’s suffering, did they reunite with their sister after a long estrangement. They say the healing continues. Here, her stepbrother, Andrew Sabiston, tells his story. In a separate piece, her sister Jenny Munro tells hers.
Forty-nine years. How could the truth about the horrors suffered by my stepsister have been kept silent for so long? In the nearly five decades I’ve spent inside this story, I knew about just one of those horrors — the first assault that started it all — but I learned volumes about silence.
Silence can seem like the best way to protect someone you care about (as in: don’t talk about painful things and you won’t hurt them). Or silence can be tribal, insidious, and used to protect the wrong people (as in: a conspiracy of silence out of a Hollywood movie). Silence is learned generationally. It masquerades as a treatment but is in fact a cancer.
I can’t speak to the motivation of others and their silence in Andrea’s story. I can speak to mine. It goes back to my childhood with her.
I was 10 years old when my mother told me she’d met someone and fallen in love. His name was Jim. We’d be moving from the little house she and I lived in, to Jim’s much bigger house. Best thing of all …” I’d be getting a new sister. Andrea.
In the shadow of my mother, a literary icon, my family and I have hidden a secret for decades. It’s time to tell my story.
Since my parents’ divorce when I was an infant, I’d been an only child spending most of the year with my single mother. Episodes of “The Brady Bunch” spoke to me. I’d longed for a sibling close in age to grow up with; to have that kind of fun with; and now I had one, close even in name.
Andrea and I instantly got along. She was warmth and love and laughter — my best audience, who cracked up at all my dumb jokes and antics. She made me happy in this new home. Our lives as children of divorce followed a curious kind of symmetry, with both of us spending the summers with a parent in Ontario, and the school year together in Victoria. We marvelled that we were like twins. We had a sense of belonging. Everything was just right.
When we returned from our first Ontario summer apart, nine-year-old Andrea told 11-year-old me what her stepfather had done to her. She tried to make light of it. But I knew what she was telling me was bad, very bad. I told her she had to tell my mother. Jim was at work, but my mother was home — upstairs.
I remember following Andrea up the stairs and listening from the hallway as she told my mother and started crying. “What happened?” “He touched me.” “Where?” “Here.” Her cries became screams, sobs. It was terrifying. But once this was over, I thought, everything would be OK. Our parents would take charge.
After her harrowing disclosure, Andrea and I didn’t speak of it again. She didn’t bring it up with me, and I knew that I never wanted to cause her that kind of pain again by making her talk about it. Besides, there wasn’t any need. There was nothing left for us kids to do.
Andrew Sabiston and sister Andrea Munro (now Andrea Robin Skinner) circa 1975/76. They began living together and became close when his mother moved in with Jim Munro.
Munro Family photoOur happy and close relationship continued to grow. The resilience of children astonishes me, when now, as an adult, I look back on that time and see how the two of us put Andrea’s abuse into a silo and set it aside. We were following our parents’ lead in what kinds of conversations happened in our house, and what didn’t. The silence around Andrea’s abuse became hardwired circuitry.
My life with Andrea continued to be close, the two of us as best friends in the home we lived in. No one told me how her abuse had been dealt with, just that it had.
I left home at 18. Andrea followed me to Toronto after her high school graduation. It was 1984. She easily mixed in with my new friends, and we still never spoke about her abuse. It wasn’t something I could even imagine her wanting to talk about. It was so far in the past now. I had no idea that’s not how she felt.
Alice Munro’s husband sexually assaulted her youngest daughter. For nearly five decades, a conspiracy of silence haunted the family, and at times,
Her own silence kept her from telling me that the reason she’d followed me to Toronto was to be near someone she felt safe with. It broke my heart years later to find that out. Still does. How could I have been so clueless?
Between 1992 and 2005, I heard Andrea had written a letter to her mother telling her what Gerald Fremlin had done; I learned about the appalling letters he’d sent to the family, and about Andrea formally charging him. When I gave my statement to the Goderich police recounting Andrea’s disclosure to me as a kid, it felt like this would be the end of the silence around her abuse. It wasn’t.
When Andrea’s estrangement from the family began in 2006, it hurt. Here was silence, now amplified. Total. I saw respecting her request as my way to help her. The hardwired circuitry of not talking about difficult things kept me from stepping over the boundary she was establishing. Looking back now, I wish I’d asked if her request was related to her abuse in ‘76. Maybe I would have learned that it was about more than that, that she had endured so much more suffering. But I didn’t. There was a boundary to respect.
Andrew Sabiston and Andrea Munro (now Andrea Robin Skinner) circa 1977/78.
Munro Family photoThis is my deepest point of pain in our shared story. What would she have told me if I’d asked? Anything? Everything? All of the horrors I’ve learned about just in these last two months? Talking about it today, Andrea herself says she isn’t sure how much she might’ve told me. Neither of us had the tools then. Those wouldn’t come until The Gatehouse.
It was 2014 when Jenny told me and Sheila about this place she’d found: The Gatehouse. The three of us went there for a healing circle to share our grief over not having Andrea in our lives. So ingrained was the silence around the story of her abuse that this was the first time the three of us had spoken about it.
My parents let my sister down. I should have spoken up sooner, writes Alice’s daughter Jenny Munro.
Entering our circle, I still believed my young boy’s version of events — that the abuse had been dealt with by the adults. I was shocked to learn the truth. Not only had Jim not contacted Alice, he’d forbidden (his word) my mother and Jenny from contacting her. They’d both argued with him, and been violently yelled at; he feared telling Alice would “kill her.” And, the next summer, the way he dealt with 10-year-old Andrea’s wish to see her mother was to send her older sister Sheila to Ontario with her as her chaperone. Lastly, I was disgusted to hear details about the letters Gerald Fremlin had written. I became profoundly upset at myself for having known about those letters, but never asking to see them. My reaction to seeing photos of excerpts of them printed in the Sunday Star was visceral. I averted my eyes and couldn’t read them. I didn’t want that man in my head, not for a second. But that’s protecting me, not Andrea. I needed to face this monster, and I have now.
The Gatehouse advised Jenny, Sheila and me to write to Andrea separately, expressing our feelings. We were counselled to have no expectation of hearing back from her. But those letters opened the door to change and healing.
When Andrea reestablished contact I was grateful. She seemed healed. She seemed happy. We resumed our close relationship. But that circuitry of silence remained soldered around the subject of her abuse. I didn’t bring it up. I didn’t want to upset her, didn’t want to damage all that private healing she’d done. I’ve since learned from Andrea that while there was now more trust for us than there’d been, she was still waiting for us to break that damned silence.
A few weeks ago, when Andrea shared the article she’d written for The Gatehouse, I was shocked to learn how much I didn’t know. I wrote Andrea this text:
“How you endured all of that to be who you are today, and still every bit the treasure you were in our childhoods, is a miracle. YOU are a miracle in the strength and power you found to heal. You telling your story will shock. It will inspire. It will save. And it will move mountains. Your power is only just beginning. I love you with all my heart. Can’t wait to talk with you when you are ready.”
We’re talking now. All the time. All of us. About it all.
In the case of childhood sexual abuse, silence hurts, whatever the motivation. My silence was motivated by wanting to protect Andrea from the hurt of speaking about what she’d suffered. Now I know how misguided that silence was.
