Tag: me too

A Moment of Clarity

Blog Post 2

It was as if something within me just snapped.  I’d reached some sort of tipping point where I had just had enough of my dad.  I was just done.  I didn’t want to see him anymore.  I didn’t care if that meant that every other member of the family would be angry with me, or not believe me.  I just couldn’t take it anymore.  I felt more peaceful and serene than I had felt in years.  And I felt relieved.  I would never have to see my father again. 

I had been putting up with him and suffering through heavy discomfort for years, fearful of what people would think.  Fearful that people, family members, would be angry with me.  Fearful that nobody would believe me.  That I’d be deemed “crazy” and blamed for hurting my father. 

But I didn’t care anymore.  At lease not enough to continue putting up with him.  The emotional price that I paid for tolerating him became higher than the imagined cost I might pay from estrangement. 

It seems that public opinion judges harshly those that choose to estrange themselves from their family.  Such people are seen as cruel and selfish.  I’m here to tell you that people that separate themselves from a family member likely have a very good reason for doing it.  But the person from whom they estrange themselves sure isn’t going to tell you that part of the story.

As I said before, my father molested me. 

I just hadn’t realized it.  I didn’t have a word for what he had done, and because of all the gaslighting, I doubted my perceptions. 

When I was probably five or six years old, my father used to take me in the shower with him on Saturday mornings.  I remember only a few details, but I can tell you this: no adult man should be taking his elementary age daughter with him into the close quarters of a shower stall.  I didn’t understand the significance of it at the time, but I’ve come to understand that this was his way of exposing himself to me.  And it wasn’t normal. 

Then there was the tickling.  He loved to tickle me.  I hated it and I said so.  He did it hard and it hurt.  When he would start, I would curl myself into a ball and try to protect my private areas, because he always went there.  He’d reach around my ribs for my breasts, or the area where breasts would be if I had any, since I was so young.  He’d poke me in the inside of my thighs, my butt, and the front of my pelvis.  It wasn’t tickling so much as him groping me disguised as tickling.  I hated this.  And I said so.  I’d tell him to stop.  That I didn’t like it.  Of course, he wouldn’t.  Because he liked it.  And he would tell me that I liked it.  I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t listen to me and stop.  I didn’t understand why he didn’t believe that I didn’t like it.  But now I understand that he did this for his own satisfaction. 

He was blatant about it, too.  He’d do this right in the living room in front of anyone.  It was sexual abuse disguised as tickling.  It was so confusing to me because with him telling me that I liked it, I thought that there was something wrong with me that I didn’t.  That fact that he wouldn’t stop taught me that I had no voice, and I didn’t matter.   That fact that he’d do this right in front of anyone let me to believe that it must be okay for him to do this, because nobody stopped him, in spite of my protests. 

To this day I’m not ticklish.

As I got older, I would sit in front of him and he would rub my back, which, looking back, that alone is a little weird.  But it was never just a back rub.  Especially as I approached my teenage years, he would reach around my ribs or over my shoulders for my breasts.  I would tell him to stop, and of course he’d say that he wasn’t doing anything.  I’d say I didn’t like that, and he’d tell me that I did.  Same old story.  And this happened right in the living room.  My father groping and copping a feel on his daughter.  On me.

It didn’t end there.  My father was overtly sexual with me and made no effort to hide it.  He’d call me “sexy” if I had a nice outfit on.  He’d smack my butt if I had on tight jeans.  He’d pinch my butt and laugh.  I’d tell him to stop and he’d laugh some more, saying he was just “goosing” me and it was okay. 

He behaved as if he had a right to my body. 

He’d try to catch glimpses of my naked body, too.  He used to come into my room and wake me up in the morning and try to rip the covers off of me, knowing full well that I wasn’t fully clothed underneath. 

These things didn’t stop until I was probably sixteen years old and was able to physically stand up to him and make him stop. 

I had had a hard time understanding what he had been doing to me, due to his gaslighting and his willingness to touch me right in front of other people.  But the body knows what the mind won’t admit.  That explains the visceral revulsion I felt toward him touching me at all as an adult.  That’s what led me to ask the internet, just before Christmas, if I had been sexually abused.  I learned that, even though he hadn’t actually raped or penetrated my vagina, that I had been molested by my father.  It was a moment of clarity that helped me to understand the disgust I felt whenever I was in his presence.  It made everything make sense. 

I called a couple friends for support and told them what my father had done to me, and that I didn’t want to see him anymore.  Since they hadn’t been gaslighted by him as I had been, they were immediately disgusted by his behavior.  One called him an evil monster.  They told me, “You never have to see him again.”  And that was it.  I was just done with him.  I wanted to be free.

Christmas

Christmas

I’ve always hated the Holidays.  Well, maybe not always, but I have a long history of hating them.  And it’s because the Holidays have a long history of bringing me misery rather than joy. 

I remember when I was quite young and the Sears Holiday Wish Book would arrive in the mail months before Christmas.  I’d spend hour upon hour perusing that magical catalog, dreaming about the magic of Christmas morning and getting glittering new toys that I had put on my Christmas List after discovering them in the catalog. 

After much anticipation, Christmas morning would finally arrive and I would open my gifts.  One year I got a Six Million Dollar Man.  Another year, a microscope and premade slides.  But after all the gifts were open, the excitement would start to wane.  I’d get a little tired and cranky.  Or I’d abandon my toys and build a fort out of the boxes.  And inevitably, my father would call me “ungrateful.”

After a few years of this, I would expect that this reaction would be coming from him, and I began to anticipate it.  I made sure to act grateful, whatever that was.  But it was impossible.  Because he’d catch me at some point without a smile on my face, and it would all be over.  I was ungrateful.  

In addition to my lack of gratitude, I didn’t love my father enough.  I knew this because he told me so.  He’d get weepy and say, “I can’t be happy because my kids don’t love me.”  I told him over and over that I loved him, and he said that I didn’t show it.  That I was a selfish brat that didn’t care about him.  I was crushed.  I wondered what I had done wrong, or if I was broken and incapable of showing love. 

On more than one occasion, I asked him what he wanted for Christmas, or his birthday, and his answer was, “I want a happy family, but I can’t have one because my kids are awful and they don’t love me.”  As I got older and he said to me, I realized that that was an awful lot for a grown man to put on a child.

At one time when I was quite young, I remember reading that each family can have their own birthday traditions, and you can even make up new ones.  A creative and artistic kid, I decided to make up a birthday tradition for our family.  I had a toy sewing machine that sewed with glue instead of thread.  I was too young to sew with a machine that actually had a needle in it.  Nevertheless, this glue sewing machine actually worked and I had made little stuffed animals with it and a purse.  For our new birthday tradition that I made up, I made a hat.  I think I modeled the hat after my rabbit fur Davey Crockett hat.  I had made it out of my favorite scrap material that someone had given me.  It was yellow and had cats on it.  The new tradition was to be that on someone’s birthday, they would be given this special hat to wear for their birthday dinner, because they were the birthday person and deserved a special hat.  Then they would keep the hat until the next birthday, when they would present the hat to the new birthday person.  Kind of like when last year’s Miss America presents the crown to the new Miss America.  The very first person to wear this hat would be my dad, as his was the first birthday after I made the hat and the new tradition. 

I really thought this would be a very special and unique thing for our family.  Our very own birthday tradition. But of course, that wasn’t how it went. 

My dad’s birthday came along and we had our usual birthday dinner in our dining room, which we only used for special occasions.  When it came time for the cake, the real celebration, I brought out my special hat for my dad to wear.  He was loathe to wear it.  I explained that it was a new, special tradition for our family that we were starting right then and he would be the first to wear the hat.  It was his job to watch over the hat until the next birthday, at which time he would present it to that person.  My birthday would be next.

My creative, childish, and yet fun idea of a hand made birthday hat was not met with the enthusiasm that I expected.  My father would barely wear the hat for a moment.  And when my birthday came only three weeks later, no hat for me.  I asked where it was and was only told that it was gone.  I was gutted.  I was looking forward to getting the birthday hat and then passing it on to my brother, who had the next birthday.  And the disappointment showed on my face.  And there I was again.  Ungrateful.  To him.  To my mother for all her hard work in making dinner.  Nothing was ever good enough for me. 

In adulthood I’d come a long way to distance myself from such unhappy childhood memories and to find parts of the holidays that I enjoy.  I’d put my father on “low contact” without telling him and managed to see him only on the required holidays a few times a year.  He would still find a way to ruin them, and as such, I dreaded the holiday season as it approached.  I hated to see my father.  I’m a relatively well functioning human being but being around him puts me into a tailspin.  I can’t stand to have him touch me.  At all.  Forget a hug.  His touch literally makes my skin crawl.  If he touches me at all, I go wash.  Spending any time with him at all makes me physically ill and will trigger a migraine that will last for days afterward. 

Nevertheless, this Christmas I managed to buy him a Christmas gift fairly early in my seasonal shopping and intended to have him over for some sort of dinner.  I called my brother and invited him to come to our celebration and he told me that he wouldn’t be able to make it as he’d be working that day.  But he’d let Dad know when Christmas dinner was so that he could come without him. 

He thought he was doing me a favor, but the mere thought of my dad at my house without my brother there to dilute the situation was more than I could handle.   My mood turned dark for the rest of the day and for days afterwards.  Even I was puzzled at the sudden and strong reaction that I had.  My dad is an awful person to be around but my reaction was visceral.

I did a little searching of my memory, and asked Google what those memories might mean.  For the first time, I finally found some clarity regarding my father and his treatment of me.  I looked up some things that he had done to me when I was a child, and the Internet was unequivocal:  my father had molested me.  Everything suddenly made sense.