I was molested when I was five years old.
I don’t remember her name. I do remember she was in her teens and my parents trusted her. At least for a little while.
She was very friendly, and she was good with me and my little sister, and my parents felt comfortable having her hang around the house and keep us occupied while they worked on other things. She never took us anywhere outside the yard or house, and there were always other people around.
It didn’t stop her. We played a game, you see, a game about making me feel good. It involved taking off my shorts and my underwear and letting her first massage my buttocks and then turn me over and lick my…You Know. Down There.
And it did feel good. She was never mean about it, she never seemed to force it on me. It was a game. I knew it was a game we could not let anyone else know we were playing. Sometimes she played it with my little sister too, who was only two, but I was the main one.
After a few months, my parents discovered she was stealing small things from our house. I never saw her again.
My best friend in first and second grade and I would play Doctor. I taught her how to take off our underwear and touch and lick Down There, to make each other feel good. That was the panacea for all our hurts in that game. My father caught us once. I lied and said we were just curious, we were just looking. I don’t know if he believed me. I think he wanted to. We were never caught again.
I flirted with similar relationships on and off over the years, mostly playing around with close friends, never quite going as far as I did with my first friend. It always felt dirty and shameful and secret. And I was, in truth, more interested in boys overall. It’s just that they didn’t seem very interested in me.
That was the second part of the damage. Boys would date me, sort of, more because I was foolishly and awkwardly smitten with them than because they really wanted to be with me. After a brief time, they would find someone else more interesting and drop me. My first boyfriend, in junior high, even denied we had ever been together. By my junior year my longest-lasting relationship, a whole two months, ended when my boyfriend told me pick-up games (as in sports) were more important than spending time with me. I was so convinced of my inferiority by this point that I didn’t think to be offended. I was just grateful he was being kind enough to break it off with honesty.
There were never more than a few kisses and hand-holding. There wasn’t much opportunity in my community, and again, I don’t think they were all that interested. Looking back, I think I probably would have slept with them if they’d pushed it, if there had been the opportunity.
I lost my virginity to the boy I started dating my freshman year of college, one month after we started dating. He actually treated me well, at least to begin with. But sex still felt secret and dirty and shameful. Our relationship became mostly about sex. I was more than capable of orgasms, but started faking them to make it go faster and so that I didn’t have to tell him what would really work. He became the center of my world. I never really made any friends in college, other than the friends he already had. I never did go have the semester overseas that I always dreamed of having. I never did a lot of things, because I thought it might threaten our relationship.
I couldn’t threaten the relationship that I had already realized, even though I didn’t want to admit it, was damaged and problematical and probably should have ended. But I was already so tied up with him: financially, physically, sexually, emotionally. I kept pushing the thoughts aside, denying the depression, avoiding the issues. Things became…dysfunctional. I could write a book about it, but I won’t. He was never physically abusive, and I doubt anyone would have seen him as emotionally abusive. He was controlling, in subtle ways. There was disapproval of anything that didn’t fit his strict concepts of what was okay to do, to think, to be. There were the little comments here and there: I didn’t have much common sense. I was gaining too much weight. I partied too much on the few occasions we even went to parties. There were always strings attached to gifts: expectations for what I would do with them, how I would thank him.
I remember once when we both got high on pot with some friends and he took me back into his room and we had sex and I started crying in the middle of it and he kept going and afterwards he asked why and I told him that I was so confused that I thought I was being raped.
I knew it was him. And I still felt like I was being raped.
Sex became infrequent. We could go a couple of months without having sex. He complained. I halfheartedly tried, but we were rarely in the mood at the same time, and he never wanted to just make out, just spend time loving each other without having to fuck every time.
We got married, bought a house, had children. We knew exactly when each child was conceived because there were only those times it could have happened. We had sex perhaps three times total during the eighteen months I was pregnant. I had post-partum depression, but we were both in denial. He couldn’t fix it, couldn’t fix me, so he became angry and turned away and shut me out. I remember telling him I thought I needed help and him telling me I was being stupid and only weak people go to therapists. I needed to buck up and deal.
He had a need for girl friends–you know, female friends, “nothing further.” He had an emotional affair with a coworker two years ago. He told me each agonizing detail, because I was his confidante. I comforted him, stood by him, became best friends with the girl. I started a physical and emotional affair with a married coworker around the same time. I told my husband nothing, lied about who I was meeting on weekend nights, hid the evidence.
The man I had the affair with built up my confidence at first. He listened to me, comforted me, stroked my ego while he stroked my body. He was enthusiastic and long-lived in bed, if not particularly excellent at satisfying me. And he wanted to share me. I said that might be fun. So he did. Another married friend of his met us at the motel where we would go. They both fucked me for three hours, and they said I was amazing, beautiful, such a hot fuck.
I left feeling a bizarre mixture of pleased and proud and deeply shamed and empty. Empty most of all. It was like with every touch, every thrust, every stroke, they had stolen a part of me.
Shortly after that I allowed a stranger to pick me up at the bar where we had our staff Christmas party, and we went to a motel and I let him fuck me. He tried to trick me into letting him fuck me without a condom, but I caught on in time. I still let him do it once he was covered. He wasn’t very good. I had to finish myself off. He told me I was a beast, in an admiring tone.
A few weeks later I lied to my husband about going to a friend’s rescue and went to another (single) coworker’s house, and I had my second one night stand. At least he was better at it.
I told my lover about it all. He said he wanted to get more of his friends involved, have a real gang bang. He said he wanted to find a woman to bring into things.
I started making excuses for not making it to the motel. Both times a second friend of his arranged to meet up with us, I had sudden “emergencies” with kids that afternoon. I finally broke it of. He sucked me back in with sweet words, twice. Even though we hadn’t had sex in months, I didn’t break things off entirely, finally, until almost ten months after we had started.
I tried to fix things in my marriage. I was willing to do almost anything. He didn’t know the truth, though his gut suspected. I had gotten better at sex, and we were having more of it. He suggested we look into swinging. I said I’d be interested. He took me to a strip club and we spent $200 on a stripper who was willing to get into a serious threesome session back in the filthy little stalls. We did everything you could do with underwear still on. It felt good at the time, and my husband was very excited by it all, and I felt emptier than ever. It was confirmation: I wasn’t enough. I would never be enough.
I finally told my husband the truth. Things fell apart. He was filled with rage. He had been honest about his emotional affair, which now he wouldn’t even admit was an affair. How could I have lied? How could I have betrayed him? How could I have stopped being his little virginal whore? Within a month I hated myself so much that I tried to commit suicide and ended up in the psych ward. He hated me for that, couldn’t understand how I could leave my children. I told him the truth: I was convinced that all I did was cause people pain, that they would all be better off without me, that they could just mourn my death and move on.
It was in the hospital that I began the long, slow process towards truth and healing. I stopped lying to myself, stopped lying to other people. I discovered people did and could love me for who I really am. I discovered I could stop running.
He couldn’t handle it. He said he didn’t know who I was any more. It was a final betrayal.
Ten months later, we’re finally filing for divorce. I’m finally healing. I’m finally facing the truth: most of what I’ve believed about myself were lies that people told me.
I’m dating someone new now. I don’t know if we’ll make it in the long run, since there’s plenty working against us, but I hope we do. When he listens to my pain, he listens with compassion for me and anger for those who have harmed me. He is working on gaining my trust that he will be there for me, that when he promises something he will carry it through, that he truly thinks I’m beautiful inside and out. Slowly, I’m starting to believe him.
This isn’t all my story. You can’t condense more than two decades of shame and pain into one post, however long it is. But it’s a truth that I’ve never told in its entirety before. And I can feel the healing begin.
Posted by jellomaker 
Posted by jellomaker 
Posted by jellomaker 
