[Gaposa Gossip]: My father’s bed[ Read Full Story]

I thought it meant that I was special. I didn't know it would turn sex into an act of shame.

 

My first lover was my father.

It’s ugly and, even now, more than 25 years later, difficult for me to say. With my father, in his bed, I first experienced the bump and grind of sexual relations. It was his genitals I first explored; he was the first to touch my body sexually, and those hands have left an indelible imprint. I have no memories that predate his abuse — his rubbing and touching, his forcing me to touch him.

I was 4; it was 1972. At night, while my mother worked, he took me into their bed and made me believe he was doing me a favor, giving me a special privilege. It took me a long, long time to really believe there wasn’t anything special about it, that it was all just sick. For many years I held onto the notion that in some way, his attention and his obsession with me made me special.

In bed he would watch TV, snapping the edge of the sheet between his fingers and the mattress while I pretended to fall asleep. Knowing what was ahead, of course I could not sleep. After a while, the snapping of the sheet stopped and I knew it was time. He would grope me, run his giant hands under my nightgown and into my flowered panties — the kind that little girls wear, with yellow and pink daisies on them — and he’d talk to me. He was always talking to me, whispering things, telling me he loved me. He’d tell me how nice I made Daddy feel. He never penetrated me with his penis, but his fingers would routinely enter my tiny vagina. It was terrifying. At times I fought with him, begging him not to touch me, and he responded by scaring me further, pressing his hands too firmly against my neck, ordering me to be quiet, to behave. He spoke in the harshest voice I knew from him, as if I had started screaming in church. Sometimes he would leave me alone in the closet until I begged to come out, but when he let me out it was more of the same. I learned to be quiet. I learned to “behave.”

Other times, the routine was different. He would work up to things slowly. We’d be wrestling, rough-housing playfully, maybe in the living room, and he would casually, repeatedly touch my vagina through my clothes. Later in bed he would hold me close and we’d laugh. He’d ask, “Who’s my No. 1 girl?” And he would touch me under my nightgown, and I would like it.

I could hardly wait for him to reach into my panties and give me that tingling feeling. I didn’t know then that I was having orgasms; it would be years before I learned that word, and even longer before I admitted to myself that what I experienced was orgasm. But sometimes the incest felt good — that special feeling, all that attention and love and affection from my nice daddy. And he was, in my young mind, my nice daddy; he hugged me and put Band-Aids on my skinned knees and sang Sinatra songs to me.

Eventually my parents separated, meaning I spent two nights a week at my father’s house. Those nights, I stayed in his bed with him, all night long. Somehow, the lie he’d told my mother to explain why I was often in their bed when she came home from work — that I was too scared to sleep alone — became truth. I don’t know if I was truly scared or if I simply came to believe I was, but I rarely spent a night in bed by myself until I was 13 years old.

Even at home with my mother, I would crawl into her bed to sleep at night. Meanwhile, at Dad’s house, the abuse continued. I’d go to sleep, genuinely fall asleep, and he’d get in bed. I’d wake up and feel his warm skin, his erection against my bottom, his breathing in my ear, the slight scent of Budweiser on his breath. One afternoon, there was a spanking after a sexual encounter and the link between sex and shame became permanent in my brain. I believed that I had let the sex happen, and that it was my fault; I believed that I was the bad one.

The abuse was the center of my universe. I created an imaginary friend, Charlotte, who was the only one I confided in. I had conversations with Charlotte in my head all the time about the ways my father touched me. We would devise elaborate strategies, some plotting to get rid of my dad so he’d stop doing it and others scheming to get rid of his girlfriend so he would never stop thinking I was special.

I acted out my distress in myriad ways. My kindergarten teacher caught me gritting my teeth as I pretended to strangle an imaginary attacker. She notified my mother, who questioned me. I told my mother that I was cold — that I was shaking because I was cold. Her solution was for me to carry a little white sweater to school with me every day. Once when a friend and I were playing at my house, I stuck my fingers in my vagina and asked her to sniff them. In my neighborhood, a small group of us kids used to expose our genitals to each other, but only I let one of the boys try to put his penis in me. Once I made my best friend, Jane, pull down her pants and lie across my lap as I pretended to spank her. I told her she was a bad girl. It was what had been done to me.

Shortly after I started spending nights at my dad’s house, two girls in my neighborhood disappeared. One was 11, one was 9. It was traumatic; their disappearance spooked me horribly. There was whispering, never substantiated in any way, that maybe their father had been “messing around” with them and they ran away from home, or that he killed them to protect himself; this theory stuck with me. The day they ran the dogs in the woods across the street, the day they dragged the pond searching for their bodies, those are two of the most vivid and horrific memories of my youth. I worried for my life, that I would disappear or that I would be killed. I started writing my will. I was 6.

One of the other theories surrounding the girls’ disappearance was that they had been sold into “white slavery.” While I didn’t know what this was, I intuitively knew it involved sex. Adults did not so much as pause before discussing the kidnapping of the girls and the possibility that they had been murdered, but their hushed tones and grim faces when “white slavery” was mentioned made me know it was about sex. And I could tell that it was something bad, shameful, and not to be talked about. Yet it was something being done to me all the time.
My whole life, I have been haunted by an intersection between shame and pleasure. As a young child, I was hurt again and again and led to believe that it was my fault, and that if only I weren’t bad, my dad wouldn’t do those things to me. But at the same time, I thought I was special because it was happening. I’d tell myself, “Look how much my daddy loves me,” but still I knew it was bad and that I should be ashamed. And sometimes I liked the way it felt, but a lot of times I was scared. And I knew that if I told anyone, he would hurt me.

Eventually, my father remarried and the whole thing came to a halt. My “friend” Charlotte disappeared and I experienced a strange combination of relief and grief. Despite how horrible it was, I lost something when my father stopped being sexual with me. I felt like I lost his attention, his affection and his adoration. Those feelings, wrapped up so tightly in those interactions with him, had become my world, and suddenly that stopped. It traumatized me in all new ways.
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