I hated coming home from school. Any sense of freedom I had during the day disappeared the instant I stepped inside the duplex, even though my father wouldn't yet be home for a couple of hours. I'd get stuck into my homework immediately: it had to all be done by the time he arrived so I could take my place beside him on that hated unfolded bed chesterfield in front of the T.V. for the rest of the evening. Mom would arrive home shortly after I did, smelling as she had for years of sweet biscuit dust and furiously rubbing her itchy nose while she bashed the meat with a meat hammer. Though she never said it, every bang of that hammer was a release of her own deep seated anger, a hopeless rebellion against her life. Every blow echoed through my own helplessness. We were two women held captive by fear, ashamed of our weakness and disgusted by our own inability to change our lives. As dad's arrival time approached, we both sensed the tension mounting in each other, but we never talked about it. We both knew talking about our lives would most likely be a waste of time: neither of us had the courage to do anything about them."
For the first time dear reader, I'm sharing with you a tiny segment from my book, "Coming Out From Under". How am I doing? I'm now more than half-way through my true story of "incest in the first degree", my words for how I see sexual abuse of a child by his/her biological parent.
Incest in the first degree is not quite the same, for me, as incest by a step-parent. I carry my father's genes within me. Yes, there is no difference in how much the victim suffers, or the key role a step-parent has in a child's life, but the biological parent gave the victim life in the first place. Now that same parent, sometimes for years, murders that same child. It's a slow form of filicide (i.e killing one's own child).
According to another victim of incest, I have forgiven him as I cannot quite bring myself to hate him. I never did, though I got close enough to want to kill him. But I valued my own life more and I think that's what sustained me, carried me through the 11 years of sexual abuse and finally away from it.
But even as I write my story, I still cannot understand, and never will, why the biological parent is attracted sexually to his/her own child. I certainly never, at any point, found my father sexually attractive. From the get-go, the idea of dad sticking his penis in me, touching my breasts, slobbering me with lascivious kisses was utterly abhorrent and repulsive, as I'm sure it is to any who don't want and never invited such activity. And by the time it had ended, it amazed me, and still does, that he never really saw anything wrong with it. For him, "loving" me this way was no different from any other kind of love. In desperation, I'd say to him that this isn't the kind of "love" a father gives a child. He'd just brush it off and say "Love is love. A father loves everything about his child. What's the difference?" And as I write in the excerpt above, I felt weak, powerless, bereft of words to fight incest in the first degree. He was so much stronger and smarter than I was in every way.
Well that's all want to share today. I've taken the first step in giving you a peek into my book. Much of it is a lot nittier and grittier than that. But other sections will make you forget temporarily that you are reading a true story of incest. For me, and I think for the reader, those segments are needed. We can only handle so much bad news at one time, don't you think?
So now, I'll ask again as I did in my last post ... but got no response: how am I doing? Am I on the right track? Will YOU want to read my book when I'm done? I hope to hear from you this time. Thanks for subscribing, reading and commenting. Your thoughts and reactions are needed to keep me coming out from under.
