Caution! Contents of this post are emotionally charged, graphic, and will make you feel uncomfortable. I feel I must share this, because the beginnings look very innocent, but in fact are very insidious. If it helps anyone recognize it, deal with or just connect with the emotions, this post will have accomplished something. Nothing can ever compensate for the pain that was caused. But it will bring pain and secrets into the sunlight, where evil cannot survive.
I am an older sister. My sister is one and a half years younger than me. My earliest memories begin in Georgetown. My mother and biological father were married in 1956 (I could be wrong on the year). I was born in 1958 and my sister was born in 1960. I was all legs and elbows. In first grade, I had to get glasses. My sister was beautiful and elfin. She had limpid blue eyes and was always the coquette. There is a picture of her on the front page of the Washington Post, at Georgetown Children's Home at the age of 4 years, staring out the window, all brown ringlets and big eyes. The caption reads "Waiting for Mom". It was taken because George Town Children's Home was multi-racial. I think it was taken after my parents had separated, but before they were divorced. My parents were deeply in love and very active in the Civil Rights Movement. However, by 1964, my biological father who was brilliant, was having more and more difficulty. He had problems keeping jobs, was becoming paranoid and delusional. By 1965, Mom decided that she must divorce him in order to keep us, his daughters safe. In order to obtain a divorce, she moved to the Virgin Islands, and my sister and I spent 9 months with my Mom's mother and my Mom's aunt in Laurel, Mississippi.
By 1966, my Mom was resettled in Berkeley CA with a job and a roommate and sent for us to live with her. I finished up first grade and started second grade there. My stepfather was an old college friend of my Mom's roommate. He was an Assistant Professor in Geography at Ohio University, and met my mother in the fall of 1966 while traveling through the United States before returning to his job at the university. It must have been a whirlwind romance. My stepfather met my mother in October of 1966, but had family obligations. He returned to Berkeley and asked my mother to marry him, and we were made a family on November 11, 1966. It was my mother's second marriage, my father's first. We finished out the academic year in Athens, but relocated to a small university in the Southwest in 1967.
My stepfather, to this day, loves to teach and share knowledge. We had some growing pains becoming used to a new father. I remember having to lick the bottom of his shoe (which I watched him use to step on cockroaches) because I stuck my tongue out at him. He loved Geology, Geography and we travelled each summer through different states and National Parks. Our stepfather adopted us in 1970, and our birth certificates were amended to show him as our birth father.
Life progressed in a small Baptist town in the southwest. We had a 3 bedroom home in a transitional neighborhood. Dad would read out loud to us in the evenings from one of his thousands of paperbacks that covered an entire wall of my Mom and Dad's bedroom. We went on trips in the summers. He taught us how to give Indian Sunburns, and make hairballs on your arms (my sister and I both had hairy arms). He gave us horsey rides and we would get spankings for our occasional indiscretions. He often pinched us on the bottom to tease us (I later learned that not all Dad's did this to their children.) As we grew older, we were allowed to hear jokes with sexual punchlines and innuendos. We would all snuggle in bed together on Sunday mornings.
I can't remember when I started sleeping in the nude. But I think it was when I started High School. I know it was at the direction of my adoptive father. I grew, my sister grew. We had two sabbatical summers in Corvallis OR where my father did coursework in preparation for his Doctorate. When I was 12 and in the 8th grade, I went through that painful year for mothers, where there pre-adolescent daughters hate them. This lasted for a year, but we survived.
In 1971, my youngest sister was born. When my little sister hit 12 and the 8th grade, my mom and dad were each working on coursework for Doctorates, and the whole family had moved to Greeley Colorado, so my parents could study at the University of Northern Colorado. It was a busy, hectic time. I was a sophomore in High School. My sister and I slept in bunk beds in the same room, and our one year old sister slept in a crib in her own room. My father and mother attended classes, and my father supported us in addition to his sabbatical stipend by working at 7-11 on weekends and nights. My sister and I attended school, made friends and took care of the baby. And then the hate year started. It was bad. Tensions between my mother and sister were terrible. There was screaming, shouting, crying. My father would support my younger sister, and not my mother. Everybody would be shouting, the toddler crying, and I was the observer and attempted peacemaker. My sister stopped tormenting me and tormented my mother. By the summer, my Dad and younger sister were working on a bedroom downstairs for her, so there could be peace and quiet, and so the house would sell faster. I think my sister started sleeping down there at night even though it was not finished. I found out later, that it was at this time, when my sister and Dad (I was rarely included) were supposedly working on the room, that my Dad came to my sister and told her that my mother had told him to teach my sister how to have sex. I was absolutely clueless.
By the time, we moved back to our "hometown" after the Sabbatical Year, my Mom had found a job out of town, actually out of state, and was living there with our youngest sister. My younger sister had always been the nominal favorite of my Dad, and this became more intrenched. Where before I had ridden my bike and taken the bus to school, all of a sudden, we were driven to and picked up from school by our father. When it came time for my sister to get a flute to play in the High School Band, she got a silver Gemeinhart. Mine purchased two years earlier was a nickel-plated Wilson, whose nickel-plating was falling off, giving it a leprous look. My sister never got over the hatred of my mother, and their relationship was bordering toxic all through my sister's High School years.
My parents never lived under the same roof again. The relationship between my Mom and Dad was distant and full of arguing. In retrospect, I believe that my father fueled the antagonism between them so that he wouldn't be discovered. When we returned home, my sister and I were now in separate rooms. We were both sleeping in the nude as did my Mom and Dad. My sister and I would be invited to "snuggle" in bed with my father in the mornings before school. I know...red flag, but I swear nothing ever happened to me or in front of me, in or out of bed. Years later, I asked my Mother about this, and she had no awareness that we were in bed with our Dad during our adolescent years. I had no idea of the wrongness of this. I really thought this was normal. I did notice however, that my sister often "snuggled" with my father in the mornings before school, without my presence.
My junior and senior years in high school were hellacious. I was obviously odd man out. Obvious advantages were given to my sister, and she used her position to her advantage. We became distant, and fought a lot. I think my father also encouraged this to protect himself. I knew something was wrong. I did not have the imagination or experience to realize what was really happening. I was naive and absolutely clueless.
I left home for college right after High School Graduation in 1975. My Mom and littlest sister were still living out of town, so that left just my father and sister. My sister started taking correspondence courses so that she could graduate High School in 1976, one year earlier. The summer before her Senior Year, she spent in Laurel Mississippi, living with our grandmother and great aunt while she took Classes. My sister graduated in the spring of 1976. In the Fall of 1976, my parents divorced. The greatest tragedy, besides this whole story, is that Mom was given custody of me, and Dad was given custody of the daughter he had been having sex with since 8th Grade. Still, nobody knew. Not me, mother, my grandmother, nobody.
My sister lived with my father for two more years while she attended the University at which he taught. She studied Chemistry and Biology, worked in the Lab and for one of the town physicians. She graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1978, a full year before I graduated from college, even though I graduated High School the year before. This means she got a double degree in two years. Even more surprising, my sister moved to Alaska to live with my mother and littlest sister while she gathered security clearance to work at Los Alamos. It didn't make any sense then, that she would choose to live with my Mom when their relationship was so fractious. She dated MUCH older men while she lived and worked there. None of this made any sense. I know now, the additional coursework, the early graduations, were the only way my sister could safely escape her abuser. I never lived at home after I graduated, visiting only on random weekends, and attending Summer School all four years.
Before, I left for the Peace Corps, in 1979 shortly after I graduated from college, I met my sister in Santa Fe for a farewell visit. Striking still, our luncheon was paid for by an older gentleman who had struck up a conversation with her while waiting for me. I remember asking her at that time, if anything sexual had happened between her and my father, because by that time he had sexually approached me. I think he only did it, because she had left home by that time, and he never approached me again. She denied anything. But she truly did not remember. She suppressed the memory until she was 30, married to a lovely man and had two children.
She wrote letters to all of us. We were all devestated, confused, astounded. My mother felt extremely guilty that she practically GAVE her middle daughter to her abuser, but my mother had no clue.
In retrospect, I can see it clearly. The conditioning us to sexual innuendos. I thought I was so mature, because I wouldn't get offended by sexual jokes (I figured out later, that maybe I should have.) The bottom pinching, sleeping nude. The family interrelationships that suddenly went bad.
I confronted my father once my sister remembered the abuse. He never denied it. I never severed our relationship, but I never allowed my two children, a boy and a girl to visit or be alone with their grandfather the times that he visited us.
My father was remarried to a lovely woman by the time my sister had her revelation. In fact, she and her husband, myself and my future husband, were the only attendees at my fathers marriage in 1984. My sister was even pregnant with her first child at the time.
I share these excruciating details so that you will see how my sister and myself were prepared in advance. We accepted things that were unacceptable because we didn't even know they were wrong. My sister was brilliant enough to escape her abuser's clutches early, but it was still 6 full years of sexual abuse. Nobody to turn to, no one to save her. My father even took her to an OB/Gyn out of town once because there was a pregnancy scare. I can't even fathom what a nightmare that time was for her.
Though I begged him to, my father never sought out counseling or treatment. I also begged him to tell his wife, whom I loved and respected. My sister herself, told his wife, when my sister and her husband started caring for her husband's nieces. The neices started living with my sister and her husband because they were removed from their father's home when he approached his older 14 year old daughter for sex. She told her paternal grandmother, and both girls were immediately removed from the home. This additional awareness of the prevalence of incest/childhood rape became the impetus for making my father's wife aware of his sexual abuse of his own daughter.
I do not know the whole story, but feel there is value in telling my side. Teach your children at an early age right and wrong touch. Teach them that no matter WHO approaches them, even if it is a family member who they know and love, to tell. Most childhood sexual abuse is pepetrated by family members or somebody close to the family and trusted. It is better to be hyper-vigilant and mistrustful than to deal with the ruin that comes from being victimized by those who should protect you.
I thank you for reading my story. If you can help someone by sharing this story please do so. Though this story is 34 years old, our lives are still devestated by it.
Peace,
Kismet
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