Day 17 – someone from your childhood

A,

You blamed me. For being molested by your brother. For being sexually precocious when I was, in fact only curious. Heaped on me the rage and shame and anger that I can only presume you felt about your own daughter's sexual activity.

I know you were a friend of my mother's, and she left me with you when she was feeling overwhelmed.  Being trapped and then interrogated by you, until I invented stories of sexual sins sufficient to satisfy the fevered imaginings of you and your husband was a regular part of my life, and I do not remember much from that time beyond perplexity, guilt, shame, and fear.

Why you felt a need to terrorize me was, and is, unknown.

In the story of my life, there is much that is incomprehensible.  Being held hostage by evangelicals while forced to confess to sexual depravities when I had never done so much as kiss a boy is one of the more difficult ones to explain.

I wished you dead for many years.  Dreamed it. Hoped it. Prayed it when I still held to a belief in god.

You saw nothing wrong, still do not, I imagine.  I pity your children. And your grandchildren. Can only imagine the shame and fear and self-hate that you passed on to them. 

L.