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. I thought of Spain. I thought of elbow-length gloves and endless chatter. I thought of my mother. I imagined her soul creeping into my body, more of it crammed inside with my every intake of breath. I thought of my mother in my father’s embrace. The two of them moving in this space, in this bed. And as I thought, I ceased to be.

My father said I looked more like her everyday, and that the gloves – elbow-length – made us look like twins if she had been a few decades younger. Because my mother’s favorite accessory had been gloves. It was strange how she loved them so much. I recall a faint memory of her telling me it had made her feel like a movie star when she was little, that she had grown attached to the way they looked, the way they felt, on her pale arms. To me, it felt constricting. As if my arms had been wrapped in gauze. 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. 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.I was eager to replicate both the good and the bad feelings that had come from the abuse, without even realizing it. It would take me a long time and a lot of unraveling the lessons of my childhood to see sex as something I could enjoy, choose, participate in joyfully. To want it, not need it. To learn that sex didn't have to feel bad to be good. Even now I am careful to think through my sexual motives and actions to make sure that what I'm trying to "get" from sex isn't shame, isn't obsession. Though the abuse itself ended long ago, the impact is everlasting.

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. They didn’t scurry to wake her. I knew that they wouldn’t. That my mother was dead. That she would stay dead. She had wanted to die. And I had let her.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. 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. I could hear my father breathing. He was awake. His breaths were irregular: sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes not there at all. I knew he was still thinking about her. For him, it would be hard to forget. It would be hard to fall asleep.

Not nothing. Never nothing. What would you want me to have said?” My voice was louder. It was growing, feeding off of what it found inside me. Whatever it could grasp. “It only makes sense. It only –” I called no one. My father was still lost to his anger. The busy signal on the phone was frightening and loud. It gave me a headache – splitting and painful, and so I hid. I hid in slumber, in a tiny corner of the room. I curled on the couch, I shut my eyes. Like my mother, I looked like I had fallen asleep. But I was alive. I was awake to hear them pronounce the time of death. 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.orphan_account Fandoms: Father/Daughter - Fandom, Incest - Fandom, Family Sex - Fandom, Young Love - Fandom, Older Man/Younger Girl - Fandom I called my father’s phone and it was busy. He had turned it off. He always did. He never liked to be disturbed after the yelling. He would end up shouting at the person on the other end. He would turn it on later, after his cheeks were less flushed, his skin not buzzing with rage. It would take a long time, and my mother didn’t have that long.

Around the same time, I initiated a phone sex relationship with Mr. Bernard, the neighborhood "perv." He lived alone; he was normal looking, maybe 60 years old. I don't know how we kids knew he was a "perv" -- it was just common knowledge, information passed along, as many things were, by the older, wiser sisters of my peers. My friend Kathy's parents used to tell us, "Oh, leave him alone, he's just an old alcoholic man." But the wisdom of the sisters reigned supreme. At slumber parties, we would crank call him and scream "You're a perv!" into the phone. "We know what you do to little girls," we'd taunt, and then hang up. When she woke up it was to say goodbye. For a few moments, a few seconds, I had her. For once she was silent. She was dying and she wasn’t talking. She wasn’t my mother then – she was all that was left, remains. A smile began on her lips, a tiny hint. I didn’t miss her. I wasn’t sad. All I could feel was a bland acceptance. To be honest, I hardly knew her. All I was sure of was that she loved to talk, and she would never shut up. On long drives, she would keep rambling on and on in the car, not knowing that everyone else had fallen asleep. She’d never notice. I was crying. I could feel it on my face. I could feel the tears and they felt strange. My hand shook when I wiped them away. They had already dried up on my cold skin, a meek straggle of tears.Recently I read that national radio host Tom Leykis urged his male listeners to "hit on" female victims of incest and sexual abuse: "If you think that a woman's more likely to put out, or more likely to be good in bed because she has a history of abuse, is it wrong to try to find that out and then go for the gold?" At first I cringed in anger that the comment had been made, but then I cringed in shame, knowing that in some ways the comment described me. I had been promiscuous. I had gone out of my way to make sure that my lovers thought I was a talented sexual partner. My mother lay underneath me. I was suffocating her, my elbow crammed under her chin. When I stood, I was standing on the street: the bus was on its side, all its windows broken. Glass was wedged in my palm, my hair, my burning cheeks. My eyes were closed, my lids pressed against cool window glass. I was soothed. I was calmed. I felt guilty for pulling away – I knew how it hurt to be pulled away from. I turned over to face her, to look in her eyes as I apologized. I turned on my side and faced away from him, closing my eyes. I opened them after what felt like hours. I couldn’t sleep. Neither could my father. He usually snored – big, monstrous snores that could keep people in the next room awake. The night was painfully silent. A buzzing began in my ears and it was deafening. You don’t know what’s best, I wanted to say. You’re too clouded by your anger to think straight. I remained silent across the narrow aisle. Talking would never work: if I talked, my mother would talk. And she wouldn’t stop. Like water spilling from a broken dam, her words were never ending.