Not Your Toy, Not Your Victim.

Until December 30, 2024, I would have sworn that the only sexual assault I had experienced in my life was one very unpleasant date I had when I was 20. There wasn’t a thought in my mind that my childhood held anything more than mild to severe religious trauma.

I mean, I remembered my aunt’s murder and I remembered a bunch of other non consequential hard times, so it never really felt like I had gaps.

Being told by my sister, that she heard from my mother, that my brother had told her, he molested me, wasn’t a thought I could ignore.

No, it wasn’t an easy thing to talk about over extremely spicy, yet delicious Thai curry, but there isn’t really a good time to talk about family skeletons. Especially when those skeletons include sexual assault.

My sister went on to say that as soon as Mom mentioned this, my father immediately snapped that nothing of the sort had happened.

Crazy.

At that point, neither my sister nor I, could even imagine that we would find out our father had raped both of us… But even then, we both worried.

We walked on the beach that night alone, sharing fears, because once you open up a topic as loaded as sexual abuse, it’s hard not to speculate.

I told my sister about the time I woke up underneath my brother’s feet and felt so confused, but fell back asleep because I didn’t want to wake him up and scare him… I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there, so surely I must have slept walked?

In return, she told me about waking up in Dad’s bed in nothing but her underwear while he was in the shower.

We were so scared.

The flags were crimson, and even though neither of us wanted to look into it more and just let the thought die, I knew that wouldn’t happen.

For heaven’s sake, we were both so into true crime there was no way we didn’t see the patterns that had looked so benign before. And the brother who molested me was no older than 7… Children that young are practically incapable of committing this type of crime unless they have seen or experienced it before.

That’s not just me, there is quite a bit of research done towards the reasons children commit sexual crimes. The young age of perpetrators tends to starkly outline how devastating these situations are.

Children should be protected at all costs. This feels like something that should be less of a personal opinion, and more of a societal fact.

Yet so often children are used as tools.

Sound off in the comments if you know what it is like to be used against a parent! WooHoo!! Childhood Trauma!!

My mother? I made her feel good about herself, I was the mirror she wanted and the baby who loved her the way she wanted me to.

My father? He needed to protect and guide me, he was the dad who brought me McDonald’s during lunch in second grade and lavished me with care. He was the Dad who taught me how exciting it is to be curious…

He also decided to turn me into the perfect daughter and correct her potential homosexuality.

I do not judge my mother and my father on the same scale. My mom was raised by a narcissist and then groomed by my father while she was underage, so all she had known was bending herself to fit whatever mould was needed in the home.

How can I judge her the same? I learned how to survive in a narcissistic household at her knee.

These were things I could look back on, and they were red flags yes, but of abuse?

Not immediately, but still, yes.

This certainly doesn’t account for the repressed memories, which was the first thing I learned on my journey.

All four of us, my siblings and I, have a hard time putting together a timeline of our childhoods.

I am going to do my best to not speak for my siblings, because there is a 9 year age gap between me and my oldest brother. The house I was born and raised in was built a year before I was born, and I didn’t leave for twenty years.

I may not be able to align my memories exactly with my siblings’, but they are valid. Finally. For the first time in my life, I can breath and scream and tell the truth of the pain I saw in the darkness of my room.

Narcissists are phenomenal at mind games, and my father was the best at ruling the kingdom of our home.

The red flags seeped through his charismatic facade, as it always does. And the more I have seen and remembered, the more I can’t help but feel relief…

Thank Fuck my Dad is dead.

If he were alive, his word would be the law and none of those who still drank his lies would ever allow the thought of pedophilia to darken his name.

My sister may not have even told me that I was molested.

But the truth still would have come out. Skeletons that are hidden so securely in the closet tend to be found. Truths that are buried eventually come to light.

I mean, it would have taken so much longer, but you can only feel broken for so long before you start looking for explanations. Why else would being told that I was molested by my brother bring me any form of clarity and relief?

Why would anyone make this shit up?

I spent weeks being wrecked by panic attacks at the thought of my father… my hero… being my rapist.

At the end of the day, I’m just a little girl who looked at my dad like he was my protector. My brain wasn’t developed enough to see his actions for what they were, it could only accept his lies.

“You know God loves you, right?”

*Trigger Warning Staring Here*

“I want to make sure God loves you as much as I do. You want God to love you, right?”

“Didn’t you know? God asked me to do this.”

He would bury his face between my thighs and force me to cum just to prove that a man could. That he had ensured his daughter wasn’t one of the gays.

He used pleasure as a punishment.

I asked him to stop once, the Me Too movement was big enough that our community was abuzz with stories and whispers.

At this point, I was at least ten, I knew that what was happening wasn’t okay, so I decided to talk to him. My Dad was a logical man after all, he always liked it when I brought a well thought out argument to him, so he would absolutely listen.

Right?

I planned it all out the night before, I put together logical reasons for why what he was doing wasn’t good, and he should stop. I was so scared and excited to see his reaction.

I approached him in his room, and my chest was aflutter, maybe he would be proud of me for putting together a good argument.

I only got through my first point before I was on the ground.

What follows isn’t nice. It isn’t something I want to detail, both because of it’s graphic nature and the pain it brings.

But if it helps anyone, if it gives one person the strength to admit they aren’t in a good situation, I am happy to fight through the pain, because healing is worth it.

My father then raped me. Not for pleasure, but control, forcing me to cum before then pulling me up to finish him off.

I… God. I had to walk away from the computer for a moment after writing that, just to breathe. The first time I remembered that moment is beyond description with the pain I was drowning in. There was a lot of sobbing, pacing, and worrying my three cats as I did so.

*Sexual Talk Over!*

Remembering the first time I was actually raped is something that I know I need to confront, and it’s something I refuse to back down from.

My father relied on the control he enforced, along with other societal norms in our Mormon community to ensure our silence for over a decade.

He also relied on isolation.

We were ten minutes from anything, surrounded by farmland, and ensconced in the mormon culture – a religion that encourages some level of individualism.

It was the perfect place to breed control, which he did with the zeal of a low level cult leader.

And for so many years, it worked, but I don’t like the idea of keeping his skeletons quiet. Not just for me, but because he could have other victims, or there could be victims of people like him who don’t feel safe enough to even remember the pain.

So here I am, shattered, struggling, and stubborn enough to not want yet another damaged white man get away with his crimes against the most innocent demographic.

I will say it again and as many times as needs to be said, children deserve to be protected.