<font color="red">Warning: Big triggers ahead.</font>

My family, from whom I am now pretty much estranged except for one brother, tends to sweep issues under the rug. If we don't discuss it, we can pretend nothing bad happened. I had a freaking "Leave It To Beaver" childhood, everything's rosy, and we're all one big happy family.

Barf.

Mom's memory is pretty distorted; ironically this is exactly the same thing she says about me. She'll tell me it's my imagination. It didn't happen to me. I saw it on television, or dreamed it. Or I'm just plain remembering it wrong. And this is the same woman who, when I was 12 years old and told her my stepfather had been sexually abusing me, honestly remembers me putting it to her like this: (assume provocative posture, with smug smile and purring voice) "Guess what? I had sex with *your* husband." Believe me, that's not how I said it at ALL! I didn't even think of it as me having sex with that disgusting alcoholic SOB. I thought of it as him invading me. What I told her was that he had been touching me, not that I'd been having sex with him, and I certainly didn't say it in such an in-your-face manner.

Shortly after it came to light, she royally chewed me out for mentioning it in front of my little sister, because finding out about it might traumatize her. Never mind anything traumatizing ME, the kid it happened to. Let's not traumatize little sister, by talking about it.

This was neither the first time nor the last. I was first molested at age 5, by a neighbor. That man ended up in jail. My mother thinks every emotional problem I've ever had stems from that one event. (Actually it was a series of events; it happened several times before he was caught.) Anyway, if there is any resentment toward her, it's only because I was with a babysitter when it happened, and I'm mad at her for not being home to protect me. Nope, doesn't go far enough. What's not being addressed here is that I was also being beaten black and blue, except that they called it discipline. Not just my parents, but also that babysitter. The man who molested me had been the only adult I knew who *wasn't* into beating kids; no wonder I was drawn to him. As for it being called discipline, how normal is it for children so small to be drawing pictures depicting belt-whippings? Don't most children that age draw pictures of houses and puppies and flowers and stuff?

Yeah, it was all my fault. My grandmother told me so. When that man had me in the garage and was molesting me, "It seems you would have been intelligent enough to scream." May I remind you how old I was? I was 5, for crying out loud. I didn't even know what that man was doing, let alone that I was supposed to scream about it. I knew I didn't like him doing it, but he told me if I loved him, I'd go along with it. And I *did* love him, because he didn't hit me. I knew he told me not to tell anyone, that it was our little secret. But I didn't know he was doing something wrong, and I was supposed to scream.

The beatings, my fault too. My mother told me so, when I'd point out the bruises. She'd say, "I didn't do that to you. You did that to yourself." Even so young, I knew she didn't actually mean I had bruised myself, but that I had it coming for being such a bad kid. And the babysitter told me, too. When she saw my drawings, with that huge exaggerated belt in the adult's hand, she said, "Yeah, that's what you get when you're bad."

I said that my step-father wasn't the first or the last to sexually abuse me, but I'm running out of space to say more. Let's just summarize it by saying that everyone else who molested me was related to me, and the unrelated neighbor was the only one who faced consequences. We can't prosecute family, no. Family must stay together at all cost.