Untitled
By: Anonymous
I lived a very sheltered life. My parents were very religious. Avenues of popular culture like television, movies, and music were severely restricted. Music with a beat starts you down a slippery slope that leads to dancing and devil worship. Us kids were separated from our community, made to be so different from our peers that we couldn’t possibly make close friends. We never had sex education. We never talked about sex, except to know that it was something sinful. We were never taught about sexual abuse or bad touching or any of these things. I didn’t know what sex was. I didn’t know what rape was. I didn’t know what molestation was. They were definition-less words for some vague undescribed badness. I didn’t have words for my own life.
In Church they used to tell us of spiritual warfare. Demons walked the earth. They would come in the dark. If our faith was strong enough we could cast them out. They were real and usually formless but in the dark we could feel them. Crushing. Suffocating. Penetrating. They could look like people. They could look like our friends and family. I believed. This was my experience. How many times had I woken in the dark: terrified, crushed, suffocated, penetrated. There were man-like monsters in the dark (whose silhouette was shockingly like my father’s) and my faith was not strong enough to repel them. I always prayed. I cried out to Jesus. Sometimes I would pass out; sometimes it would eventually stop and I would try to go back to sleep.
In twelfth grade we read short stories in English class and discussed them in small groups. We read “Wild Swans” by Alice Munro. My classmate said, “The story about that girl being molested made me really uncomfortable.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. My SAT verbal was through the roof but I hadn’t been taught the definition. We sort of skipped that part. I knew “molested” was bad but this all seemed so normal. It used to happen all the time when I was much smaller–before the demons began to show in the wee hours of the morning. Whenever I’d done something wrong after the spanking he would always hold my body against his and slip a finger into me and wiggle it around for a few minutes. I was always naked because clothing would soften the blows from his belt, dampening the punishment that I so richly deserved. Sometimes when no one else was around he would lie me on the bed, pull aside my underwear, and thrust in and out with his fingers. I really never understood the point. It was confusing. It seemed a bit like a waste of time. At least he wasn’t whipping me so I hadn’t done something wrong; who was I to complain?
A lightbulb came on. Molestation had a definition and I had lived it. I read about sex and rape and I had lived them too. There were no demons in the dark. There was no Jesus to save me. There was just my father.
Emotional turmoil followed. I couldn’t afford to go to university if I didn’t live with my parents. I stayed for a year. It became too much so I moved out. An accident left me disabled and homeless. It wasn’t a bad life for the first few months. Then there was the attempted rape: just some well-muscled guy about twice my size. I fought him off. Not bad for a crippled homeless waif living off of scraps from dumpsters. And then the truth hit me. I could either stay on the street forever or go back to college and qualify myself for a white collar job of some sort. My whole live I had known the truth that sleep is not safe. Was it better to stay on the street and eventually be raped in my sleep by an IV drug user with some disease? Or was it better to go home to be raped by someone who was either infertile or using protection and who had, at any rate, not given me a disease yet. (Not counting, of course, all those UTIs when I was 3).
I went home after a year’s freedom with my tail between my legs. I tried to take some precautions but they were ultimately ineffectual. They probably bought me a few months’ reprieve. Eventually I finished University and left. I thought I would be free but I’m not. Sometimes I feel like a slut because I traded sex and safety for a college degree and the hope of stable employment. Sometimes I feel empowered because I so clearly chose the least damaging of the choices before me. Sometimes I think I must be stupid for not having thought of some third option that would have let me have my cake and eat it too, although I haven’t figured out yet what that third option would have been.
