Shit.

So let’s dive in.

If you’ve ever been touched as a kid, exposed as a kid, viewed as a sexual object as a kid then you’re likely in one of two camps. In the first, you’re an avowed sexual ascetic. You’re conservative and perhaps sexually avoidant. You move with an abundance of caution and you are Uber-protective of kids. That shit is not happening on your watch.

Then there’s the other camp, the one where I set up my tent and keep adding to it. I’m glamping at this point. (Truthful interjection: I’m making light of something that I honestly don’t even want to write about. But that’s really why I’m here). So this other camp is a lean-in type of place. A place where we cope by making friends with the devil. Where things ‘aren’t so bad.’ Where we go harder in the direction of sexual immorality. The literature calls this camp promiscuous. That’s a stupid term that means little. What really happens is we have more sexual interaction, even starting as a kid, and with each act it reduces the value of the original infraction. Sometimes in big way and sometimes in small ones, but each time it lessens it and that’s what matters. Touch me at 5? Shit, what about the time I played those same games with my Dad’s friends daughter? It’s just how I am, right? You didn’t do shit to me, not really.

But you did, but shit, let me add to it. The problem is you can’t reduce it. You can’t make it mean nothing. But those attempts to do so eat away at who you are and your sense of wholeness and wellness. Your sense of goodness. You blurred the lines and now they’re unrecognizable. You have become the problem.

I was seven when I had oral sex for the first time. Read that. Seven. And it was with my eleven year old cousin who I idolized. She was amazing (at least in hindsight that’s what I tell myself). And the games were fun and I wanted to keep playing them and I blackmailed her into continuing to play by threatening to tell on her. I was angry when I performed oral sex (but a kid can’t do that – so what’s the language? There’s no language for this). Angry because I did it and it was kind of weird but I did it and when it was my turn she tricked me and used her thumb. I was humiliated. At seven.

Where do you go from there? How do you make that right? Especially when you already know its wrong but think its more about getting in trouble than a life long mark on your sexual development. At seven I’m now obsessing over girls and interacting sexually with them. Because it makes what happened normal. That’s it. Everything is geared towards normalizing that unspeakable. I wanted to write ‘abnormal’ but language matters and sexual acts performed by children are unspeakable. We confuse common with normal.

I still don’t want to get into how I was once I started having sex with boys. I was ‘good’ by having one boyfriend in high school but, my God, what I did with him. How I did it. And seriously – I just erased the word ‘willingly’ because that is key to everything. It had to be willing, I had to be ‘bad’, I had to own this because if I don’t own it then I have to go back to the beginning.

I’m off topic though. So the second camp ends up being pretty self-destructive. If you’re intelligent you might be a high functioning self-saboteur. I’m very intelligent. And I’m the rest as well. But it’s my life, right? If I want to destroy myself why should you care?

Here’s where the true danger enters. People like me will sacrifice everything to keep the math going. I was on safe ground when I focused on my first experience at age 5. Fuzzy memories of sexual touching. Big bad boys whose names and faces I’ve forgotten were the target of my sexual angst. But my cousin? I didn’t even think about what happened with her. I wrote stories and even made a film about that early experience. But I was absolutely silent about what really mattered. And I was exposed when I had a daughter of my own.

I was tested. My five year old daughter was exposed to sexual content – including hard core pornography. My daughter interacted sexually with younger boy. She kissed his penis and laid on top of him and who knows what else. Over and over again. She told me her Dad, my gay ex, let people come into the bathroom while the was bathing and they took pictures. Her Dad who had a porn company. She told my son’s father that she felt uncomfortable around her Dad, that she could feel his finger on her vagina when he washed her, could feel his erect penis when she sat on his lap.

And in the end I lost my. mind. I chose her Dad over her. I abandoned my own efforts to prosecute him, I stopped trying to find out what happened, and I gave her away to him and his family. My family supported me. Because we have that thing in common. We cannot and will not call molestation wrong and we will not protect our kids.

I vilified my son’s father and at one point literally attacked him for trying to address what was happening to my daughter. For daring to insinuate that I had a problem loving her, a problem truly protecting her. He was the problem. Just like the babysitter’s kids. Because if he wasn’t the problem then, shit. I needed all those experiences to be because she was ‘curious‘ or ‘over-sexualized‘ not because she was molested. I needed to love my cousin, not feel sexually assaulted. All kids engage in sexual play, I said. Me. The trained clinical psychologist who worked at child trauma clinic. I pulled every statistic I could think of to support my metered response. I became the devil herself.