Day 8 :: Someone who made your life like hell, or treated you like shit When I was in high school, one of my relatives molested me. Since he was newly widowed and "depressed," my mother actually encouraged me to have dinner with him one Sunday. Soon he had his hand between my breasts and his tongue in my ear. I insisted he take me home, but I initially didn't tell anyone. My mother was so distraught over his wife's death that I was afraid she couldn't handle it. This emboldened him, and every time we were in the same room he spoke dirty to me. His perverse game continued for more than 2 decades, when I was 38. During a family gathering -- with my toddler niece, my mom and my grandmother right there -- he leaned in and asked me how I masturbated. He knew I wouldn't make a scene and he got off on it.A switch inside me was flipped that night. I vowed he would never speak to me that way again, and I haven't allowed it to happen. My mom and my sisters now know what he did to me. It isn't so much that they don't believe me as that they wish I'd just get over it already. It was so much easier before, when I just went along and kept the peace.
He's very old now. I wish he'd just die and get it over with, because I often wonder how I'm going to handle his funeral. A pillar of the church, many of the out-of-town cousins think he's aces, a patriarch worthy of respect, and will undoubtedly wonder why I'm not at his wake/funeral. I have too much respect for death and God to pretend a grief I won't feel, I don't know that I feel like covering for him, and I don't have the stomach to dredge it all up and explain to the cousins.
And it pisses me off that I suffer all this agita over something that never was my fault.
Gee, this was cheery, wasn't it?
No - not cheery - but certainly honest. And that's all you can do. I wonder how many others he has messed with. Victims always think they are alone and sadly they rarely are.
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