At 14, it was no “Gift from God”, Trust Me

[Nay]

19. Me, neither. 25 years ago, a friend told me she had been raised in a horrific household; she and

her 8 siblings were all adoptees, and they were all molested and beaten repeatedly by the stepfather (both the boys and the girls) while the stepmother did nothing. Among other atrocities, she was required to give the stepfather a blowjob each morning before she went off to elementary school. Most of her siblings grew up to be alcoholics and drug addicts who died early. She ran away from home at 15 or 16, and found a Christian group home that thankfully did not have a man who thought he was ordained to screw or abuse everyone around him.

Strangely enough, I grew up in a dysfunctional family with a depressed mother and alcoholic father, and I remember a couple of times when I was a young teen that my father was 'acting funny' or 'looking at me funny,' and of course now I wonder if he had had those urges and only barely restrained himself from acting on them. He was certainly patriarchal, but not in a religious way. I have been supremely sensitive to that sort of craziness since childhood, which has saved me a couple of times from encounters with strange men that could have been fatal.

There are lots of us who have suffered tangentially and/or directly from patriarchal shit, and that is why we are always in attack mode when we hear this stuff. It strikes directly to our experience and to our empathy with other victims.