A Little Follow-up

 I need to clarify something I wrote in my recent blog post, "What Gets Stolen."  There is a sentence where I mention being ostracized from my paternal family, for behaving like a slut when I was five.  That is a simplification of a very complex reality.  

Starting from about 2 years of age on, I began displaying sexualized behaviors.  Not the normal "playing doctor" kind of stuff, either. Behavior that made a number of my babysitters tell my mom they would not watch me anymore, because of what I was doing with other children.  Behaviors that made a paternal aunt once tell my mom to "Keep your slut daughter away from my sons."  That was the first time I ever heard the word "slut."  Me, and one of my cousins (yes, one of her sons), tried to figure out what that word meant, as she had also used that word while telling my cousin why I was bad.  Our 5 yr-old minds didn't figure out that definition we would eventually come to know well, in a patriarchy that is quick to place such labels on cis girls.

Fast forward decades.  After I made the decision in '93 to cease all contact with my father for the sake of my young children, I lost touch with the paternal family members I had grown up with.  Outside of one cousin, who realized there was a legit reason I was no longer having any contact with my father and made sure to invite me and my kids over for get-togethers she set up when my father would not be around, I simply disappeared from that family.  There were whispers about why.  Some of those whispers were accurate.  But the spoken narrative that seemed to get the most traction, was that I was angry at my father for cheating on my mom so much, so I stopped coming around.  When I finally posted "A Thousand Words," here in my blog years ago, the truth about my absence from paternal family get-togethers was known.  I have had a few chances to reconnect with some on this side of my family, but those connections have not ended well.  I am not an easy person to draw back in to any family fold.  Especially when the current narrative about me is that my childhood was not what I have always known it was.  My childhood sexualized behaviors, which got me in trouble a lot from the age of 2 on, and caused a paternal aunt to see my behavior as slutty, is now being completely attributed to me as some sort of birth defect, and I am viewed as delusionally making up what my father and pam were doing to me.  I am now being viewed as a once tiny delusional hypersexualized toddler.  How am I supposed to feel comfortable around those who prefer to see me as a slutty toddler with severe delusions, while choosing to see my father as innocent of anything he actually put me through?  My father, a known philandering habitual liar who was once married to a hooker who was in my life for over 4 years. My father has always exhibited fucked up sexual behavior, in a family that has kept other predators in their ranks hidden as well, in past generations.  I can't comfortably be around people who are in denial of such glaring truths.  If my father was a decent, kind, honest, devoted man who had treated me with any sort of parental love at all, I could understand the hesitancy in believing me.  Nothing about my memories is delusional.  I was not a natural born slut.  And I can't be around family who are choosing to see me that way.  I love my extended paternal family members.  I miss them.  I understand why they have to be in denial.  I don't envy their position, the awful place my father's abusive choices toward me has placed his siblings and their offspring.  It all simply is what it is.

I hope that helps clarify that simplified statement I wrote, regarding my absence from the paternal side of my family.  Anyone who thinks poorly of this side of my family, please try to ask yourself what you would honestly do, if in their position.   Parental sexual abuse of a child is not just cruel and abusive to the abused child in the family.