Scary Thoughts

What if your father raped you and you enjoyed it?  Or, to put it a little less explosively, what if you enjoyed the feelings produced when your father played with your body?  This possibility worries me tremendously.  It's odd because I remember so little of the actual events but I remember the feeling that sex was dirty and bad -- and that those bad feelings could arise in me pretty much anywhere and at anytime.

I can imagine that having my father's attention was nice -- no matter how painful, scary or humiliating.  I was so seldom noticed or touched.  I can also imagine extremely mixed feelings about being abandoned for my younger sister.

Two scenes trouble me at the moment.  I take them as evidence of the warped and perverted child I had become -- and they won't let me go.  I feel guilty that I might have allowed, liked or initiated connections that recreated the feelings with my father.  Which I can't remember.  So unsettling and upsetting.

One.  I remember sitting on the front lawn of the boy who lived behind us.  We decided we'd get married.  We were 4 or 5.  He kissed my cheek.  I have a horrible feeling now that I thought I knew what marriage was and it involved feelings and beds.  Because I'd done that.  A year or two later, he and I built a fort in his back yard.  We planned to sleep there overnight but then all of a sudden that was a horrible idea and his mother and sisters objected strenuously.  I felt so bad about myself and I still do when I think of that time.

Two.  Of course, at the cottage.  So very many occasions of wondering who I was, what I wanted, what was allowed.  My friend's cousin.  Boys from the other beach.  Noxzema.  My friend had Noxzema at her cottage.  I remember the smell.  And I remember one day when we were taking turns rubbing it on our bare backs.  Her mother put a stop to it.  We were in a room we seldom entered, the room with the window I was supposed to tap if ever Grannie was sick.  Which I never did.  Bad again.