An Ordinary Girl

For most, the sexual abuse of a child is exceptionally difficult to assimilate. And if difficult for a mature, fully functioning adult, how much more confusing and difficult for a child to grasp? With limited life experience and still-developing emotion, intellect, cognition, and body, children formulate their ideas about themselves and the world around them based largely on their experiences. For good measure, toss in the fact of a child’s egocentric nature that says, Everything is about me, so this must be about me. This must be my fault. So it is with incest. Absent intervention and rescue, a child will arrive at a set of erroneous conclusions in order to survive. And somewhere along the way of all that concluding and surviving, the intolerable yet unstoppable experiences are ultimately internalized, normalized, and rewritten in a patently false and twisted work of fiction, to the great detriment of the child.

Throughout the entirety of my formative years, I lived in a state of helplessness and entrapment, under a constant threat of predation. My development as a child was structured entirely around my survival, and my filter for everything in life was tainted by the sexual abuse being perpetrated upon me by my own father. Moreover, it was disorienting as I walked through my day-in and day-out experience in the quagmire of abuse, struggling against the enormity of it all and hopscotching the hidden land mines that were all around me—the ones that only I could see. While attempting to reconcile what I instinctively knew was wrong and harmful—an assault against my young body and personhood—with the outward appearances of my so-called normal family life, I inhabited the tension of two worlds. I had to smile and be sweet and get along and behave and otherwise act against the monumental lie that was my life, while ignoring my intuitive sense that those who were charged to provide love, care, and protection did nothing of the sort. And the collision of those parallel worlds created a huge chasm of dissonance.

On one hand, there was the appearance of stability and consistency. My parents had good jobs and provided a nice home. We rarely moved, and I always attended the same school and church. I made friends easily, earned good grades, and otherwise enjoyed many of the expected rites of passage for kids growing up. But behind closed doors, the odious secret reality of my sexual abuse was always with me.

As a high achiever, I worked hard to cultivate an exterior veneer of the “good daughter.” I was proud of my academic performance, and I strived to be first in all of my endeavors throughout my elementary school days. But the underlying motivation of wanting to be good and do well was wrapped up in the hidden hope that my efforts and performance would somehow be enough to earn my parents’ approval—to satisfy that deep longing for love and care that I legitimately craved as a daughter. On another level, I strived to be good outwardly to offset how rank and foul I felt inwardly. And of course, I hoped that maybe, somehow, if I were good enough, it would stop. But it didn’t. I could never work hard enough to wipe away the stink of it, the ugliness and horror of it, the shame and permanent stain of my sexual abuse. It created a distorted, deep-seated view of my value and worth as a person and image-bearer of God.

To further the conflict in me was the great contradiction of the abuser himself. What I could not integrate in my child’s mind was his dual nature. One side of him housed my tormentor, whose diabolical antics could only be those of an evil man. He made me complicit and systematically doubled down on the unmistakable message that I, too, was a willing participant. The relationship was warped and coercive, and he repeatedly cautioned me not to tell or “we” would get into trouble. Conversely, as far as one set of characteristics is from the other, it was his kindness and solicitousness that baffled me most. It simply did not fit. By night, he forcibly abused my body and soul. But by day, he fed me with his love and care. I was his special girl, and he told me often that he loved me.

The apple of his eye, my dad lavished attention, affection, and tenderness upon me, with perks and special privileges in tow. While he was brutal with my brothers in terms of physicality masked as discipline, I was granted a special status in the family, which was an obvious and understood dynamic within the household.

My mother first married at age fifteen, and she had three boys by the time she was twenty. After that marriage failed, she brought those three young boys into her second marriage to my father, who later adopted my half-brothers. As a child, I grew up believing that my special status was driven by the fact that I was the only girl in the family and the only biological child of my parents’ marriage. And on its face, that was true. To this day, I have not entirely relinquished the hope that my father did carry some measure of genuine fatherly love for me, the way fathers naturally love their children. But in my honest moments, I must consider the more likely scenario—that my special status and his expressions of love and kindness were nothing more than his sustained grooming and manipulation of me, with the bestowing of favoritism, status, and gifts my payoff and hush money for keeping his secret.

The appearance of my seemingly-happy home life that produced the seemingly-happy, well-adjusted, and high-achieving child was the fraudulent front for our incestuous home. The stage was a sham, and the characters on it were playacting. The discord of appearances versus reality, and my father’s kindness colliding with his deviousness, set me up for years of immense struggle, self-doubt, and an inability to trust others. The threads of my father’s actions and his counterfeit narrative were woven into every fiber of my being.