How to Get a Daddy to Sleep

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They didn’t scurry to wake her. I knew that they wouldn’t. That my mother was dead. That she would stay dead. She had wanted to die. And I had let her.

This work is currently completed, but I may continue it in the future. Language: English Words: 2,857 Chapters: 5/5 Comments: 45 Kudos: 2,432 Bookmarks: 196 Hits: 239,258

I thought it meant that I was special. I didn't know it would turn sex into an act of shame.

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It's ugly and, even now, more than 25 years later, difficult for me to say. With my father, in his bed, I first experienced the bump and grind of sexual relations. It was his genitals I first explored; he was the first to touch my body sexually, and those hands have left an indelible imprint. I have no memories that predate his abuse -- his rubbing and touching, his forcing me to touch him. It was sudden when he hugged me. I was surprised, but I relished in his warmth. On cold nights when we were out and the winds decided to be cruel, my father would envelop me in his arms. He never failed to comfort my freezing skin.

I nodded. I didn’t answer. I was mad at her. For taking me with her, for leaving my father, without asking me who I wanted to stay with. I felt my anger boil over and I yanked my hand away from hers. I didn’t wonder where we were going. I didn’t ask this time, because I knew. It was always the same place: “Asias.” My mother told me, though I didn’t need to know. “Asias Hotel – same place as always, dear.” When I was 12, my girlfriends and I sneaked in to see "An Officer and a Gentleman," a movie that explicitly depicts Debra Winger and Richard Gere having sex. It was the first sexual encounter I had ever seen outside of my father's bed, and it was tremendously erotic for me.

His breathing stopped completely, and he froze. I guess for him it was awkward. I had never been an affectionate daughter. I had never hugged him like this. Or maybe it just reminded him too much of my mother. I was eager to replicate both the good and the bad feelings that had come from the abuse, without even realizing it. It would take me a long time and a lot of unraveling the lessons of my childhood to see sex as something I could enjoy, choose, participate in joyfully. To want it, not need it. To learn that sex didn't have to feel bad to be good. Even now I am careful to think through my sexual motives and actions to make sure that what I'm trying to "get" from sex isn't shame, isn't obsession. Though the abuse itself ended long ago, the impact is everlasting. I was fine. I didn’t hurt. But my mother’s blood ebbed and flowed out of her, like water spilling from a broken dam. One of the other theories surrounding the girls' disappearance was that they had been sold into "white slavery." While I didn't know what this was, I intuitively knew it involved sex. Adults did not so much as pause before discussing the kidnapping of the girls and the possibility that they had been murdered, but their hushed tones and grim faces when "white slavery" was mentioned made me know it was about sex. And I could tell that it was something bad, shameful, and not to be talked about. Yet it was something being done to me all the time. My father’s waist met mine in one smooth movement. He moaned my mother’s name over and over, his voice broken by tears and crying.

I called no one. My father was still lost to his anger. The busy signal on the phone was frightening and loud. It gave me a headache – splitting and painful, and so I hid. I hid in slumber, in a tiny corner of the room. I curled on the couch, I shut my eyes. Like my mother, I looked like I had fallen asleep. But I was alive. I was awake to hear them pronounce the time of death. Around the same time, I initiated a phone sex relationship with Mr. Bernard, the neighborhood "perv." He lived alone; he was normal looking, maybe 60 years old. I don't know how we kids knew he was a "perv" -- it was just common knowledge, information passed along, as many things were, by the older, wiser sisters of my peers. My friend Kathy's parents used to tell us, "Oh, leave him alone, he's just an old alcoholic man." But the wisdom of the sisters reigned supreme. At slumber parties, we would crank call him and scream "You're a perv!" into the phone. "We know what you do to little girls," we'd taunt, and then hang up.