Pandora's Aquarium: Dear Mom and Dad, - Pandora's Aquarium

How do I even begin to express to you the hurt and anger I feel towards you at times? Being a parent is a lifelong commitment to health, safety and welfare of a child. During my childhood years you failed at all three of those. I tried for so many years to "let you off the hook" using your own naivety as an excuse. But I am realizing that there is no excuse for your mistakes. Those mistakes cost me so dearly; you may never fully understand the depths of my scars.

As a little girl I entered a period in my life where I was plagued with urinary infections. I also from the time I was little was almost always "irritated down there". I also experienced stomach pains that I felt at the time were my insides tearing out. And Mom...you had to nerve to say to me recently that at the same you were having such trouble with my behavior and you didn't understand what was causing it. I still cannot fathom how you didn't pull all this together to realize your son was sexually abusing me. You subjected me to medical procedures to "fix me". I had doctors scare the hell out of me with threats of ulcers if I DIDNT GET THESE STOMACH ACHES UNDER CONTROL. I was a little girl screaming for help in the only way I knew how.

And then Paul gets thrown out of school for sexually inappropriate behavior and you throw him right back in the basement with me? You didn't start putting two and two together at that point????

Then there is the icing on the cake. Dad walking in on the abuse itself. Him witnessing his oldest son (16 years old) having sex with his little sister (12 years old). The family answer to this "crises" was to beat Paul with a belt for lying (because he attempted to cover up what was going on) and then NEVER speak of it again. NOT EVER. Not ask your scared and confused daughter what was happening to her. Not then putting together all those years of emotional problems and physical problems and realizing that this had been going on FOR YEARS. Just go back upstairs, leaving him and I in the basement and pretend NOTHING ever happened.

Can you even realize the damage that caused me? I think the actual abuse by Paul stopped then but it was only the beginning of the emotional abuse I carried on my own shoulders for the next 30 years. For 30 years I sat in silence thinking I must be the most horrible person in the world for my parents to be so repulsed by what they found that their answer was to leave me in the basement with the person abusing me. Most of my teenage years I was haunted by suicidal thoughts and I began hurting myself because I needed physical wounds to help understand the pain that was going on inside me.

After finally confronting you both, Dad has the nerve to tell me that all this time he thought it was a consensual act between the two of us. REALLY you thought a 12 year could consent to sex with a 16 year old and that was ok. This was not a 12 year old in today’s world. This was a 12 year old who wasn't allowed to watching anything stronger than Little House on the Prairie on TV. That was never talked to about her body and how to keep her body safe from others that might have bad intentions. No...all that information was provided to her by the same person that was abusing her. But because he didn't have a knife to my throat it was my fault it happened.

Do you realize that for 30 years I shouldered so much blame, guilt and shame over that abuse? I felt it dirtied me so bad that even God probably couldn't even forgive me.

So here I sit in the wreckage of that abuse. Haven't been to a doctor or dentist in over 20 years for any kind of routine appointments because of fears that are only just know being addressed in therapy. Haven't had sex with my husband in 9 years because as soon as my daughter was born, the idea of sex in a house where there is a child close by is just inconceivable to me. My relationship with my daughter affected at every turn because in her eyes, I see the little girl I could never be because of the hell that was happening to me. My anxiety attacks that now keep me in my home more days than I care to admit. My depression that I can't shake because the reality of all this is just too much to bear at time.

This is what your naivety caused. This is what happened when you ignored an issue. This is what happens when you don't love a child enough to tackle the hard stuff. Because you "never imagined Paul would do anything like that to you" that is EXACTLY what that bastard did to me.

All of the sorrys in the world can never replace the pieces of my soul that I lost...