I did not understand that other fathers met their daughters’ innocent desires for affection with a gentle, loving touch rather than the horrific, inappropriate acts I endured in the dark. I had no clue the family next door ate dinners warmed by conversation and laughter. No one ever told me things were different at other houses. He adopted my siblings and me when he married my mother, and he terrorized our home for the next eight years. The man I call my father entered my life as my stepfather when I was 2 years old. There is no telling how early his sexual abuse started. By the time I was old enough to form memories of being raped, it had already been happening for years. When he crept into my bedroom in the middle of the night, I didn’t have to wonder. Whenever my father walked into a room, I began to wonder which of us was going to get hurt. It took my father mere seconds to overturn the table, cross the space between them and hurl the child through the sliding glass door behind them. My sibling, barely eight at the time, clapped a hand over their mouth. I remember the chuckle, small and stifled, that ignited the fuse one night. Then someone, typically a child, broke the silence. Unusually quiet for a family with four small children, the meals played out like a silent movie. The dinner table stood out as a particularly tense and terrible place. He was a quiet man, never much of a talker.
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