I was an accident – at least on my father’s part. I’m not so sure on my mother’s. She wanted him more than anything. My father was in the Navy and was getting transferred back to the United States.
My mother told me I was “this close” to getting aborted. The last time they were to be together, she informed him she was pregnant and intended to get an abortion, because, as she said, my father was Catholic and she wanted him to feel bad.
He married her.
He adored me. I was Daddy’s girl. He was a pedophile. I saw a picture of my mother’s stepfather. He looked amazingly a lot like my dad.
Things were really twisted in my family. There were three siblings, my younger sister and I, and an older brother, who had a Chinese father from my mother’s previous marriage.
My father played us against one another, and of course, no one spoke of things we couldn’t even acknowledge. It wasn’t until I was thirty-one, and my sister, twenty-seven, that the two of us started to tell ourselves the truth.
My sister was so overwhelmed by her memories that she chose to cut off all contact with her biological family for a number of years. I just kept plugging along, doing my spiritual studies, taking greater and greater care of my mother, while negotiating a failing marriage and facing the reality of being a single mother of two very young children.
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