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Content warning: incest; sexual abuse

There’s a series of photos in which I’m posing with my biological father on the small front porch of his townhome in Anchorage, Alaska. It’s summertime, 1983, and brilliant outside until nearly midnight this far north. A potted hanging fuchsia on the edge of the photo frame spills copious blossoms, riotous.

My dad and I are both dressed up. It is the summer before he dies, but he hasn’t been diagnosed yet. In these photos, he looks well, with ruddy cheeks and shiny eyes. The oozing melanoma behind his ear, the one that is leaking all over every pillowcase he owns and that he’s refusing to get checked, may have already metastasized to his lungs. In any case, his body is a time bomb and he’s doing nothing about it, and that decision will cost him his life in nine short months, when he dies on April 8, 1984.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

~

In the series of photos, I’m wearing a teal cotton dress I borrowed from his girlfriend (who will become, briefly, my stepmother in the middle of the winter, marrying my by-then emaciated chemo patient father in someone’s sunken living room). I am wearing a white headband and my hair is cut in a bob, with bangs. I have just turned fourteen.

If you look at the photos—as my mother did when I got home to Chicago later that month—you might see something amiss, something almost too subtle to name. It might give you a prickly feeling on the back of your neck. My father and I are posed in the frame, over and over, with a positioning reserved for lovers. I am inclining my head toward his as one does to a boyfriend or husband, never to a parent. I am fingering the button on his dinner jacket the way adult women flirt with their spouses or lovers. I am playing the coquette. He is playing the gallant.

When my mother saw these pictures, she waited one day, asked me to show them to her again, and then asked me if my father had ever harmed me. I assured her (and my own unquiet brain) that he had not. She had asked me that once before, shortly after they divorced when I was three and my father gained sole weekend access to me. When I came home crying and making my stuffed mouse, Algernon, aggressively kiss my Raggedy Ann doll, she was worried. I denied it then too. She looked for marks on my small body at bath time but found none.

I learned much later that my father had been sexually violent to my mother. She also told me much later that she never imagined he would do to me what he had done to her.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

~

When I told her he had not harmed me, I was telling the truth as I knew it, based on what was available within my conscious mind. The actual truth of the ways he did harm me would remain sealed away in my unconscious mind for twenty-five years from that day in my 1983 kitchen. In fact, my father’s untimely death may have sent my memories back into the crypt for some extra decades as I worked overtime to “grieve” my father. Dramatically pining for him covered up the real story: that he groomed me to be his child lover, that he violently raped me dozens of times. My mother, who loved and loves me fiercely, experienced her neck prickling as she looked at those photos. Even she was helpless in the face of my denial, a force that made my own story unavailable to myself.

How does one learn to pose as a sexualized grown woman by age thirteen, reminiscent of a blue movie before one has ever seen one? How does one wear the vestments of adult sexuality convincingly?

~

When my daughters were little, they loved to pilfer my lipstick and draw bright, clownish lips around their own. They wrapped themselves in my shawls, found mismatched pairs of my heels, slipped their small feet in, and clomped around our apartment. They were little girls trying on my shoes and mannerisms, not pulling it off by any stretch—looking more like a zany circus act than like their adult mother.

When I was their age, I had been someone’s unwilling lover for years already. One year at Baptist summer camp, nestled in the remote Davis Mountains in southern Texas, I suggested my cabinmates and I, for our final skit on parents’ night, devise a dance set to Donna Summers’ “Bad Girls,” a 1979 hit about prostitutes. Somehow, my idea was greenlit, and I threw myself into choreographing. Although my counselor fixed my hair in chaste French braids, I could “work it” better than anyone else, throwing my hips with a prescience that, if it hadn’t been the checked-out, groovy seventies, might have caused a well-meaning adult some alarm. For an otherwise sheltered child who rarely was allowed to watch network TV, some internal instinct—that of being an adult, sexual woman—had been awoken far before its time; I came by my sluttiness naturally as I had been taught the Lolita role by a master Humbert Humbert. Like those movies about A+ students who turn tricks on the weekend, I led a double life. The remarkable thing is that my double life was a secret to myself.

~

I had my first flashback on a rainy April night in 2008. It was triggered by the panicked voice of my older—very shy—daughter who was trying to be brave by toughing it out at a sleepover, but who called me from the tiled bathroom at her friend’s house. I can still hear her tiny, terrified voice traveling through the family’s portable phone into my landline. I offered to pick her up, and she whispered that, no, she wanted to stay. When I hung up the phone, my brain exploded in what I can only describe as a sepia-toned “movie” with frames of things I didn’t recognize but later (and with a torrent of new flashbacks) was able to stitch together into a story—one of terrible abuse and violence that stretched from the time I was three (when my parents divorced) to the year I was fourteen (when my biological father died).

At the time, I was working in therapy with a skilled and experienced clinician. I had started with N three years earlier, complaining that I lived inside a cloud of self-loathing. Over the years, N had asked me to tell her more about my relationship with my biological dad. I always answered, “There’s nothing more to tell. I loved him, and he died young,” and she nodded as we moved to the next topic. I don’t know if N’s skin prickled when I dismissed her questions, if she had some sense there was more to the story. If so, she never betrayed her worries or got out ahead of me.

The morning after my first flashback, I called N. I said, “It’s not me. It’s incest.”

~

To survive within my hellish reality as a child, I had to code switch between little girl and vixen. I hate to think what would have happened to me at the hands of my father had I not played both parts very well.

Who was taking those pictures, as I stood with my father on the porch that afternoon? My future stepmother was there—maybe blind to any prickling of her own neck, as she had been incested by her own father (she had told me). My aunt was also there, my father’s only sister, someone who lionized the version of my father that was visible to the world—Yale law degree, basketball star, piano prodigy, handsome hipster. Something canceled out any neck-prickling she might have had, had she considered the strangely comely angle of my neck that day. Many years later, she conceded he was a sociopath. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My mind couldn’t know about my abuse, but eventually my body did. It showed me movie-like tapes that unfurled in my mind’s eye with alarming steadiness, often viewed from the point of view of the top of the doorframe. In my thirties, as in my teens, I was relatively sheltered; I read Jane Austen for pleasure and had never seen video porn. If they weren’t memories, where could these vivid scenes have come from, replete with specific and long “forgotten” details of the many houses and apartments where my dad had lived? I wanted to believe they were an illusion or fiction, but I couldn’t deny their realness. Consider the scene in which I’m maybe five years old, taking a bath in a rented farmhouse while my dad cooks dinner in the kitchen with whichever girlfriend he has invited on this weekend (she is out of the frame of my recovered memory). I take the bar of soap and wash my vulva, which produces a pain so sharp it blinds me. I scream and scream, and my dad comes running, yelling at me for making a scene. He tells me not to wash down there anymore. In my mind’s eye, he is vivid—the cadence of his voice, his jeans studded with rhinestones and fringed with burrs from our walk to the pond earlier that day. As I watch this internal movie now as an adult, I realize my tissues must have been torn, and putting soap on an open cut caused the split of white-hot pain.

~

Besides the internal “photography,” there are many actual photographs. My father dabbled and left behind binders of prints and negatives: me in leotards, photographed from odd and suggestive angles, standing in a field of marram grass, like an X-rated baby Helga. I saved everything through many moves and left myself a breadcrumb trail. Then I walked the trail and reconstructed my life. I have sifted through it all, including a postcard he sent me from Las Vegas when I was eight (says the postmark); on the front of the card is a photograph of a neon sign—the iconic woman sitting inside an oversized martini glass, her sexy gams thrown over its lip. On the back, my father wrote to my eight-year-old self, “I didn’t expect to find you here!” Maybe a funny joke—comparing your child to a neon lady of the night—but only funny if it’s preposterous. Not funny if it’s merely true.

The shards and scenes now live in my conscious mind. Occasionally I hear it can’t be true—that “memory doesn’t work like that.” My father’s sister shared this opinion. I am here to tell you that traumatic memory works exactly like that. From the other women in my trauma group to those whose stories populate books like The Body Keeps the Score and Trauma and Recovery, we all hope you understand that traumatic memory—preserved in amber for later consideration—does indeed work just like this.

~

It has been fourteen years since that chilly April night when I first had a glimmer of my abuse history. Facing it has been the hardest work of my life so far. When I did the work to stitch the memories together, everything “clicked.” This hidden narrative was the mystery dictating all my choices; it explains why I have to leave a store if I hear 1970’s funk, why I must excuse myself from the company of men with mustaches, why I avoid ranch-style homes, why I never wanted to have biological kids of my own and instead chose to adopt in my twenties, why I became a poet. I lost my aunt because she disagrees, my first marriage because who really can with all that, and the comfortable haze of denial I used to live inside, but, by allowing the truth in, I gained my very self. I forgot to remember, and then I remembered to live.