To me & you: I always wished it were not true.

I've always had this memory- or since I was seventeen anyway- of being in the car with my mom, being bent forward, hunched at the waist and glancing up at the sky through the windshield.  I remember seeing the power lines against the blue sky as the car passed under them and I remember wondering why I was having such a difficult time being alive.

For years I just remembered the moment of glancing up at the sky and of being in the car with my mom.  I eventually put this memory back into its original place in the sequence of memories from my childhood and my life growing up.  My mom was driving me home from an abortion; I was hunched over because I was in pain.

Today my friend wrote about having been raped until she was twenty-four.  A woman left a comment on her blog thanking her for writing that and said that she had been raped until she was twenty-eight.  I was raped until I was twenty-five.  

I was on the phone with Eve and we were talking about all of this but it was like I could hardly hear anything at all and Eve asked me a question and it took all I had not to scream the response to her.  The scream would not have been in anger; it would have come from pain.  Eve asked why it was so painful to read about another person writing openly about having been raped into their twenties.  It seems like this would be comforting; that I would know then that I am not alone.  And it is good and it is comforting and it does make me know I am not alone.  It also makes me know again and in the most clear way ever that I am a woman who was raped into my twenties. 

So much of my life has been about making my life be not about having been raped.  If there has been one thing I've wanted it's been this: TO NEVER HAVE BEEN RAPED.  If there was one thing I could undo in this life, from my story, from my body and from my mind it would be:  THE RAPING.

It has taken me years of work- running back and forth between a semi-knowing-place and a trying-to-pretend-it-never-happened-place.  It has taken about seven and a half years of therapy, to be exact.

So last week when I received another anonymous comment saying that there would soon be a website created which would prove I am lying about having been raped by my father for twenty-five years; a site which would refute my 'accusations'... I read the comment, shut the computer and went out for a bicycle ride.  And while I was riding I thought:  I WISH.  I WISH IT WERE NOT TRUE.  I WISH THERE WAS SOMETHING TO REFUTE MY MEMORIES OF MY DAD GETTING INTO MY BED AND RAPING ME FROM THE TIME THAT I WAS A SMALL CHILD UNTIL I FINALLY DROVE AWAY and moved to Washington D.C. when I was twenty-five.  

So to the anonymous commenter whomever you may be:  I am unsure of why you are so upset about this horrific aspect of my life but let me assure you of this:  However much you may wish this story about my father and mother abusing me were not the truth- no one could or ever will wish it as much or more than I already have.