Lovingly molested

Marie visited me for a week over Thanksgiving, and just flew home tonight. Together we drove out to where most of my family was gathered for the holiday. She met them; they met her. A good time was had by all.

But also we talked and talked, as always. And a couple days ago, the conversation was a little interesting.

I was talking about my dad -- specifically, about how he was always trying to worm his way into learning about my private life, as if he were groping at me with his questions. I've written about it here, and probably other places. Marie pegged his behavior nicely as "voyeuristic". And for a long time I didn't have a very good idea why he would even want to know all this stuff about me, except that he always had. Sometimes I thought maybe it was because he enjoyed the power that came from knowing things and being able to make me squirm when he talked about them.

But as I talked to Marie, I added that I had recently thought of another hypothesis ... another possible reason that might have explained his behavior. And I told her that this hypothesis could have meaning for her too.

My idea was this: maybe my dad was lonely. Well, of course I know he was lonely -- he didn't have many friends, and those he had rarely saw him. He didn't have any family except my mother's, and over the years he had alienated most of those. He didn't have a job to go to. So yeah, he was lonely.

And his social skills were a little off. He could be entertaining -- he was an actor by trade, after all -- but he didn't trust people and so he had trouble making new friends. He wanted to be loved and accepted, but he was afraid to let himself be honest and real with others ... and that has to be the first step. The only circle he (mostly) trusted were his immediate family: my mother, my brother, and me.

So I think he wanted to be my friend. Actually I know that's what he wanted, because many times -- usually when he was really drunk -- that's exactly what he would say. "I don't want you to think of me as a father ... just as an older friend who has been through some things you haven't yet, so you can ask me questions and I can give you advice." (Notice, by the way, that this implies he had a really unpleasant idea of what fatherhood entails. I think this is related to his lifelong hatred of authority.) And so I think what he wanted was for us to sit around shooting the shit and "lying about women" [his phrase], the way he imagined that Real Guys must do in the locker room. (My father was a classic Non-Athlete, but I think his image of masculinity must have dated from high school gym class -- which he hated, but which he must have thought he should have liked in order to be a Real Man.)

In short: I think he pawed at my life with a perverted, voyeuristic lust because he wanted to be my friend, and didn't know how. And didn't know that it was impossible, because the Father-Son relationship is prior to the Friend-Friend relationship and excludes it.

Marie thought this was very interesting, both charitable and plausible. But what the hell did it have to do with her?

Well, I don't remember if I've told this story yet but her mother molested her when Marie was 12. Her mother was an alcoholic, and one night (after Bible study!) she came into Marie's bedroom and started massaging Marie's vulva until she came. Marie was really upset at this but figured that a Good Girl wouldn't tell her mother to stop; also, that God wouldn't have allowed it unless she (Marie) was already hopelessly corrupt and soiled. It fucked up her ideas about sex for decades, and that in turn seems to have crippled her sex life until she and I got together early this year.

And I asked Marie, Why did she do it? She wasn't getting off, after all. And she probably wasn't particularly aroused by it -- as she objected later, when Marie confronted her with this and she said that she had no recollection of it (probably true because she blacked out a lot), "I like men." (Marie's father was dead by then, of suicide. Marie's mother was drinking heavily and fucking anything in pants.) So why did she do it? Marie didn't know.

Well, I suggested, maybe it was the same kind of thing that was going on with my dad. Maybe at some level she thought that she was doing Marie a favor. After all here was her oldest daughter, just on the cusp of womanhood ... about to come into her sexual inheritance. If you assume that her mother's higher reasoning abilities were all wiped clean out by the alcohol, it's not so crazy to think that she might have thought this was somehow a good thing.

Of course I told Marie that this was just a hypothesis. She'd have to think whether there was any external data that could make it look likely.

And after a minute she said, "Oh shit. There is."

Marie's mother was a very feminine woman. She was pretty, and paid a lot of attention to her appearance. She always had to have a man in her life, and it thrilled her to be the focus of some man's adoration. Marie was 12 -- just at the cusp of womanhood -- and didn't care about any of that. In mythological metaphor, she was totally devoted to Artemis and scorned Aphrodite. (See, e.g., this link for just how dangerous that can be.) Marie's mother kept trying to convince her to care about boys.

And so, Marie went on, ... maybe it makes sense that her mother would try to show her why it was worth it to care about boys. To show her how good sex feels. To let her experience directly why sex and romance can reasonably dominate your life. Throughout it all her mother kept saying "It feels so good." Maybe that really meant (if you look through the drunken haze) "It's worth the sacrifices. Make yourself pretty. Make yourself sweet and soft. Because then men will want to fuck you, and there is nothing sweeter in all the world."

But that means, Marie went on, that maybe she still loved me even while she was molesting me.

She was sobbing softly into my shoulder by this point. I held her, and kissed her, and tried to reassure her that yes, it was perfectly possible her mother still loved her. I reminded her that many of the terrible, cruel, destructive things that people do are caused not by malice but just by ignorance and clumsiness. And if anything can bring on ignorance and clumsiness, heavy drinking is surely on the list. So yeah ... it's all possible.

We talked about a lot of other things over the course of the week, but that may have been the most unexpected.