The Hardest Story to Tell

Why I Didn’t Report
1. I did not realize exactly what happened to me until I was 42 years old.

2. It was my father.

The physical and emotional abuse I suffered at the hand of my father is something I have talked about for many years. I have also talked about how my father sexually abused two of my friends and my uncle at very early ages. The abuse I haven’t talked about and one of the hardest things to fully accept is the sexual abuse he also inflicted on me.

Something so innocuous brought it to the forefront of my brain and once it was there it would not let me go. I was reading a magazine and in it was the story of a woman who was a bedwetter, and she talked about how when she woke up in the morning her sheets were soaked. I was also a bedwetter when I younger. I sat on my couch reading this article and thought about waking up wet all those years ago and about how drenched my Star Wars sheets were, sometimes I could feel the wetness all the way up to my chest, and I kind of smiled out of pure understanding of what this woman had gone through. I also recalled the beatings I received for having a wet bed, and then I had a thought that hit me hard. If I was that wet, why did my father check to see if I was wet by touching my genitals? He would come in while I was sleeping and touch me to see if I was wet.

Checking to see if I was wet, that was the way that my mind processed his abuse. I know this happened because a few times I woke up while he was checking me, I could feel him touching me, and then feel his hand quickly slide out from under me and I would lie in that soaking wet bed, terrified and frozen, waiting for the beating I knew was about to come. For my whole life I have known that the way my father checked to see if I was wet was weird and wrong, but until that day I did not realize exactly what he was doing. Then I thought: how many times did he touch me and I wasn’t wet, and I didn’t wake up, what happened then? My bedwetting went on for years. It started in first grade and it did not stop until I was in fourth grade. It most likely would have continued if not for my Mom stepping in and taking me to a doctor. My father was touching me all that time.

Since I was 15 and the truth came out about my father molesting my friends and my uncle, I thought that he beat me and treated me the way he did in order not to be close to me so that he wouldn’t touch me like he did the others; but on that day, sitting on my couch, with that magazine still in my hands, at 42 years old, I realized he did it to me too.

It was incredibly hard to admit that it happened to me, and I kept going back and forth for so many years thinking: no, he was just checking to see if I was wet. I couldn’t stop thinking that until I read that magazine and remembered how wet I was.

I know that I am a white man and right now is not the time for male survivors to be telling their stories, but I feel that all survivors need to stand together. United we are stronger; letting people separate us into male and female survivors makes us weaker and more vulnerable. So here is my story and out of all of the stories I have ever told, this one seems the hardest, because this one is the one that was the most buried, the most rationalized and the memories that haunt me the most.