A question for middle-aged men and older
farfromhome
Registrant
I really appreciate all the answers here. I think in my case there are a lot of memories from my father's behavior where I felt like I'd made up my mind about it, if that makes sense: I saw it as strange, and uncomfortable to some extent because of how powerless I felt as a kid. When he abused me physically it was often intensely cruel and violent, and that was easier to evaluate and label "abuse" in my recollection. The inappropriate sexual behavior made me really uncomfortable, and I clearly recall disliking it every single time it happened, but I didn't know what to call it.
I now have a daughter who will be turning 2 years old this year, and I'm a very involved parent. And so much of parenting a child that young involved tons of physical contact to the point of feeling overstimulated (like when she's having a bad night and won't sleep unless she's being held), let alone all of the things we have to do as parents around hygiene, bathing, diaper changes. My wife had very serious health incidents postpartum and was hospitalized for about a week each time, which meant I was a solo parent to an infant. The last two years have been some of the most wonderful and also most intensely stressful and frightening of my life, and I have had no shortage of frustrating or difficult moments.
And maybe that's what's caused me to reevaluate what I do remember, because suddenly I'm a parent and I'm around children all the time (with friends, at the park, at daycare). There's now a huge amount of comparison in my mind, whether I want to think about it or not. I cannot help but think about some of these memories, and whereas I might have tried to explain it away in the past, it's become very clear to me how obviously wrong it was. I used to think, "Well, my dad is a weird guy who had a hard time relating to other people, and he just behaved strangely without realizing it."
Becoming a parent immediately changed my opinion. Since I didn't place TW on here I'll withhold details but there is just no plausible explanation for my dad creating reasons to be able to touch intimate parts of my body as much as he did (vague language here but I'm sure you catch my drift), especially given that he always made sure that we were completely alone when he was doing it, and he would use excuses like "this is to help you stop wetting the bed" when I was 7 years old and—this is crucial—did not have a problem with wetting the bed.
So, in my case, it's less about a memory being completely gone, and more about something causing me to reflect on it—and my sudden realization that I would never touch my child or any other child that way, regardless of the supposed reason. And I'm finding that when I have these breakthroughs, I feel genuine distress at first (although it eventually lifts). I'd like to tell my mom about this, but she's my dad's sole caretaker and I don't think she'd believe it, or really be able to hear it. I told my wife about it when we were much younger, though. She recently told me that, while she didn't want to instruct me on how to feel about it, she saw these incidents as obvious sexual abuse from the first time she heard them. Even before we'd started talking about trying for kids, she'd already decided that she'd never let my dad be alone with our child.
I now have a daughter who will be turning 2 years old this year, and I'm a very involved parent. And so much of parenting a child that young involved tons of physical contact to the point of feeling overstimulated (like when she's having a bad night and won't sleep unless she's being held), let alone all of the things we have to do as parents around hygiene, bathing, diaper changes. My wife had very serious health incidents postpartum and was hospitalized for about a week each time, which meant I was a solo parent to an infant. The last two years have been some of the most wonderful and also most intensely stressful and frightening of my life, and I have had no shortage of frustrating or difficult moments.
And maybe that's what's caused me to reevaluate what I do remember, because suddenly I'm a parent and I'm around children all the time (with friends, at the park, at daycare). There's now a huge amount of comparison in my mind, whether I want to think about it or not. I cannot help but think about some of these memories, and whereas I might have tried to explain it away in the past, it's become very clear to me how obviously wrong it was. I used to think, "Well, my dad is a weird guy who had a hard time relating to other people, and he just behaved strangely without realizing it."
Becoming a parent immediately changed my opinion. Since I didn't place TW on here I'll withhold details but there is just no plausible explanation for my dad creating reasons to be able to touch intimate parts of my body as much as he did (vague language here but I'm sure you catch my drift), especially given that he always made sure that we were completely alone when he was doing it, and he would use excuses like "this is to help you stop wetting the bed" when I was 7 years old and—this is crucial—did not have a problem with wetting the bed.
So, in my case, it's less about a memory being completely gone, and more about something causing me to reflect on it—and my sudden realization that I would never touch my child or any other child that way, regardless of the supposed reason. And I'm finding that when I have these breakthroughs, I feel genuine distress at first (although it eventually lifts). I'd like to tell my mom about this, but she's my dad's sole caretaker and I don't think she'd believe it, or really be able to hear it. I told my wife about it when we were much younger, though. She recently told me that, while she didn't want to instruct me on how to feel about it, she saw these incidents as obvious sexual abuse from the first time she heard them. Even before we'd started talking about trying for kids, she'd already decided that she'd never let my dad be alone with our child.
