I (27f) don’t remember her molesting me. I do remember she didn’t behave appropriately with me when I was very young. She was fond of tickling me very close to my genitals, upper and inner thighs. Once, I tried tickling another child there (couldn’t have been older than six?) and they immediately got up to tell their parents, clearly upset. Mom pulls me aside to inform me that parents have special privileges, that even though she touches me there I may not touch other kids there. There’s a few different memories like that. Mom praises a certain part of my body or touches me in a certain place, I try to recreate that encounter with other kids or adults, I set off alarm bells, mom tells me our relationship works by different rules. Once I tried to expose myself to my speech therapist. I knew I had done something wrong because I failed to elicit her praise, and worried she was angry. My mother said that part of me was pretty. What did I do wrong?
I remember when I was around four or five years old my mom touched herself through her leggings to show she had no penis, which, she explained to me, boys had. I might be imagining this, but I swear she invited me to touch her down there so I could check for myself. I can hear her saying it. I can remember the feeling of the fabric on my right hand. I remember being hesitant to push too deep and feel her flesh underneath. I remember thinking that this was very strange, that I didn’t want to touch her there. She told me that I should not tell anyone we had this talk.
I had behavioral problems as a kid. Adults often had to redirect me from touching myself inappropriately or rocking my hips into my hands in that conspicuous way. My mother told me that if I kept doing that, people would call me a slut. I constantly spaced out. I remember thinking that I was not really inside my body, that I wasn’t really myself or that I was secretly someone else, that I wasn’t real, that I was dead or asleep and dreaming. These trances were so severe I was put into therapy, citing “attention problems.” I was preoccupied with sexual fantasies I had no way of making sense of but couldn’t help but obsess over. Thinking about them did things to my body that made me very upset and very ashamed. I used hostility to drive other kids away so they couldn’t see. All this was between ages six and nine. All this makes me worry that something truly awful happened that I cannot remember.
As I hit puberty, that shame crushed me and I was remorseful that I was ever born. I started cutting myself and pondered suicide in my early teens. My sexuality was very confused and dark and a constant source of shame. As I got older and became independent I reflected on what my mother had done to me and realized I would never treat a child that way. I am very sad for the childhood I never experienced and the mother I never had. We do not talk. All the while, I think “was it really that bad? Am I making this up? That must have been my fault. I was asking for it.”
I read stories here and mine is so tame. How is it possible I’m so bothered by it?