Rape: to force someone to have sex when they are unwilling, using violence or threatening behavior.[1]
With this definition, how do you expect me to explain or tell people I was raped when I actually was happy to do it… Also I think I consider my rapist as my first love and best friend at the time. With that in mind, there is no possible way in my logical mind to explain to somebody, shrink or friend, that I was raped. My closest friends know though, but they don’t know I used to like it. I guess I’ll have to explain it a little better now.
At the time, I was the oldest daughter, having a brother (2 years younger) and a sister (5 years younger). My parents, as in all great stories, were going through their divorce. Neither my mom nor my dad took that very well, both too sad to keep up with their lives in a healthy way. Dad left the house, so we were left with my mother. She used to get “food poisoning” very often, probably due to the empty bottles left from her dinners. I know now they are called “Hangovers” and not “food poisoning”.
I used to get scared of my mother’s comments and attitudes when she got drunk or had a couple too many pills, so I used to take my sister and make her stay in her room with music so she wouldn’t notice all this. Couldn’t do much for my brother because he wouldn’t listen to me, so he saw some of the episodes too. There were good episodes too, sometimes she didn’t come back for days at a time and we would have the house to ourselves. That was great! I learned how to cook all my favorite meals.
Not so long after the separation, my mom started dating her Kung Fu instructor. He seemed nice and patient. Even when she was too wasted to stand up, he would help me take care of her, which made it easier for me to hide it from my sister. The first time, he would come to my room after to ask me how I felt about the situation. At the beginning I would kick him out and keep on crying by myself in my room.
A couple weeks later, my mom took some of her antidepressants, I don’t know how many but she was only supposed to take one. So she got into a really weird, depressed mood and she looked very drugged and mean. She started attacking me verbally and saying she hated us (her kids) and wanted to die. By the time I was 9. I’m glad my sister was locked in her room with her music as always.
Albert (her boyfriend) helped me put my mother to sleep, and tucked me in, I was crying so bad I let him in my room and he just heard me out and hugged me until I fell asleep. That quickly turned into a routine. We would put my mom down or just assume she wouldn’t come back that night, and he would hear me out and hug me to sleep.
This went on for weeks. I remember missing him the days my mom was sober and demanding his attention. “Why wasn’t she always out?” I would think to myself, it was so much better when she wasn’t there. I liked cooking, plus her cooking wasn’t very good to be honest. And with her gone, I would have my confident by my side and not hers.
One day, when we put her to bed, we were talking while hugging on my bed and he told me I was very special to him, which made me very happy so I hugged him even harder. He asked me if he was special to me. I nodded strongly and said yes, of course he was. At that time, he was the only person I could or wanted to trust. Nobody else could know my house was so broken.
He asked me if I wanted to make him happy, what kind of question is that. Of course by that time I wanted to make him happy but I was scared he was thinking of leaving my mom and that I would never see him again. I wouldn’t blame him for it though, she was a mess. Anyways, I said Yes. So he opened his pants, put his underwear down and took my hand to put it on his member, then took my other hand and did the same thing. He started showing me how to make him happy and when I got the hang of it, he started touching me to show me what he felt. It was nice, I didn’t know we could do that. He explained that was something you are just supposed to do with very important people and only when the man asked for it first. Girls are not supposed to ask for that.
After that day, our routine changed to him hearing me out, while hugging and doing this to each other. We never kissed though, now I guess he didn’t want to show me we were doing “couple” kind of stuff, he would kiss my mother because they were a couple and the prince charming kissed the princess. We were friends and any “couplelly[2]” kind of thing could make me doubt what we were doing.
I remember this one day, at my dad’s house, we were visiting as we did every 2 weeks. After breakfast, we would always play around with my brother and sister, we would pretend dad was a tickle monster and he would try to catch us to tickle us until we gave up. After that game, I tried to show him how much I cared about him. So I tried to do what my friend Alberto had shown me, grabbed my dad’s member. My dad got so angry, made me promise to never do that again. I promised, although I didn’t understand why he got so upset. Albert did tell me not to do it if the man doesn’t ask for it first but I didn’t think my own dad would get mad at me for it.
When we were alone and hugging again with Albert, I told him I had promised my dad I would never do that again so we couldn’t do it anymore. He said that as my dad was French, he didn’t understand how Chileans express their love for each other, so it wasn’t really surprising that he reacted like that and also reminded me that girls are not supposed to do it first, men are supposed to “invite us to do it”. I didn’t want to upset my dad by breaking that promise, so he said we could keep it a secret if it made me feel better. And so we did.
[1] Cambridge diccionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rape
[2] Invented Word by me that means doing couple only kind of stuff.