How Grooming Keeps Abusers Safe

I didn’t realize it was sexual abuse until my 30's

Oprah Winfrey once said about grooming, “I have said for years that if the abuser is any good, you won’t know it’s happened… If the abuser is any good, he or she is going to make you feel like you’re part of it.”

Everyone loved my dad. He was quiet and kind, a youth minister and a children’s church leader. He played guitar in a band, wrote beautiful music, made up funny stories, and told every dad joke in the book.

He also enjoyed pornography. He liked it a lot. He kept piles of magazines in his closet, between his mattress, and under his bed. I knew this because as far back as I could remember, he liked to show them to me.

It always happened the same way. My mom would leave for some reason or the other, and Dad would turn off the TV and go to his room. He’d leave the door open and sit on his bed. He didn’t call me, but I eventually walked by the room and peeked in. He’d smile and wave at me, and I’d walk in. There I’d find Dad with his collection.

He didn’t show me the photos of real men and women directly but left them open all around him like he was sitting in a nest of naked flesh. He watched me poke around in the magazines curiously. I could read at a young age and often read a sentence here and there out loud though I had no concept as to their meaning. He’d eventually call me over, turn the pages to the cartoon comics that were always in the margins. He asked me if I thought they were funny and would tell me to pick out another one. When I brought one over, he’d read them to me while I sat on his lap or beside him on the bed, and he masturbated, sometimes rubbing against me, and sometimes having me touch him.

I didn’t know what he was doing was sex abuse until years later. I just thought it was a funny thing that all grown-up men did. When I was 4 years old, I told my mom that I’d seen “white stuff come out of Daddy’s wienie”. Her immediate response was “Never tell anyone or you’ll never see my family again!” I knew after her passionate, scary response that something was wrong about these storytimes with Dad, but it wasn’t until I was an adolescent that equated my father’s actions to sex abuse.

I thought for years that Dad stopped sexually abusing me after I told mom about it. I continually had nightmares about the abuse that happened while I was a toddler, but I didn’t realize he continued to abuse myself as well as my siblings well into our teens until I was in my early thirties. He’d simply found other ways to do it, insidious abuse that happened under our very noses.

The way we figured out that the sexual abuse continued began with a nightmare my brother shared with me in a letter; “I keep having this dream about taking a shower with Dad when I was a kid. In the dream, he would have me wash him. I don’t know if this was something that actually happened or just a random nightmare. Is this familiar to you at all?”

As soon as I read that, I was floored. My father and I took showers together well into adolescence. I was 9 in the last shower I took with him. I called my sister immediately.

“Do you remember taking showers with Dad? Did that ever happen to you?”

My sister remembered it clearly. I called my brother, and we confirmed it with each other. We all also remembered very clearly that he’d tell us that Mom told him to give us the shower.

Because mom told him to do it, and he’d been doing it since we were toddlers, we had no reason to talk about it. He also never touched us in obviously sexual ways. He touched us to clean us or had us touch to clean him. He always had an erection. I just thought that was the constant state of a penis since it was the only one I’d ever seen.

My sister and I asked our mom why in the world she told dad to give us showers. Her response? “What are you talking about?” She was horrified.

My siblings and I were in our late 20’s and early 30’s before we had this revelation. I discovered years later, that he’d also treated me more like a girlfriend or wife when mom was gone, telling me how horribly she treated him, apologizing that she was so jealous of me. He took me on “dates”, choosing the outfits I wore and didn’t tell anyone I was his daughter.

In retrospect, it’s all obvious, but I had no clue while it was happening.

He was manipulative and intelligent. He found ways to abuse me where not only would I not tell but if I did tell for some reason he’d be able to explain it away as a misunderstanding as he had the first time I told my mom. “I’m so embarrassed. She walked into the bedroom while I was masturbating. I thought I had the room locked.”

Sometimes I still feel guilty when I talk about my dad. I loved my father then, and I still love him. Most of the time I simply try not to think about him. Other times, I’m so plagued with nightmares and fear about him hurting other kids that I can barely function in other aspects of my life.

Always, in the back of my mind, a thought vibrates. "What else did he do that you still don't recognize as abuse?"