"Rape doesn't exist" my father would often say.  He liked to use visual aids to prove his point, so he would demand a needle and thread.   He would sit in front of me and hold the needle and command me to "thread the needle" while he moved his hands all over the place.  "Daddy, I can't unless you hold still" I would say.  "Exactly!" he would declare and then look at my 5 year old face and repeat "rape doesn't exist".   And though I was too young to understand the needle and thread analogy, I GOT IT.  Anything that happened to me was my fault.  If something bad happened, I brought it on, I asked for it, My due. 

At the time, I idolized my father.  He was my daddy, my hero.  If he said it, it was real, had heft and weight.  It was only later, when the rages began, and he took me to see his mistress, that my hero began to tumble from the pedestal.   I may have begun to fear him, but the lessons remained. 

 Of course, it didn't help that my mother had been hideously raped as a girl and didn't, or couldn't refute my dad.  I think now that each time he used the needle story, he was taking careful aim at her.  but he always hit me too. 

So the years went by.  And by some miracle, my father, in my 14th year of life suddenly, and without warning "got nice".  One day, he was the raging madman I loved and feard beyond all reason, the next, he was patient and kind.  To this day, I don't know what precipitated this radical change in him, because a year later - he was dead.  But the lessons lived on.  Only a new layer of lesson took root.   I remember, at his funeral, everyone talking about what a great man he was, so gifted, so smart, so kind.  I still hated and feared him, but now I hated a feared a dead man, so powerful that hoardes of people called him great.  So now I not only brought on all the bad things that happened, I hated a good man.

It's impossible to catalogue how much that thinking dominated and deformed my soul for much of my youth, and early adulthood.  Somewhere along the way, I gave up and decided it was easier and better if I never dated, never married, never really got involved with a man because then I wouldn't be the agent of my own undoing.  If I didn't play, I couldn't be wrong, could I?

I watched my sisters jump from one bad relationship to the next.  My father mirrored in each man's face.  With every mean-spirited man, my determination to never have THAT grew.  Only now, in my 40's, do I have the courage to dip my toe into that boiling cauldron of dating, marriage, attraction.  All I can say, is...... This is what I was missing??? DAMN!!!! 

But at least I'm willing to play, now.