I read “One Family’s Struggle to Make Sense of 9/11” by Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic’s September 2021 issue. The author describes one trait of a victim’s mother’s grief, how for years she couldn’t bear to hear someone else talk about their child, she just couldn’t. The article itself focuses on the author’s personal experience and connection to the family of a specific young man, but I forced myself to sit with the discomfort of the mother’s aversion to other’s happiness and set aside the magazine for later. Last Wednesday, I went out with coworkers for a goodbye lunch and, as often happens with my coworkers, the conversation turned to their children. My manager mentioned that he really was only into rock climbing because it was the only thing his teenaged son would let them enjoy together and I sat quietly in that, not sure how to say that it was really nice of him to think that way. I had noted that for the first time in a while, a father expressing his love for his children finally did not bring tears to my eyes.

I immediately empathized with the mother who could not listen to others talk about their children. From a young age on, I have burst into tears when I see children being cared for by their parents and more so when it’s the father in the picture. I don’t think I was ever caught crying… but there’s also the insidious thought that perhaps my parents did notice me crying and just figured it was best to leave me alone. It was not the only time, but I recall one family outing specifically that resulted in me sobbing in the front passenger’s seat, both struggling to suppress the body tremors that come with deep sobbing and deathly afraid that I would have to explain the intensity of this emotion. I had seen a family friend, the closest I had to a friendly parental figure, bring out a swing similar to, if not the same one, that he had swung me in before when I was much younger. If it was the same swing, he had kept it for almost a decade and was now bringing it out to play with his son, the youngest of his children and the only boy. I watched them play and felt pangs of jealousy and longing. I hadn’t personally kept a close relationship to this man, but seeing him swing his son brought up memories of when he had also played with me that way and in the great wasteland and deprivation of parental warmth, that memory had bite to it.

That memory of that car ride home, begging my body to hold still but also unable to contain the tears, is now about a decade old itself. But the pain of having grown up without a father has only recently subsided. It was only three years ago that I almost broke down in my then supervisor’s car. We had been working together for near a year at that point and finally had a moment to sit down and have a long lunch and open up a bit more. I shared some of my background with him and he did as well. We were both Mexican-Americans, born to working class Mexican parents that had managed to get us a decent education. The key differences in our upbringing were that he had grown up with his father, who had gone on to teach him soccer and other such things that fathers do, and that I grew up relatively pampered in Orange County to his experiences in inner city Los Angeles schools. I told him how I had a difficult relationship with my father and that he had once tried to teach me soccer, but that he was quick to point out that I would have been a better soccer player if he had raised me. I mention that anecdote to people often to highlight my father’s cruelty, after all, he could have stuck around to raise me had he wanted to. My mother partially named me after him, in a misguided effort to have him acknowledge me as his son. My supervisor said one of the only things people with healthy relationships to their parents know how to say, “Sorry.”

My issues with my father specifically have eroded some of the pain from his abandonment and from generally growing up without a father. However, that pain still shows up from time to time, especially when talking to my coworkers and the relationships they’re trying to foster with their children. That same day we had lunch, my then supervisor explained the rationale behind his and his wife’s decision to home school their children and, in the way that engineers speak to each other, explained the benefits they sought to maximize, while addressing the possible issues that might arise. His careful explanation, his well thought out rationale for his children’s upbringing, felt in that moment almost like a slight against my own upbringing. Had I not been opening up all afternoon over that two-hour lunch, had we just been talking about work, I may have remained more composed. But for a moment in that car, I felt suffocated by what I did not have in my own life, what I so desperately wanted. I had to excuse myself to the bathroom once we got back to the office, to let myself cry and then wash my face, dry it off and compose myself to continue working.

I don’t know how or why the intensity of those feelings has faded. Perhaps it is as simple as acknowledging them and crying about it, over and over again until their intensity fades. The English language has its limits for naming certain things, but I would surmise that the feelings I was feeling can be described as follows: a general feeling of parental abandonment, both physical and emotional; whiplash or post-traumatic stress from experiencing the emotional intensity of my parents, juxtaposed by the careful and thought out planning of my coworker’s parenting styles; for the family friend, a feeling that nothing I had was for myself and myself alone, everything had to be shared and therefore my needs would have to be second hand, second to my younger siblings but also to my parents’ emotional needs; a longing to be loved and cared for as my coworker’s children are.

I told my therapist that at this next session we could talk about my dad and I already mentioned that there are specific things he did that left me longing for his absence in my life. I didn’t meet him until I was around 10 or 11, even though his sister, my godmother, had plenty of times babysat me while my mom worked. He very quickly proceeded to molest me, as he explained later, to satisfy some curiosity he had over my body. What I have gathered in the decades since is that my grandfather may have molested at least the youngest three of his children, my father the eldest of that trio; that the ranch my dad and his siblings grew up in was sexually permissive with the animals; and that my father seems to be, unsuccessfully, suppressing homosexual desires that contributed to his lack of respect for my body. For his family, his bipolar diagnosis complicates matters, as they treat him as if he is never truly sound of mind. I am not a therapist, and I am biased, but I don’t buy that for a minute. He didn’t appear manic at the time, and he didn’t disappear from my life again after it happened, as he would later on following other episodes, so I believe he was within his ill reasoning when he molested me. On top of the molestation, he was generally an under educated, arrogant and mean person. He actively campaigned against me attending any after school or extracurricular activities that were too focused on science and not enough on sports, was disappointed I would go on to attend college instead of getting to work right away, and was fond of saying that things would have been different had he raised me. I agree they would have, and I assume I would have grown up more homophobic, more traditionally masculine and interested in sports, likely less well educated, and unfortunately even more scarred as I assume my father would have molested me more frequently and more often.

Whenever I think back to that day, I get an ache of discomfort. I know there’s a part of me that still wishes I had done XYZ thing to have changed what happened. Unfortunately, so much of my behavior then was molded by both parents and so I was a good victim. After all, my mom had taught me already to suppress my emotional needs, to make them secondary to the whims of my parents and authority figures in life and she had taught me that she would not tolerate any emotional vulnerability in me, would lash out at it even… So after it happened, I had no one to turn to. I recall how much I fought with my mom to stop planning weekends for me with my dad, telling her that I didn’t want to see him. She would argue back with me that I should continue to see him, that we needed the money he was providing. In retrospect, it’s not clear why she didn’t just ask the courts for child support from him. It is true she was often too scared to do these types of things, wanting to minimize her interactions with the court given that they were connected to immigration services and could deport her. But she had already taken legal action against her second baby daddy, was already receiving child support from him. My grandmother would often step in too, the likely source for the argument that I should continue seeing my dad for the money. I will say, I was back then often tempted by the fact that he could afford to buy me things my mother couldn’t and things I wouldn’t necessarily have to share with my siblings, since that wasn’t their dad. When I finally told them, a little over a decade after the fact, I put blame on them for never listening to me, for never letting me not go over to his house, for not picking up on how I was trying to advocate for me to not be left alone with him.

Although my body had started to undergo puberty at the time, I would say my mind was still pre-pubescent. I hadn’t so much as masturbated and, although I had experienced the fresh pangs of desire, I would not say that I had started lusting after peers. Before, there was just a general sense of wanting to feel warmth from my peers, physical warmth yes, but chaste. My father may have given me my first erection. The only ambiguity is that I don’t remember if my body had done that on its own before. Either way, my sexual awakening was at the hands of an overweight construction worker whom my mother trusted, loved so much as to let him take her only son. I recall that we were laying down together, essentially him spooning me. I don’t recall exactly how it happened that his hands were on my flesh beneath my clothes, I remember feeling how he traced the whisps of hair on my stomach. I didn’t move, but enjoyed the feeling and continued staring at the television on the ground above us. His hands traced the elastic of my boxers before he pushed further down, blood had already been rushing to my penis. He firmly squeezed my erection, played with it for a while and I think rested with it in his palm for several minutes. I started to move around a bit once he had slowed down, excited by the touch and wanting it to continue. Perhaps he thought I was asleep.

I believe that was a Saturday afternoon and this was an overnight stay but besides the pants I was wearing, I don’t remember much else after that. He didn’t explicitly tell me not to say anything. My mother wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. I began to masturbate soon thereafter and for a couple years until I started cruising in gyms, I didn’t have an appropriate outlet for the sexual longings I felt. I recall humping a lot of pillows and being more willing to participate in games with friends and other cousins that were sexual in nature. I didn’t know how to initiate that back then, would often find it happening to me, but I wanted to have my penis played with.

Exploring at the gyms, cruising, was certainly an outlet, but I wouldn’t say it was the healthy outlet I needed. For one, I started young, when I was probably fifteen if not a little older. Because my parents did not want to pick me up from school and because I had joined the football team, which made my schedule different than my siblings, I was given a car and license very young. By fifteen and a half, I was able to drive myself to the gym, one of the only acceptable places I could be out at besides school. I had forgotten this, but remembered it in writing, but I believe I was even younger when I started cruising, because I used to ride my bike to the gym too, before I could start driving. In some small defense to the grown men I began to have casual encounters with, my body hair and thicker facial hair aged me up some. This is not an attempt to victimize myself, but I believe it’s true that the body hair enabled me, as it made my body and face look older than I was. However, now as an older adult than they were, I think it would still have been very clear that I was, at best, borderline legal and at worst, a risk for statutory rape if we were caught. There are men who were clearly gay but that seemed incredibly disinterested and, in some cases, even annoyed at me. I recall one in particular that I couldn’t tell if he was gay, that I had seen once masturbating in the showers and had wanted to join but he quickly left; I ran into him years later at a pride event in Santa Ana. I had made a game back then of detecting other queer men and had been excited to have been right about him. We had chatted, I had initiated a conversation in the steam room, and he had told me he had kids only a little younger than me. Perhaps that is why he was able to acknowledge how young I was.

Not everyone was so scrupulous. My MO back then was to lift weights, run, all the while observing the other gym patrons and then go wait in the steam room. It was good for my acne and gave me a way to prolong my gym visit, to extend the time away from home. I think because the steam room was in the locker room, not co-ed, I recognized that men were not wearing undergarments below their towels and I adopted the behavior. It was not long before one of these men undid their towel, showed me their erection and we would begin to mess around. It felt liberating, a secret thing that my mother couldn’t know about and also exciting, the release of endorphins and the touching of my body in ways that I didn’t know how to ask for. But, because I didn’t verbalize these desires and because these were men that were preying on young men, some likely excited at the possibility that I was not of legal age, I often found that these encounters went further than I was comfortable with or with men that I actually was not interested in. Some of those men downright disgusted me, but I hadn’t learned how to say no.

That legacy belongs to both my parents. Each one contributed to my inability to voice my own desires and boundaries. Again the English language shows its limits, but, for my mother’s part, she pulled me into her emotional messes, exposing me to adult conflict that I was not ready to help process and punishing me when I gave unwise, youthful counsel. My father literally introduced me to sexual desire, primed my body for it long before I had even learned sexuality and thus I had no vocabulary with which to act upon it. I quickly picked up the language of cruising, itself primarily non-verbal, but did not have the necessary defenses to be able to insist on rejecting people, verbally and clearly, nor even to listen to my body when it was saying it wasn’t interested. I learned very quickly to dissociate, to leave my body while things were done to it and let men finish. Most of these guys did not have condoms and this was before the preventative, anti-HIV pills were readily available, so this was mostly non-penetrative. I recall at least once that one did have a condom and did want to insert himself, but at least there I acknowledged my discomfort (or was it that my internalized homophobia flared up) and said “No.”

I have already written about how my being in the closet exacerbated the situation after an acquaintance sexually assaulted me, which is linked to the above because I was still learning how to say no to unwanted sexual advances. Unfortunately, beyond just the cruising, I did lose my virginity to a man who had catfished me and who I was not interested in. Because my father had taught me to just quiet up and let him finish, I had that in my ill fashioned repertoire of sexual tools. It was not long after I started cruising at the gym that I started lying about my age and meeting people off Craigslist and Adam4Adam. I was so drawn to sexual desire that I was risking being kicked out of my home, because my mother later did do that when I came out. In college, as a freshman, I figured I was finally old enough to lose my virginity and had even found the perfect candidate, a grad student with a toned, hairy body and also in the closet. The person who turned up at my doorstep had no relation to the pictures and was much heavier, smooth, and not the least bit hygienic. To my every no he had a negotiation and finally, to get him to leave, I let him ride me to his completion. After he came, I asked him to leave again, and that was my first time.

So it is that I recognize the pain in movies when they show children who have been molested or forced upon by older relatives. Even to those who were later taken advantage of there is an intense feeling of sharing their trauma. I don’t know if that feeling has a word, but certainly, I am “triggered” when I see sexual assault portrayed in the media. There is an intense feeling of dissociation, perhaps because I have not fully reckoned with the pain of the molestation. I can attribute behavioral patterns to it, I can acknowledge that I will experience intense discomfort when I hear stories of sexual assault or see them in television, but perhaps I still keep the pain at arm’s length and so have not fully healed from it. I don’t know how to process it any better. Let me name the feelings as I did above: there is the discomfort in knowing that my body experienced pleasure as well as the memory of my mind drifting away; there are shades of guilt, of wishing that I had been bigger or stronger enough to overpower my father and remove him from my side; there is resentment that my mother would not have believed me and seemed intent to ignore the complaints I had to be around my father; there is that I will never get to experience a first time like in the movies, awkward and messy but with a peer; there was the confusion in the years between when I was molested and when my mind finally caught up with my body and I began to explore my sexuality in a way that I could verbalize; there’s the danger now that I get too unconscious, that I let myself get into a scenario where my mind could leave my body and I could let something happen to me, something that would remain in my flesh’s memory even as my mind tries its hardest to not feel it; there’s rage at other parents who do this, other predators who do this, the absolute wrath to grow stronger that I might destroy these people… I picture myself hulking out essentially and wiping my father off this planet but not stopping there, somehow finding all these pedophiles and destroying them too; there is too, sadly, some measure of compassion for my father. Be it his illness or repressed homosexuality, there is something that is driving him to express sexuality in such an unhealthy manner. I do not wish to know what it is, but I feel bad for him. In essence, that is wrapped into my desire to kill him, that he may do no further harm, given that he is weaker than his base impulses.

I sign off with this as a declaration of where I would like to go from here. The idea of someone hurting children in front of me still drives me to anger, which remains proper. If I see something in front of me, I want to be so in my feelings that I will overcome social mores to speak out, to tell the parent I think they’re wrong to raise their child that way, to report what is so evidently wrong. But what I am tired of is reacting to even movie and television portrayals of this. Maybe it isn’t a bad thing that it led me back to therapy, but I recall several moments in Netflix’s Feel Good that I had to legitimately walk away from my television, barely holding in vomit and a desire to have my body torn apart that I may no longer feel that disgust. There is the fact that I can’t watch Michaela Coel’s HBO show, I May Destroy You, because from the very beginning it is clear this show will be about sexual assault. This sensitivity to these topics, I don’t know that it serves me, I don’t even necessarily need it gone. I just think of how I used to cry at the examples of good parenting… Will something similar happen as I process the pain of sexual assault?