For the last 6 months, I have been filled with a profound and overwhelming guilt for what has happened to my daughter, through my fathers actions.
As a child, the books and stories I gravitated towards were very similar in nature, “King Arthur and his knights”, “The trials of Hercules”, “Ivanhoe”, “Beowulf”, “Conan”, “Thor”. Later , it would be Superman, Batman, Capt Marvel ( shazam) and again, Conan and Thor. All of those stories depicted heroes, protecting the weak, righting wrongs, seeking justice.
Those stories appealed to me for the same reason they appealed to so many other boys. By instinct, we are hard-wired to protect others, and for me, it was evident at a young age. My grandmother used to tell stories of how I would not let her cross the street without me being there to hold her hand, to protect her…I was 5-6 years old.
Later it would manifest itself throughout elementary, middle and high school, as I opposed bully after bully, regardless of size or number. I protected my friends, strangers, girls, guys,..it didn’t matter who they were, if they were being picked on or bullied and I was there, I would stand by their side. It didn’t always fare well, as I had my nose broken more than a few times. In my 20’s, I would do the same thing, only in bars, or where ever it was happening, even to the point of stopping a husband from abusing his wife in a shopping mall.
Looking back now, I distinctly remember how my own father protected his family. I remember how he urged me to stand up for my sister and myself. I actually watched him do it as well , on multiple occasions. So it wasn’t just the hard-wiring, it wasn’t just the type of books I read. Much of who I am, my sense of protection and justice was instilled in me, to a degree, by my father, the same man who would molest my daughter.
In the first few moments of being told my father had molested my daughter, I flashed back to two separate occasions, where we were visiting my parent’s house and as I kissed my daughter goodnight, she told me to make sure her door was locked. It struck me as odd even then. We never locked doors at our own house. What was she afraid of? What were they watching on TV that she would be scared? I thought she was being silly. She slept in a guest room right across the hall from my parent’s room. It never dawned on me that my father was sneaking into her room at night and molesting her, torturing her, abusing her.
For two months, I would rack my brain trying to remember if I had actually locked the door on those occasions. It haunted me day and night. Then on one especially rough day that my daughter was having, I broke down and told her of my guilt and that I couldn’t remember if I had locked the door. We both sat there crying as she told me she locked it every night and he still came in. I cant imagine how helpless she must have felt , how alone and afraid.
How long had he been manipulating her?
Why didn’t she feel like she could come to me?
How could I have protected and stood up for so many people..strangers, and not be able to protect my own daughter from my father?
How could I fail at the one thing a father was supposed to do… protect his daughter from monsters?
I often think about how my own father would have reacted, had this happened to my sister, when we were children. What would my own father have done to his father, had that been the case? How would he be reacting if instead, it were a stranger, who did this to one of his grandchildren?
I do not doubt that these thoughts have crossed my fathers mind. How could they not?
How tragic and ironic it is, that the very man that I was modeled after, a man that I loved, will be standing across from me in a courtroom in 2 weeks, diametrically opposed in everyway…the focus of my rage…a rage devoid of mercy, fueled entirely by the betrayal of one father and the guilt of another.