The first memory I have of being abused was before I could talk well enough for people to understand me. I was maybe 2. My father was home and acting playful. He was letting me climb on him and crouched down on the living room floor with me. I was happy, he was like a different daddy because normally, I was scared of him. He was always yelling and hitting people.
On this day he seemed happy and nice. He picked me up and I reached out to touch his mustache. I touched it lightly and he pressed my hand harder onto his mustache, then he took my fingers into his mouth. He bit them really hard. I screamed, but he didn’t let go right away. When he did let go of my fingers and put me down, there were purple tooth prints on my fingers. He was still happy, but I never wanted to play with him again.
When I was 3, he started coming into my room when my sister wasn’t home. We shared a room, so it didn’t happen a lot, but when it did, it was terrible. I never thought it was meant to be pleasant for me, he liked to hurt me.
The first night, he reached under my blanket and just felt my private area. He was talking quietly about how it was too small and would bleed if he put his finger in. He sat there for a while just touching me, then he left.
The next night, while we watched tv, he called me over to him on the couch. He said he thought I had a fever, and he was going to take my temperature. I think he already had the thermometer. He made me lay across his lap and told me to put my face down into my pillow. He pulled down my pants and put the thermometer into my rectum with his finger along side of it. He told me to hold still and relax, or it would break, that it was glass, so it would hurt a lot. I cried even though he told me to stop. My mom came back and saw what he was doing . She told him he was doing it wrong. He said he was afraid the thermometer would slide in and get stuck if he didn’t do it that way. So I had to lay there in front of everyone while he timed it. They said it would be a few minutes but, when the show was over he was still at it. When the show was over the other kids were sent to bed. He told me to be real still and he’d take it out. There was a bit of movement of his finger then he took it out slowly and sent me to bed.
The next time my sister was sleeping over, somewhere my dad brought me into my parents bed. He said I’d been crying because I was scared but I hadn’t been.