When I wasn’t at school I was starting to engage in some at risk behaviour and rebelling, my mother was totally absent now and I would spend weekends at friends, in city with my school friends and experimenting with drugs and alcohol to numb the pain and escape.
I remember my first experience with a boy other than a brief kiss with an old school friend the year before, and yes I was a very late starter when it came to boys and I never had boyfriends. I was out in the city with my school friends and they had all left me because I couldn’t get into one of the nightclubs even though everyone else did I was refused and ended up meeting with up some random people that I didn’t know and we went to the botanic gardens. I lost my virginity that night and I don’t know how it happened I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no, I never spoke at all the whole time and I felt like I had some sort of out of body experience and instantly performed sex acts that no 16 year old virgin could ever know how to perform but I just went through the motions. Unfortunately for me this boy that I had met up with was some popular boy from a rival boys school and my reputation was ruined and when I returned to school on Monday my experience had been once again exposed and I was shamed all over again. It was very confusing for me because even though I should have known or connected the dots I didn’t, I had no reference or recollection of the sexual abuse as a child from my father I was completely in denial and I didn’t get any flashbacks or memory until I was 21 years old but I knew intuitively that I was not normal and that I carried a deep sense of shame and guilt following this incident and couldn’t make sense of any of it.
For years, I just went through life having one night stands because I craved love, I used to find it rather bizarre that people assumed I was enjoying it because of the sex when I never had an orgasm at any stage in my life from a man till I was probably in my late forties and it only happened very rarely, the thought that I had engaged in sex for my own pleasure was absurd to me. I did it because I was craving and desperate for love, affection and belonging. I was attracted to the males that would be drunk and tell me that they loved me and adored me when they were drunk, how beautiful I was, it was a drug and deeply intoxicating. It was all I had known, it was part of my conditioning and drunk men wanting me and being sexually attracted to me that was my love language I knew and meant that they would love me forever.
For several years I continued to see my father fortnightly and he would ring me on the phone drunk and cry at times because my sister and my mother never spoke to him once he left. He was lonely but would never remember these conversations when he was sober so I did my dutiful daughter duty and go there and clean his house regularly and his ironing and maintain the only family connection he had.
