Baby Madonna

I need to write this, and I suspect it will make me cry.

I'm not sure I've ever really forgiven myself for being fourteen.

And if anyone asks what sort of sins being fourteen might be: I let myself get assaulted. I let someone inflict lasting psychological damage on me, warp my sexuality around fear, take away the possibility of it ever being easy.

And while I have worked a great deal on forgiveness, on self-acceptance, I have never fully forgiven myself for this.

Never forgiven myself for being the sort of fourteen-year-old who could only find a partner three years older and thus well past the explorations of boundaries that are tied up with the experience of being fourteen and learning adult sexuality.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing yet where my boundaries were, none save the last, that kept it to assault from rape.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing how to go back to ground that was secure.

Never forgiven myself for ignoring his protestations of love that I knew were anglings to set up sex in the hope that my lack of responsiveness would make it go away.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing how to say "No", even when I was pinned down with his huge weight and curled into a knot of refusal. Never forgiven the lack of words, lack of articulation, from someone who was only starting to learn how not to be a child. Never forgiven the inability to speak understandings some of which I only achieved years later.

Never forgiven myself, above all, for suspecting "Do you want to come over to my place and watch a movie?" a ruse, suspecting it near enough to be a belief I might even have spoken at the time had anyone asked me, and for packing up my videotape and going in the trust that I would be asked, that time, despite a long, long history of not being asked, of being presumed. For knowing, and hiding in a cloud of denial, of expectation of the civility of directness, of presumed protocol.

For not cutting him off, for not drawing the lines I didn't know, for ...

It never occurred to me before today that I never forgave myself for not being a more competent policing actor on that guy's penis. So of course I couldn't accept the damage that came of falling off the madonna pedestal.

Half a life ago and more, and I never thought of that.