Secrets, Part Two

Note: this is a continuation of this post.


After the delayed consummation of our marriage, K did get a little better about sex. I can't honestly remember any peculiar details, and I guess that alone speaks volumes. I do remember the sex we had was pretty much the same throughout our entire marriage, in the missionary position, with me on top. She would rub her hands over my back and sides, never on my ass or anyway else. Every now and then I would talk to her about trying other positions but she always said she was comfortable with the missionary position. Most of the times when we had sex, she made me feel like "hurry up and be done with it", and that attitude got stronger in later years. She never want to make love unless the lights were out (took me about a year to change her mind on that) , I never saw her masturbate, and I only masturbated in her presence a couple times as she found the act distasteful. Once, after asking her for while, she did try going down on me, very half heartedly for a couple of minutes, but I could tell she really didn't like it, so I never asked her again. I tried performing oral on her several times, but she didn't want me down there either, and would always pull me up, and then we'd fuck the same old way. She always made sure I came first, because she said that she was only good for one time. About a quarter of the time I could bring her to orgasm while still in her, the rest of the time I would manually stimulate her after I pulled out. I always made sure she had an orgasm because giving pleasure to her was my biggest turn on, and I guess I hoped it would maybe awaken some hidden desire in her.

As soon as we had trouble consummating our marriage, I knew we were going to have some problems to work out. But she wouldn't talk to me about it no matter how hard I tried, and I remember as the first few months went by with me getting more and more frustrated at the whole situation. Finally one day about six months into our marriage, K told me about how she had been sexually molested by her grandfather when K was 8 years old.

She never gave me any details about her abuse, and to this day her mom does not know (I wonder if she was molested too).

My mother-in-law raised K in a duplex shared with her parents, and she spent a lot of time with her grandparents growing up. The main house where the grandparents lived still has locks on the outside of the bedroom doors, and when I asked K about them years ago, she said her grandmother was subject to fits of insanity, and when that would occur, her grandfather would lock her in the bedroom until she calmed down. I thought that was really odd. Another thing I had always wondered about was when K lived at home she had nightmares usually once or twice a week , but after we were married and she moved out, they stopped. When I asked K what she thought made them stop, she honestly didn't know, but was glad they had.

We saw two different therapists in the next few months, one was a joke, always trying to tie in K's deadbeat father (he took off when K was 4) as part of the problem, and the other must have hit closer to home I guess, because K only went a few times and quit. When I asked her why she stopped going, She said the therapist wasn't helping and after that she never went back for any help ever again, not even with my prodding.

So we just settled into our marriage, had sex about once a week or so, more when we were trying to conceive. After our 2nd child was born, it tapered off to every other week, then maybe once a month, or not. By the time the 90's arrived, we were maybe having sex 2-3 times a year.

I was talking about all this with my hospice grief counselor today, and it turns out that she has been a therapist for sexual abuse victims earlier in her career, and she told me how badly the abuse can affect a victim. In K's case, her grandfather took what should have been a loving nurturing time with his grandduaghter, and instead turned her into an object of pleasure for himself, and thus created a lifetime of emotional and psychological damage. She told me that children who are the victims of sexual abuse can develop low self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness and an abnormal or distorted view of sex, and had we found a good therapist that could have helped K with these feelings, we could have had a much better relationship, sexually and every other way too.

Years ago, what I had a hard time accepting was her continued love of their grandfather. But my grief counselor told me K may have felt trapped between affection or loyalty for her grandfather, and the knowledge that the sexual activities were wrong.

It galled me to have to "play along" like everything was normal so my mother-in-law would never know. But we never allowed our kids to be alone with their great grandfather ever.

To be continued...