My stepfather confessed to what he had done one evening in the early fall. All it took was insistence, convincing him that he’d been caught, that no denial would work at this point. He stuck and resisted, then confessed. My mother was at bingo. I was on the verge of moving out, of moving in — far too quickly — with my moody first girlfriend. My stepfather’s tears froze my heart. How dare he cry, how dare he grovel and apologize, how dare he make himself small after looming so large over my interior all these years. How dare he make himself pitiful so that I might forgive him. He begged me not to tell my mother.

The thought of not telling her, of not telling anyone, was repulsive enough to be physical. My body roiled with it. It was as if he was asking me to be complicit in his violation of me, to join him in my own abuse. I’d had no reason to think my mother wouldn’t support me, and here he was, trying to deprive me of that support and love and care, the things I’d need to finally deal with this, to maybe heal from it. I couldn’t look at him any longer in his desperate, pleading state. I went into my bedroom and I slammed my door against him, and when he tried to talk to me through the painted wood I threw things at it — a jewelry box, books, boots, anything I could grab. I screamed at him until my throat was too raw to make a noise: “Get the fuck away from me! Do not fucking talk to me! I fucking hate you! Stop, stop, stop, stop!” Eventually he stopped, shut up, and slunk away to some other part of the house. Of course I would tell my mother. If my husband had been abusing my daughters I would want to know. Not for a second had it occurred to me to keep such thing a secret.

My mother appeared to be stunned by the news. Then heartbroken. She probably stayed both stunned and heartbroken even as she swiftly moved into damage-control mode — minimizing what had happened, highlighting my stepfather’s regret, incessantly speaking on his behalf, pleading with me to dump my “toxic anger” and forgive, on the double.

“You understand, this is sexual abuse,” I insisted to my mother, watching her blanch at the violence of the words. Was it sexual abuse?

“He just liked to watch you reading books in your bed,” she claimed. “He was just in awe of you.” Nothing gross or creepy about that. Totally wholesome peeping-stalking.

To be clear, the government agencies that police this sort of thing absolutely see this situation as sexual abuse. The police, child social services — these bodies list “peeping” quite high in their catalog of such things. My mother had to have known this, even as she attempted to invalidate what her husband had done. She’d pleaded with me not to report him, as he could get his nurse’s license revoked. She had to have known. But the reigning analysis in my home was, he never touched me. Never put a hand on me. That’s sexual abuse. “She doesn’t know what sexual abuse is,” our next-door neighbor bitterly informed my mother when she shared our family drama. Apparently, she did. Her own stepfather’s hands had been all over her body. And it’s true. He never touched me.

My family crumbled into the gap between what I knew happened — sexual abuse, a strange, covert kind that messed with my mind for years, twisting my interior — and what they insisted happened, the poor judgment of a sad alcoholic who had since gotten sober and apologized, and why was I so punishing, so full of hate that I couldn’t forgive this kindly, trembling man who now wanted to die — literally die because I would not forgive him and go back to calling him "Dad." This information was delivered to me via my crying mother who also now wanted to die, because the family was shattered and the fault lay not in her husband’s actions, but in the refusal of her daughter to forgive, her insistence on naming this thing sexual abuse when no hand was ever put upon her.

Sometimes I still look up the varying definitions of child sexual abuse, just to reassure myself I am not crazy, that this thing that has defined and impacted so much of my life and my person is real, that I am not delusional, longing for victimhood, all those things people say about women who cry (and cry and cry and cry) sexual abuse. I looked it up before writing this essay, just to make sure the world still thought peeping counted as abuse. It does. And in the time that has passed since my abuse in the ’80s, it has gotten so much worse. There are digital cameras and cell phones. You can snap a secret naked picture of your stepdaughter and not have to risk imprisonment when you bring the film in for development at your local Walgreens. I’m glad there was no such technology during the era of my abuse.

After I did tell my mother, when we were in the deep, deep dregs of it, the era of “I want to die” and “This is killing him” and “My god, he is sorry, why do you have to be so cruel,” my mother would claim that she’d rather not have known. She’d rather have gone on living with her husband, their relationship unmarred by such a revelation. It remains hard for me to fathom.

I never regretted telling my mother, even as every dream of care and support I’d held swiftly disintegrated. Even as it became clear that leaving her husband was not an option, not even a trial separation, not even booting him out for a week of couch-surfing. Even as I refused to speak to him, and so all conversations with my mother became her speaking on his behalf, letting me know how sorry he was, how miserable. Their unhappiness laid upon me heavily. I was never happy to hear that my stepfather wanted to die; I wasn’t vengeful except at the very beginning, when I felt that I had lost my mind a little. If this man, who had loved me so much, who had acted, on the surface, like such an excellent father, if he could do such a thing to me, then what else had people done? Were all people really two people — the person who was good to you, and the person who steadfastly betrayed you?

My girlfriend at the time, and the small ring of friends we surrounded ourselves with, were also young and damaged, struggling with the aftereffects of toxic families and a larger, even more toxic world. It was the early ’90s, and my girlfriend was struggling with memories of her grandfather sexually abusing her; we inhaled The Courage to Heal workbook, and she convinced me that my birth father had probably sexually abused me as well, because my fantasy life was so violent and perverse. I shrugged; sure, he probably had! I mean, any terrible thing could happen, could it not? Brad had just found out he was HIV-positive while in the midst of separating from his strict Mormon family. Annie and Jessa’s best friend had been gunned down in a school shooting, and Jessa had been sexually assaulted at a party the other night so we all had to find and beat up the boy who’d grabbed her. We were a seething tribe of anger and hurt, a gang of Lost Girls. We would sit together at someone’s house and drink wine and share painful stories. I told them how, when I last visited my mom, I snuck into my stepfather’s dresser and ruined all his porn with QUEER NATION stickers. Inspired, Brad asked for his phone number and crank-called my stepfather, threatening to rape him and give him AIDS. We were barely out of our teens and we’d all been destroyed and wanted to take the whole, abusive world down with us.

My mother took me to task for ruining my father’s pornography after finding some issues of the lesbian sex rag On Our Backs in my old bedroom. “If it’s OK for you then it’s OK for him,” she said tartly. Was my mother really talking to me about my sexual abuser’s porn collection? No — he wasn’t my sexual abuser, he was my stepfather — my father, actually, and if I could just get over my insanity and call him Dad again, everything would be great.

It seemed rational to not want to have to ever again look at the person who turned a tender swath of your life into a psychosexual nightmare, let alone call him Dad, but my mother could not stop trying to get me to talk to him. And so I stopped talking to my mother as well.