Doomed from the Womb

A story of covert incest. The unhealthy emotional bond between a parent and child.

“Your father was arrested for solicitation in a men’s room. In a subway station. It happened when I was pregnant with you,” my mother spat out. “We’d been married for 5 months. The court officer wouldn’t let me into the courtroom; Sid’s family tried to hide the whole thing from me. The lawyer who represented him was a cousin. Your father finally told me he had a stomachache and needed a bathroom. He said it was an emergency, and claimed it was just a case of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”

Yeah. The “wrong place, wrong time” explanation was a lie. The truth was, he got caught, but it took him more than 15 years to admit it.

I’ve been privy to my mother’s sudden outbursts as a reluctant and often terrified audience member. She’d seduce me with her stories, inviting me in as her confidante and forgetting that it might be a tad inappropriate to share some of her cherished memories with me.

I am the daughter of the man who was nabbed by the cops in a subway restroom in 1960 for wanting a stranger to give him a blow job.

It was complicated to be gay in the 1950s and 60s. But still, what were they thinking? My mom claims she didn’t know, and then years later, she said she always knew. I think it’s true that she knew it underneath her need to look away. She didn’t want to suffer the embarrassment of admitting she’d made a bad choice, and she didn’t want to raise me alone.

I’ll give her this, at least she waited until I was an adult to tell me some of these stories. At least she waited.

Did my father-to-be have pre-daddy jitters? To be sure. It’s reasonable. Any pre-daddy who’s never had a kid is probably a little nervous about it. But there was an added twist in my pre-dad’s case. My pre-dad was a young gay man during a time when gay was definitely not okay. Was his behavior that day a little over the top? Absolutely. While my mother-to-be was pregnant with me, my father-to-be was looking for dates with men in subway toilets.

Welcome to the world, little Nancy Ellen, you’re as cute as a button and we love you!

My mother’s stories tugged at my curiosity, daring me to look, to witness the trainwreck their marriage turned out to be. Was it the writer in me who wanted to get the scoop? Or the child in me who wanted validation for all the ways my life got derailed? I needed their backstory to make sense of my life. The thing I didn’t see clearly was the role I played with each of them.

We existed in a triangle, and I bounced back and forth between them. My bond with my father was close, always. I felt safe with him and that sense of safety was something I was terrified to lose; he had so many ups and downs. When he was down, I gave myself the job of cheering him up. That behavior began when I was a very young child. In many ways, he was a better mother to me than my actual mother. He nurtured me, was interested in me, and I idolized him. I didn’t possess the discernment to see that the dance we did together was harmful. I only came to understand that decades later. All I saw was how special he was, and how different from the other dads. So different.

This is the very short version of a very long story. One day there may be a book or two. I’m working on it. The story isn’t all bad, it isn’t all good. It just is what it is. I have wonderful memories interspersed with the harder ones. The marriage and family my parents created was an ill-advised effort to deny the truth, to exist in fear; fear of being caught, fear of being loved, fear of not being good enough, and both my parents deserved so much more than they got from each other. They ripped themselves off and hurt me in the process. They lied to themselves and to each other. And of course, had they not done all that lying, I wouldn’t exist. I lived in fear of abandonment, and all the choices I made were fueled by that fear.

Eventually, I became a liar, too. The person I lied to the most was me.

As a child, I had no agency. I was helpless, as every child is. I learned what I was taught. I was an unwitting participant in the games they perpetrated, in the dysfunction they sowed. My parents were my survival. I loved them. I know they loved me. They were both trapped in the lies that their relationship was built on.

I grew up in a home that was beautiful. I had parents who were beautiful. They were talented, smart, and shiny. They never fought (at least, not in my presence), I rarely heard a raised voice. They called each other “hon” or “honey.” I thought that meant they really loved each other. I don’t remember them calling the other by their given name very often, but when they did, there was an edge to their tone, a kind of scold. There was no violence in our home; no one ever beat me. I was fake-spanked once, and that was it. If I misbehaved––which hardly happened because I was afraid to disappoint them––I wasn’t grounded, they didn’t withhold my allowance, there were very few repercussions, if any at all. But when my father was angry, he shut me out. Most of the time, it had nothing to do with me, but I always thought it did, so I twisted myself into becoming the person I thought he needed me to be.

The jury’s still out on sexual abuse, because there are so many different definitions; there was a lot of borderline behavior, more with my mother, than my dad. They weren’t alcoholics or drug users, though my father’s smoking addiction eventually killed him. They provided for me in every material way I desired. Well, except for horseback riding lessons; they drew the line there because they didn’t have the budget for it. And that was fine.

What I experienced was both subtle and blatant. I just couldn’t see it.

Their lies served a purpose for a time, the lies kept them going, until they couldn’t go another step. They gaslit themselves and they gaslit me. They thought they were fooling their world, though I imagine there were quite a few who suspected something was off. I do believe that at times they bought their own false front. I also think they loved each other more than a little, at least for that season of their lives.

We were the beautiful family everyone else wanted to be. Except underneath the sparkly exterior there was something ugly and cruel.

The reason for this essay is that I’ve made a discovery. I finally put my story together.

It’s an old story, not just about me, but countless other children who were victims of a form of abuse I’d never heard of before. In some dysfunctional families, children are trained to become their parent’s surrogate partners, when the adult relationship is lacking. The replacement spouse––the child––becomes the caretaker of the parent’s emotional needs, and though the relationship lacks a specific sexual component, it is sexually charged. It’s a deep entanglement.

I’ve been working with my therapist for almost five years; I’ve been in a 12-Step program for two. In my 60s, I’m separating from my parents. I’m becoming an adult, an individual. It’s easier with my father because he’s been gone for 14 years. I still have a lot to work through regarding our unhealthy bond. It’s been much harder with my mother, I’ve tried for years, but ultimately, I’ve chosen to walk away, at least for now.

The more therapy I do, the more 12-Step meetings I attend, the clearer my life becomes.

Self-help books have never been my preferred method of doing “the work” but that hasn’t stopped me from buying one or ten, from time to time, hoping for some extra insight, some magic spell that will cast out the years of suffering and confusion.

I’ve bought a ridiculous number of them over the years. I say it’s ridiculous because though I intended to read each one, I’ve never gotten more than 3 or 4 pages in, before setting the book back on the pile, never to be looked at again. The pile goes unread, until I gather them up, releasing myself from the guilt of yet another unnecessary purchase. Then I promise myself, no more buying these books. The promise doesn’t stick.

I’ve always been a reader, so books are the first place I go when I want to new information. My dad bought stacks of self-help books, too. He’d buy and buy and buy and not read them. Sound familiar? I learned from the best.

My therapist has described the relationship I had with my parents as codependent, as enmeshment. But I knew it was more than that, though I didn’t have the words to describe it, to feel it.

How do I know what it is now? I read a book about it.

I was talking with a dear friend recently, and she mentioned her familiarity with a type of abuse described as emotional or covert incest. It rang a loud and frightening bell for me, and I jumped online and found the self-help book I would read all the way through. Twice, in a week.

The book is Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Children Partners by Kenneth Adams, PhD. It was written more than thirty years ago, and was re-released in 2011, with some additions to the text. It’s mostly geared to a heterosexual audience, but other than that, the Cinderella shoe fit perfectly. The added twist about my dad being gay wasn’t found in those pages, and that’s a story for another day. My relationship with him greatly influenced the choices I made about my own sexuality. The entanglement with my mother is the other story. Both relationships fall into this category, though they were expressed differently.

The behaviors of the children who’ve survived these “marriages,” completely fit my M.O. The book outlines the struggles that adult children deal with in our lives––from the inability to commit to an intimate relationship to the difficulties we encounter when trying to grow into responsible, healthy adults. The depressions, the denial, the constant pull to caretake others before or in lieu of ourselves. The adult child survivor of covert incest can be at risk for sexual addiction, substance abuse, eating disorders, gambling, compulsive lying, or a combination of all of them. Anything to feel as if we’re in control. Mix and match, find your coping mechanism, no matter how unhealthy. Anything to keep from feeling the rage, the grief, the abject fear and disappointment that accompanies us before we step up and make a commitment to healing the injuries we were left with.

Today, I’m hopeful. I’m even feeling oddly happy about this realization. I’m not confused anymore. There’s relief and a sense of empowerment in acknowledging the truth of what I’ve lived, because now I know better how to use healing tools that will bring me peace.

The truth does indeed set one free and opens doors to new possibilities. I’ve got more work to do, and I’m ready for it.

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