My biological father wanted to have sex with me from the first moment he laid eyes on me. This I learned two years after meeting him, as I dry heaved over his toilet in a moment of all-consuming anxiety and self-loathing. This was just after the second time we had oral sex.
“How long have you wanted this to happen?” I asked. I didn’t really want to know the answer.
“From the first moment I saw you,” he told me.
I met him for the first time when I was 19, the same age my mother was when she met him. They had had unprotected sex a handful of times, before she got pregnant and he made a quick exit. I sought him out because I was lonely and angry at her. She’d stayed in an abusive relationship with a new partner for almost a decade, and when it ended, my self-esteem was wrecked and my confidence shattered. I wanted to find a parent who would love me unconditionally, who would protect me. The irony of what happened does not escape me.
Bent over that toilet, I was filled with an unmatched horror. I can’t really begin to describe it. All along I’d thought I had landed in paradise; I thought I was finally safe. He lived in Jamaica, and from the ages of 19 to 21, I flew there for visits. He dazzled me. He treated me to exquisite meals, to travel on the island—anything I wanted. At the time, it made for a stark and welcome contrast to my mother’s abusive long-term partner, whom I’d long feared.
My father and I often talked on the phone between visits. We had so much in common; we connected immediately. It seemed that everything he loved, I loved, and vice versa. When I first met him in person I noticed that we even had the same posture, the same way of carrying ourselves in the world. I was intoxicated by our likeness, which I never shared with my mother, or with any siblings (I am an only child). All of a sudden I had company. It was that simple. I had a dream parent, and I was over the moon.
There were a lot of red flags over the course of those two years, moments I’m only now able to recognize as such. But being the daughter of a let’s-look-at-our-vaginas-together feminist who is also a sex historian with a specialization in pedophilia and sex offenders—topics that were often openly discussed around me as a kid—I found that the boundaries that existed in other families simply did not exist in mine. So when my dad started talking to me openly about his past sexual encounters, it felt fairly normal. When he told me he was cheating on his current girlfriend, I was not bothered by it. I was 19, and my mother had always spoken to me like an adult. I felt he was speaking to me the same way. I felt included in his club, and I was flattered.
On my second trip to Jamaica, I started sleeping in my dad’s bed. It was, in retrospect, yet another thing that might seem inappropriate to other kids. But I came from a kiss-on-the-lips relationship with both my mother and grandmother, and growing up, it was normal for us to cuddle and be affectionate together. I enjoyed it. I also had no idea what was normal in a father-daughter relationship. We held each other and I felt safe. When I started feeling sexually attracted to him—as well as shocked and horrified to realize it—I spoke of it to no one, least of all him. I hoped I would go home and the feeling would go away. But it didn’t. Instead, it grew.
During that final visit to Jamaica, I discovered our sexual attraction to be mutual. It was August 2009, and one day, my dad did something that deeply upset me. The heat outside was deadly, and we stayed cooped up in his bedroom, where there was air conditioning. We were watching TV to pass the time when he put on a porn channel. Sex workers were being interviewed and he told me which of them he would most like to fuck.
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