Thank you for your story. Now that it's been about 30 years since the incidents you've described, I hope that you go online and seek out both Edna and Coleen and try to reconcile. You three have an opportunity to lift burdens from each other's hearts.

My story: I've found that some people change (often when life's events humble them), some don't (they remain unapologetic and think that everything was justifiable and correct). I grew up with incest. My sister and I, her older brother, were the victims of my parents' lack of life skills. When my sister and I were young adults, we barely got along with our parents.

One day, when we were in our 20s, my sister and I decided to tell each other secrets about growing up. We had no idea what had happened to the other. We sat in amazement and compassion, one listening to the other. It was as if each of us held about half the pieces to an old puzzle and together, she and I put all the pieces together. It turned out she and I had witnessed things about each other that the other had forgotten or hadn't previously made sense of. Yes, the conversation was often about sex, how it all affected our now-adult sexuality and our adult, often failed attempts at intimate relationships.

Above, I said that my sister and I didn't get along well with our parents when we were young adults. One negative side effect of that was that I didn't pay much attention to how much my parents were growing and changing as people. In the meantime, my sister and I got a lot of help from people who could understand what we'd been through and could model much healthier relationships for us.

About 15 years later, with years of sobriety under his belt, my father called me one day and told me how deeply he regretted what had happened I was still somewhat angry and ambivalent, but I listened. In the last year and a half of his life, we reconciled, and I was able to forgive him. He'd grown and changed as a man, made his amends, and was no longer behaving like the man who had raised me.

After my father passed, one day my sister said she wanted to stop hugging me: I looked too much like our Dad - and reminded her too much of him, even though I never did to her any of the things our Dad had done to us. I was shocked and saddened, but I accepted it.

After my father passed, my mother and I got along even worse, at first: shouting matches over the phone followed by slamming the phone down to hang up in mid-conversation. A few years later, I simply stopped all communication with her, occasionally listening to my sister's accounts of her relationship with our mother. About 10 years after my father passed, I was listening to a woman my age trying to reconcile her relationship with her father. Something inside of me began to dissolve: my resentment toward my mother. I realized that I was holding on to the idea of who my mother had been and not allowing room for the woman she had become. So I phoned my mother and told her roughly the same as the previous sentence, and that I was willing to start talking to her again.

Mom and I had changed so much that we were able to get along with each other in new, healthier ways, and we did, for the last 15 years of her life. One day, about 10 years after my reconciling phone call, she phoned me, and out of the blue, she announced that she was getting old and didn't want to die with any family secrets. So if I was willing to ask, she would tell me the whole truth about anything I asked, as best as she could remember it. So I wrote out about 25 questions (20 of them were about sex and my sexuality), and when I went to visit her, for 6 hours, she, now an old woman (who still had her marbles, no dementia), patiently answered all of my questions thoroughly. And she had related questions for me, often about what she had caught me doing as a child, sometimes sexual in nature, sometimes not, and I answered all of them without hiding anything. Often the conversation was compassionate, intimate, other times amusing, funny, ironic. From then on, for the last few years of her life, we got along beautifully.

That same year, my sister was hospitalized for an injury, so I drove Mom and myself seven hours to the hospital for a multi-day visit. At the end of the visit, my sister exclaimed that I must have been some kind of saint to have survived 7 hours in a car with our mother and 4 more days of attending to her (it wasn't bad at all), and then my sister got out of her hospital bed while plenty of tubes and monitor wires were still in/on her and gave me a hug of gratitude, first time in nearly 20 years. I wept.

The reward of my letting go of all my anger and resentment toward my parents? The next year, I finally found the woman of my dreams, and we've been able to have a healthy, loving relationship ever since. She knows my sexual history and accepts me, enjoys me as I am.

I hope that some of my reconciliation and happy ending can happen for you.

(Note: I searched for and found your story because for me, being powdered has always been a fetish, a longing, a loving thing, and watching women powder their face lovingly is a delightful fascination for me. Yet I felt compassion for you when I read your story because for you powdering was a painful experience at the hands of Edna. I wish you peace.)

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anonymous 5 years ago

Point of clarification for the story, above: My sister and I have never been sexual with each other. The incest, overt by our father, covert by our mother, occurred when we were children, and my sister and I had no idea it was happening to the other sibling at the time.

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anonymous 5 years ago

Just for the record, I do not agree with ^^. We're talking foster care, not biological parents. Sounds to me like it was an old memory, and even if it might be good to get it out to confess it once, I wouldn't try to make "amends" because it could really open up old wounds. Also, sometimes people act nice, as if they've changed, and it's all honkey-dorey, but it's not, and they're still the same old perverted assholes on the inside.

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anonymous 5 years ago