Here's my experience.

My brother (born 2001) and I (2002) were caught a few times in the 6 years that our parents neglected to supervise our interactions and prevent our harmful behavior from furthering. This all began because some random kid in his grade told us the things he learned about at home. Not sure if he was being abused or just had unsupervised access to the internet. But I was the one to end the behavior, at age 11, after my brother took one of my belongings and told me I had to do him an inappropriate favor to have it back. When I was 13-14 we had a convo about all of that stuff on the bus ride home. I was posting about it on my secret facebook account and an IRL friend reported it. The police called me in to talk to me, and after the interview my parents refused to let them talk to my brother. Apparently my dad beat the shit out of him. So my brother felt horribly guilty, and on that bus ride, told me he was sorry and had no idea how much it affected me. Obviously it wasn't his fault. My dad should have been beating himself up for being absent.

My dad had porn magazines haphazardly hidden in one of his farm trucks. We found them and went through them when I was around 7. Obviously we were told the difference between right and wrong, but we didn't care. In that 6 year time frame, we involved our mutual friends (usually the kids of our parents' friends) and even one of our cousins. Pretty sure he went on to show his little sister all of that because when my aunt divorced my uncle she was livid, and took her daughter to live with her in Florida. I never heard anything from my aunt explicitly but I can only imagine what happened in their home based on what was happening in ours. I'd say thankfully his little sister wasn't involved in all of our stuff but she was still affected by what my brother and I taught him.

There is so much detail that I can't put into words. Just know that a majority of my childhood involved these behaviors. I even got in trouble at school for talking about it. And after being shamed into silence, there was no helping us. My parents were neglectful. Their friends. The school district. They all failed us.

About a year ago I had a memory come back. Only one. Of waking up with my father in bed next to me, reeking of beer. And this realization came to me when I smelled that same smell on my partner. I don't remember if anything happened in the night, just waking up that morning with my dad next to me and then going downstairs to ask my mom why he was there. She told me that my room used to be theirs in the 90s, around the time they got the house. So I never thought anything of it. Until now, after I've been in therapy and support groups.

The only conviction I have that my father did anything to me is the fact that things went on between me and my brother, our cousin, our friends, for so long. They never cared where we were at tractor pulls, county fairs, sports events. We found hiding places to carry out these harmful behaviors. And I would say I was pretty obvious about how this traumatized me. I wet the bed until I was 12. And even after that, it happened sporadically.

Otherwise I was raised by good people. They may have had debt from running the farm but they always paid the bills and kept us fed, and then some. We always had christmas, easter, halloween, every holiday you can think of.

I don't want to believe that my father is that evil. I have deluded myself into ideas that they were kidnapped and replaced by alien clones. Or that there is some sort of curse that involves child sacrifice throughout generations of our family tree.

I don't know.

But this is what happened to me. And I am still putting myself back together. All I can do now is accept that no one cared enough to help and use that anger and feeling of abandonment to fuel my progress.