Is it Safe?

For as long as I can remember, I never really felt safe with my dad.  Nothing I can point my finger at and say "Oh yeah...that's why!"  Except?  I always had to sit on his lap and he always wanted a kiss on the lips and the time he put his hand down my shirt.  And if I did something wrong when I was with him?  What kind of unappreciative daughter was I?  I just know that I really never wanted to be alone with him.  I still don't.  I think my mom knew how I felt.  She even had a friend who asked her if she thought there was sexual abuse going on.

"Oh no.  I would know if something like that was happening."  But?  Would she?  Was there?  I honestly don't know and it really doesn't even matter anymore.  My dad sits in a wheelchair every day either watching tv, being fed, or having his shitty diapers changed.  I don't even know if he knows who I am anymore.  But?  When I do see him?  I still feel like he's checking me out, in a sick, perverted, sexual  kind of way.

On the other hand?  If my mom knew, suspected, intuited, that I didn't feel safe?  Why didn't she do something?

I'm trying to work through some shit - obviously - and trying to understand why my mom didn't do more to protect me.  Not just physically from my dad, but emotionally as well.  To protect myself from him and his moods?  I had to be the perfect child.  I had to be dad's favorite - his princess.  Because if I did something wrong?  Like all kids will do?  I suffered.  I suffered from the crushing disappointment that I was to my father.  I was so disappointing?  My dad wouldn't be able to talk to me for a week or so because his feelings were so hurt and I would bust my ass trying to make it all better.

Now I'm realizing?  That I couldn't have done anything to make it better because I had, in reality, done nothing wrong.  I had just been being a kid who screws up every once in a while.  But?  I knew that if I could be the good girl, the perfect girl, my dad would just love me for me.  I was always the good girl.  Even when I was being the bad girl?  I was still the good girl who would sit on dad's lap and kiss him on the lips when I got home from school.

Well?  Guess what?  I'm tired of being that good girl.  But letting go of the good girl label and all that goes with it?  Is really fucking hard.  It hurts.  It makes me cry and I fucking hate to cry because only babies cry - good girls, big girls, don't cry.  Fickey (my therapist) said that I should cry every day as I work through this.  He says I have to go through this, I can't go around it or over it or under it.  Because if I let a little of the pain out every day?  Pretty soon it'll become more manageable.  It'll become less and less intense.  It will hurt a little less every day.  And one day?  I'll be able to look at my dad and not feel like throwing up.  I will be able to look at my mom and know that she was working so hard with her own shit that she couldn't help me with mine.  I may even want to have a relationship with her again.  Not as mother and daughter, but as grown woman to grown woman.

And also?  Someday?  I may feel like I'm fit to be in the company of humans again.