A New Perspective

    It has been quite a bit since I have been blogging. I have missed it, and I must provide a few updates in order for this post to make sense. Life took some very interesting turns. As it turns out, when I wrote "We can't all have a full quiver" I was 5 weeks pregnant...with twins! This gave Dreamy Eyes and I the shock of our lives. So much for "Hooray NuvaRing". You may also have noticed that I have a new name. As many of you were assuming would happen, I am also now Mrs Dreamy Eyes. There, you should be just about caught up.

     A few days ago Dreamy Eyes showed me a video that he thought was just stupid, but from my perspective it was very, very real. Here is a link for you so you may follow along.
Terrifying, not funny video

       If you watch this from his perspective, you see a father of a newborn girl who is freaked that she will grow up to be hot. We are having identical girls, so he found this more amusing. As an X-ATIer this video provoked dozens of terrifying thoughts. If you watch this as an ATI girl you see all the things that the daughter is doing wrong. She is obviously wearing too short of a skirt, her shirt is much too small, and she is dressed to defraud and tempt men. She is doing nothing to bring attention to her countenance. It is not the fault of the brother or father at all that they find her attractive, and if either of them were to take action on their thoughts, it would be completely her fault for defrauding them. She is disobedient to her father when he says not to hug him. She has no business being a cheerleader and defrauding other men. Who knows why she even owns a bikini when everyone knows that she should be wearing a one piece, covered in a dark t-shirt and gym shorts. She tells her father that a body is nothing to be ashamed of, which means that she has not been reading her Bible. If she was, she would know that Adam and Eve had to cover their nakedness because they were ashamed. Her father and brother should have prayed about their feelings of lust towards her. According to Dreamy Eyes, the girl does nothing wrong. Her father should be helpful to her with her rash by getting some cream or considering her allergies. The idea that the father would be attracted to his daughter is preposterous to him, let alone the entire thing is imagined at her birth.
 
      He realized as soon as I watched it that I was about to start on a roller coaster of issues. Never once have I been worried that Dreamy Eyes would ever harm our girls or be less than the most caring, protective father that ever lived. However, some things are just drilled into my brain. Seeing as this vision of the hot daughter came to the father at her birth, I asked if Dreamy Eyes would be uncomfortable seeing the girls naked. He found this question ridiculous, but this is a very real concern for someone with my past. I asked if he would be comfortable bathing them and sometimes applying diaper cream, because he would actually need to touch them in sensitive areas. Some ATI fathers and brothers don't change daughters and sisters so that they avoid temptation, especially during the post partum recovery period when the wife can't fulfill her duties of pleasing her husband. Again, to be clear, I have no worries about him as a father, these are all just real issues from my cultish past.

     ATI girls must always be aware of how they are dressed, even at home. It baffled me that my worldly friends could lounge in sports bras or tank tops, when I wasn't even allowed to have bare feet. I have mentioned before that I hate being tickled. My father never bathed me, but I would always dread my walk from the bathroom to my room (I'm not sure why I never just brought my clothes with me) because he would always catch me, take away my towel and tickle me and pinch me while I was naked. I'm not sure how old I was when this stopped, but I remember it very well. I made it no secret that I hated it. Also, being wet, freezing, terrified, and tickled would sometimes make me pee, but then I would be spanked for knowing better. Being spanked naked definitely didn't spark any additional daddy issues of paranoia and flashbacks in my adult life...
Dreamy Eyes and I both agree that we want our girls to be comfortable in their bodies, and the very thought of a father doing that to a child outrages him.

      I have mentioned in my post about still being single that I don't like anyone else to be home when I need to be in the bathroom for more than 14 seconds. A few weeks ago I was sitting on the couch and I noticed that Dreamy Eyes walked up to the bathroom door a few times, then turned back. I asked why and then he said he had thought I was in there. I told him "That's silly. I would never try to use the bathroom when you are home!" He got stuck on the word "try" and asked what I meant. I didn't want to talk about it, but I told him how I used to be forbidden to go to the bathroom at night after I was put to bed, and the few times I did use the bathroom when my father was home I would be admonished for taking too long and told that if any man ever knew that a girl could smell like that, that I would never be loved or get married. This is why I've had GI bleeds and hemorrhoids since I was 12, and most times I "tried" were not successful. Add on pregnancy, and you end up on a schedule of about every 2 weeks with "threats" of disimpaction from your OB. About a year ago I started going to therapy. When things like this come up, it gets written on "The list of things to tell Andrea". So I mentioned this to her, even though I thought it was a non-issue since Dreamy Eyes is at work about 80 hours a week. Andrea likes to give me assignments to get over my issues. I do not like these as much. This was the week of Thanksgiving and I was planning on going to my parents' for dinner. My assignment was to attempt to use the bathroom there. Worst assignment yet. I would have rather tackled my fear of bats. I tried, but after about a minute I could hear my family (Mostly my very loud grandmother) asking each other "Where is Heather?" "Is she in the bathroom?" "She is never in there this long" "Maybe we should check on her" "Why is she still in there?" "Heather, what are you doing?". I couldn't handle it. Most of the time I spent trying to stop crying and even then I just pretended I took extra long because I was putting on more stretch mark cream. My father hardly spoke to me that day, but even now, I didn't want to hear about it.
Dreamy Eyes and I had a few more chats about future potty training, and while neither of us find bathroom humor funny, we don't want our girls to end up screwed up like I am and possibly very sick. Fathers can do so much more damage than they realize.

      Back to the terrible video, which gave me a non-zero number of nightmares, I had more concerns to address. What types of clothes would Dreamy Eyes forbid, not because you don't want your daughter to look trashy when she goes out, but so that he wouldn't be attracted to the girls. Again, he found this question ridiculous, but from my perspective it was completely valid. He said that if he found an outfit that his daughter wore to be attractive, that was his issue and not hers. This was not my life, nor the life of so many of my friends. As I have mentioned, I was "lucky" not to have a brother, because this spared me from incestuous rape. This was clearly the direction the video would have taken for any normal ATI family. It's only a matter of time before that brother takes his sister and she is blamed for it. I didn't have a brother, but I have a monster of a father. I think everyone has something that they like, bedroom-wise. Liking something does not mean you cannot control it. My father likes feet. I was never allowed to paint my toenails. No anklets. No toe rings. Absolutely no sandals, flip flops, nor open-toed shoes. No high heels. No boots other than snow boots. Socks were to be worn at all times, but could be removed for bed. I know that a bunch of people are into feet (I regretfully googled it), but I feel like one should be able to separate a fetish from projecting it onto your daughter. How little control must one have that they must make their child constantly wear socks in order not to be tempted or aroused? If I pushed the boundaries, he would become very angry at me instead of dealing with his lack of self control.

     I remember once we were staying at a hotel with family friends and one daughter was just dangling her feet into the water when were were all at the pool. When it was time to head back to the rooms, my father stayed back because apparently he enjoyed the foot dangling too much to get right out of the water. I knew what was happening and I was pissed. Of course this was my friend's fault and not his. Nothing is ever the fault of a man in ATI. It is always the girl who should have been more aware of how she was tempting him. If the brother in that video had raped his sister, it would have been her fault for owning a bikini.

     To "normal" people, the video is probably just funny or stupid. I am sure that a majority of my ATI friends will have a similar perspective as I do. It's a whole different view that we all need to overcome before we end up damaging our own kids. Dreamy Eyes wrote a lot of things on my Andrea list after showing me that video.