Author’s Note

A short time ago I started trying to find out what I could about my bio family. As a part of that research, I went to the child services agency that had been responsible for me as a child and asked to see my file. I’m told that it used to be really difficult to get access to your file but they changed the rules a few years back and now all I had to do was go there and identify myself and ask.

I don’t want to go into all the details about my bio parents, and what happened back then. That’s not the point of this story. In my file there were some references to my brother. I was 8 when I last saw him and he was little more than a baby. Way back when it all happened, I remember asking one of my earliest foster mothers about my brother. She told me that he died.

I don’t know why, but that foster mother lied. It was clear from my file that my brother didn’t die back then. I went back to the child services agency and asked to see my brother’s file. They wouldn’t let me see that, but they did confirm that he’d ended up with a foster family and that he’d stayed with them until he aged out of the system when he was 18. And they put me in touch with his foster family. The foster family put me in touch with my brother.

It was very odd meeting up with a grown man who was apparently my brother, but we were total strangers. I remembered him as a baby bump, and then an infant, and then a toddler. Then I ended up in care and was told that he’d died. I’d grieved for him as much as an 8 year old could at the same as dealing with all the other trauma. I never forgot him, but I stopped thinking about him. I was too busy trying to survive my own life. Up until now he had no idea I even existed. He had no memory of me, whatsoever. And nobody had ever told him anything about his bio-family. Nobody had ever told him about me.

We met up and told each other our life stories. When I asked about his love life, he gave an awkward laugh and looked down. I had to ask some very pointed questions to get the details out of him.

This is his story.

B.

My Childhood

I think I was a bit strange as a kid. I didn’t have many friends, but I did have some. I found it stressful to talk to new people so I would often stumble over my words and mumble and so on. When I was with my foster family or my friends I could talk okay.

I was always a bit overweight. I was never one of those really obese kids you see around but I was a bit fat. My foster parents tried to get me to play sports and things like that, but there aren’t many sports that are good for fat kids.

My foster parents were good people. They took me in and cared for me from when I was little. They said they would have adopted me if they were allowed but there was some issue. I never understood what the issue was. They told me that I’d been with other carers before I came to them, but I don’t remember. I gather I was only with those other people for a short time.

I was always worried that I would get moved away from them. Or that they would get sick of dealing with how weird I was and send me away. That worry never went away. I was scared of doing anything bad or sinful in case I was taken away, or sent away. I tried very hard to follow the rules and live a life free from sin, but it wasn’t always easy.

I was also scared that they would send me away when they figured out that I didn’t understand what church was all about. We went to church twice a week. And we prayed every day. They kept saying I should hear God speaking in my heart. All my heart said was thump-thump-thump. And when we prayed, we were supposed to be talking to God. But there was nobody in the room but us. I didn’t understand it. It scared me that they would get angry and send me away for not understanding, so I didn’t say anything.

Everyone in my family were always dressed like other people dressed when they were going to church. I didn’t wear a pair of jeans until I was 24. We were only ever allowed to be less than fully dressed in the bathroom and in the bedroom. One time, my foster brother wrestled me and somehow my trousers and underpants ended up around my ankles. My whole foster family saw my little thing dangling there. They laughed. I felt humiliated. My foster father didn’t laugh, he scowled and told me to go to my room. I pulled up my trousers and went and hid behind my bed. Through the walls, I could hear my foster father scolding the rest of the family. Then they all prayed. When they finished praying, I made sure I was properly dressed and went to set the table for dinner. Nobody ever mentioned the incident. It was as if nothing had happened.

I got bullied a lot. There was one boy who was kind of the ringleader. He was bigger and stronger than most of the boys. He would hit me a lot and if I tried to fight back he would laugh at me and slap my hands away. He also organised the other boys to hit me. The girls didn’t join in with the hitting, but they all laughed at me when it would happen, especially if I started crying. The bullying went on for about 6 or 7 years. My foster parents were furious and complained to the school. I don’t know if the school did anything or not. The bullying kept happening. In the end I stopped caring. He would hit me and I would let him until he went away or the bell rang and we had to go to class. Most of the time he would hit so hard that it hurt and I would cry and he would laugh because he’d made me cry, but I didn’t care. I had permanent bruises on my arms and chest and back. He didn’t hit me in the face where the bruises would be visible.

I read a lot of books and comics. I read about girls riding on the backs of dragons and hobbits going on adventures and children falling into different worlds where they were given magic gifts and fought against evil queens. And I read about superheroes arriving in the nick of time to rescue the prisoners or stop the evil villains from destroying the world. When I read the books and comics, I would imagine myself living in those places and being able to fly away on the back of a dragon or fighting off the bullies without being hurt. The school library was a good place to be. It had a few books and comics like that but not many. This was way before Harry Potter. There weren’t as many of those types of books around. Also the school library was good because the bullies couldn’t get at me in there.

My foster family didn’t believe in those sorts of books, so I had to mostly read them at school. At home I read books that were biographies or were about history and science and so on. I read more than anyone else in my family. Sometimes I read stories of myths which were how people from different countries used to explain things they didn’t understand, before they learned the actual reasons using science. And I read the Bible. It had a lot of stories in it that were exactly like the myths from other countries. I wanted to point that out to my foster family but I didn’t. My foster family thought the Bible stories were true and I didn’t want to get sent away. And some of the stories in the Bible were just like the made-up stories that I read in the school library about a man fighting against a giant or a man living inside a whale or a god making a man out of clay. I understood that my foster family thought that those particular made-up stories were true. I wanted to ask them what made these stories different from all the other made-up stories, but I didn’t. I was scared that they would send me away. I don’t think my foster family realised that I was reading about those kinds of things or they might have stopped me.

I learned from my foster family that it was important to get married and have children of my own. That seemed like a good thing to me. I wanted to do that. I expected that when I grew up I would meet a nice girl and get married and become a father. It sounded like all I had to do was wait until I was an adult and all of that would just happen.

My Teenage Years

My early teenage years weren’t kind to me. I got pimples all over my face. I got bigger but not super big. I didn’t get muscles. I was still overweight. I started having weird sexy dreams that ended up with me waking up as I was making a mess in my pants. I was so embarrassed. Afterwards I would lock myself in the bathroom in the middle of the night and try to wash the mess out of my pants without waking anybody up. My foster parents never tried to explain anything. I never got any kind of “birds and bees” talk from them. At school, there was one really strange video we all watched in science class. Apart from that, I had to figure it all out on my own. I didn’t do a very good job of figuring things out for ages. This was before the internet was around and I was too scared to look at those types of books in the library. I’m not even sure if there were books like that in the library.

The main bully left the school when I was 15. I don’t know if he got made to leave because he got seen beating me up (again), or if he just left to do a different course at a different school. For whatever reason, he left. After that the physical bullying stopped. The remaining couple of years of school were actually quite pleasant but it took me a while to realise that. The other kids still called me names sometimes, and they all still thought I was weird, but I could ignore all that.

Around the same time, I made a couple of new friends. One of the new friends told me about a chemical wipe you could get to clean your skin and it would help with the pimples. I asked my foster parents to get that for me and I started using it on my face every day. After a little while my pimples cleared up a lot. I still got occasional ones, but it wasn’t nearly so bad.

When I was 16, I got a girlfriend. I don’t know how it happened. Lisa was 15 and one level below me. During morning break Lisa was talking with my group of friends and then she was talking to me. We talked until the bell went and we had to go to class. During lunch break Lisa found me and she held my hand and led me around the corner to a quiet part of the school. We started making out. That was exciting for me. Having Lisa press her body hard against me while her soft lips pressed against mine was my new favourite thing in the world. I’d seen people making out like that, but I’d never understood why people would do it. Now I understood. Making out with Lisa was awesome.

After making out for a while, we walked around the school yard holding hands and talking. I wanted to go back and make out some more, but I didn’t say it because I didn’t want to be pushy or anything. Lisa was really fun to talk to and I was having a good time holding her hand and talking to her. At one point, were talking about an actress and I said I thought Lisa was prettier than that actress. A bunch of older students were right nearby and they started laughing at me for saying that. I felt bad and I didn’t know what to do so I steered us so we walked away from those students. I could hear them still laughing behind me. I tried to say something to Lisa, but my words came out all mumbled and mixed up. It was all too much for me. I dropped Lisa’s hand and ran away. During class I thought I shouldn’t have left Lisa like that, so I waited for her after school. Lisa saw me waiting and came over to me. Before I could say sorry or anything she told me she didn’t think we were going to work out together and she left. I stood there and watched her leave and I didn’t know what to say.

So my first girlfriend was Lisa. I was 16 and we lasted together for 5 hours.

After Lisa, I went back to hanging out with my friends. Gradually the group of friends had grown and there were a couple of girls in the group but we just hung out as a group during breaks and talked. Sometimes the group of friends would hang out after school in the local shopping mall but we didn’t do that very often. I got invited to birthday parties and things like that with people from that group. My foster family didn’t believe in birthday parties so I never had one for myself but they let me go to those other parties, so that was nice of them.

Some time around then, I discovered masturbation. I couldn’t do that at home, not even in my own bed, because I was afraid that I would get caught and masturbation was a sin and I was scared of being caught doing any sort of sin. But there was a park near my home with open fields at one end and a wooded area at the other. There was a lot of undergrowth among the trees so I could get in the middle of that and be completely hidden. Sometimes I would go for a walk when it was nearly dark and hide in among the undergrowth and masturbate. I felt really guilty, but it was like I had to do it. I discovered that if I did that from time to time, I didn’t have as many of those embarrassing messy dreams.

When I was 17, my friends told me that a girl called Bianca was interested in me and I should ask her out on a date. I was very nervous about it and in my head, I practised over and over what I wanted to say. Then I went up to Bianca and tried to ask her to go with me. I stuttered a little bit but not too badly. Bianca looked at me and didn’t say anything for a moment and I started getting really nervous but then she said sorry but no, and she walked away.

I went back to my friends and they said that it was bad luck. But then they laughed and they said that I should have seen the expression on my face when she said no. I wasn’t sure if they were making fun of me or not so I sat there and didn’t say anything.

After that I was too nervous to ask another girl to go out with me for a long time. I did ask one other girl to go out with me while I was in high school, but she said she had a boyfriend who went to another school, so I said sorry and walked away. It was very nerve wracking to go up to her ask and when she said she already had a boyfriend, I felt really bad as if that was something I should have already known.

When I was in my last year of high school, so when I was 18, one time I was sitting in the library, and I saw a girl sitting at a table trying to do her schoolwork, but she looked upset. Her name was Lina and she was an Exchange Student from Germany. I went over and asked her what was wrong. Then she told me that the host family she’d been placed with were being horrible to her and she started crying. I sat there and listened as she told me all about her problems. Eventually the bell went and we had to go to class. She’d stopped crying by then, but she thanked me for listening to her. She told me that I was lovely, and she hugged me and kissed my cheek.

That weekend I thought about Lina and decided I would talk to her the next school day and maybe after a few days of talking to her, then I would ask her out. But when I went to school the next Monday, Lina wasn’t there. One of her friends told me she’d got herself moved to a different host family which meant she was going to a different school. So I never saw Lina again. I think she was nice. And she hugged me and kissed my cheek. I would’ve liked to go out with Lina.

My University Years

I went to university and I studied hard. I still lived with my foster family even though I was now too old to be fostered. That was nice of them to keep looking after me like that.

The university had a lot of different clubs. I joined a club of people who liked comic books. It was mostly boys but there were a few girls. I hadn’t read a lot of comic books, only the ones that the school library had, but the university comic club had a collection and I started reading them. They even had some naughty comics that they hid from the staff. They called them their XXX-collection. The pictures in the naughty comics showed girls with very big breasts wearing very small bikinis. The heroes would rescue them from some bad situation, then the bikinis would be gone and the heroes with very large penises would have sex with the girls. That was the first time I saw any type of porn. It was very exciting.

One of the girls in the club was called Suellen. One day she came over to me and started asking about the comic I was reading (it wasn’t one of the naughty ones). I answered some of her questions but for some of them I said I don’t know because I haven’t finished reading it. Suellen was looking straight into my eyes and was talking and talking. I kept answering and we had a good conversation. Later, after she’d gone off to her lecture, I asked one of the boys if Suellen had been giving me signals. He said that she certainly had. So next lunchtime I walked around the university looking for her. I finally found her and we talked for a bit. Then we arranged to meet and have lunch the following day. We started having lunch together, but then other people from the club joined us and it ended up being a group of us from the comics club having lunch together every day. Every lunch, whenever I could, I would sit next to Suellen and talk to her or listen to her while she talked about all sorts of things.

A new movie about Superman was being released in the cinemas so a group of us agreed to go to the big cinemas in the city and see the movie. I asked Suellen if she wanted to meet up earlier with me and have dinner together first. She agreed but she said it shouldn’t be an expensive place because we were both students and didn’t have a lot of money. So we went into the city to a pancake place and had some nice pancakes together. Then we met with the group from the comic club and we all went to the movie together. It was fun to see a comic come to life like that. At the end of the night, Suellen and I hugged and she kissed my cheek so I kissed her cheek and she said she’d had a good night. Then we all went to our homes.

I went on a second date with Suellen. And then a third. I tried not to be pushy, but I was hoping that we could make out. I was remembering how much I’d liked making out with Lisa, and I was imagining having Suellen pressing her body against me and kissing me with her soft lips. At the end of our second date, I kissed her on the lips to say goodnight but it was only a quick kiss, and we didn’t press our bodies together. At the end of the third date, I took Suellen in my arms and said I’d had a great time and leaned forward with my face wanting to kiss her. She reached up and kissed me, and then we started making out. I used my hands to pull her against me and I could feel her whole body pressing into me. It was wonderful. I didn’t dare move my hands because I didn’t want to be pushy but I did enjoy the kissing. Then she stopped and said she should go home.

The next day, Suellen told me she really liked dating with me but she was saving herself for marriage and she thought she should stop going on dates with me because she didn’t want to get tempted to do anything more. She said she wanted to keep being friends with me so that was nice. But I was disappointed that she didn’t want to go out with me any longer.

I thought maybe I should tell her that I was hoping to one day be married and have children and that I thought Suellen might be that girl, and that I didn’t mind waiting, but she’d already walked away before I thought of saying that.

Suellen was my second girlfriend and that lasted for about two and a half weeks, depending on when you started counting from. I was 19. I did like Suellen very much and I was sad that we ended up not keeping on dating. We had got to know each other through the comics club and through having lunch together and then we had three dates. The most sexy thing we did with each other was making out while she pressed her body up against me. That part was really nice.

They were the only dates I had while I was at university. Suellen ended up dating another boy from the comic club. I heard they ended up getting married.

I do know there was sex happening around the university, just not where I was. I would hear about a party the previous night where two girls had taken off their clothes and danced in front of everyone, but I wasn’t at that party. I would hear about a party where people paired off and took it in turns to go to the bedrooms and have sex. But I wasn’t at that party. The parties I went to were mostly people from the comic club, and sometimes their girlfriends, sitting around on sofas and talking and listening to music and eating corn chips and dip. I had fun at those parties. Later I heard people talking about sex and drugs and stuff like that at university but that wasn’t my experience.

While I was at university, I found out people could be gay. I had always found it easier to talk to boys than to talk to girls, so I wondered if I was gay. I didn’t know what to do about that. There was one boy in the comic club who was gay so one time I sat down and talked to him. I asked him about being gay and I said I thought I might be. He looked at me and he raised his eyebrows. He asked if I had ever had sex with a boy and I said no. He asked if I ever dreamed about having sex with a boy and I said no. Then he asked if I had sex with a girl and I said no. And then he asked if I ever dreamed about having sex with a girl and I said yes. Then he asked what happens when I have those dreams about a girl, and I blushed and started stuttering as I tried to work out if I should talk about making messes in my pants. He grinned and he said, “You’re not gay.” So that answered that question.

My Twenties

I finished university and got a good paying job. I worked very hard and soon had enough money to rent a small apartment. I told my foster family I was very grateful for everything they had done for me, but it was time for me to move out. They all hugged me and we prayed together and then they helped me pack and move. I was invited back for Sunday dinner once a month and that has kept going until now with me going back almost every month. My foster mother is a much better cook than me, so I really appreciate those meals. And it has been wonderful to keep seeing my foster family and find out about their lives. About 4 months after I moved out, they had two new foster kids living with them. The new foster kids were nervous about me at first but then they were okay, and I played games with them and so on. That was fun.

A good thing about moving into my own apartment was that I could finally stop going to a church that I didn’t understand, and I could finally stop praying every day to a God I didn’t believe in, and I could wear jeans or shorts or tshirts or whatever whenever I wanted to, and I could masturbate in my own bed. So that was nice. But I had to cook my own meals and wash my own clothes so that was not so nice.

Every so often, I met up with some of my friends from the comic club. There were 3 boys and they each had a girlfriend and then there was me. One of the girlfriends was one of the girls from the comic club but the other two girls were from other places. We would get together and eat snacks and talk about all sorts of things. One time the boy and girl who met at the comic club told us how they sometimes role played they were comic book heroes during sex. They made it sound like fun. One of the other couples then said they had done a role play during sex too, but only a couple of times. The last couple looked at each other and said they never had done that. I didn’t say anything, but I thought that was interesting. I tried to imagine pretending to be someone else during sex.

When I was 25, I went to a comic convention in the city. A lot of people wear costumes to comic conventions, so I dressed up as Cyclops. There was a girl dressed as Catwoman with a skin tight suit and a mask and ears and she was hugging everyone. She saw me and said, “You’re new.” Then she hugged me. While she was hugging me, she reached down and put her hand on the front of my trousers and felt around where my penis was. Then she said, “Come with me.” She took me over to the lifts and we went up to where she had a room in the hotel. In the lift, she pressed her body hard against me and kept rubbing my penis through me clothes. She was asking me questions but I only realised later that she didn’t tell me anything about herself. It was difficult to answer her questions when she was rubbing my penis like that. My penis became very hard and I ended up stopping myself from talking because I knew if I tried everything would come out jumbled.

Once we were inside her room, she undid a zip and took off her Catwoman suit, but she left her mask and ears on. Apart from that, she was completely naked. She came over to me and undressed me until I was completely naked as well – apart from my mask. I was getting so nervous that I was shaking. Then she handed me a condom and went and laid on the bed. She said, “Come on, I haven’t got all day.” Well, I was very excited, but I was really nervous and I started fumbling as I tried to put the condom on. I hadn’t ever done that before.

She sat up on the bed and said, “Come over here,” so I went over to her, and she took the condom from me and started putting it onto my penis. Well, I was very excited and a naked girl was touching my penis and it was obvious she wanted to have sex with me, so suddenly I made a mess on her hands and a bit went on her chest. She looked disgusted and said, “That was pathetic,” and then she laughed at me. She picked up the pile of my clothes and shoved them into my chest and pushed me out of the door of her hotel room. I was out in the hallway completely naked and I had to get dressed in a hurry standing out there. Fortunately, nobody walked past me when that was happening, but it was still very humiliating. I went back down to the convention and I was feeling bad about what had happened. A short time later, Catwoman walked back in. She went over to a group of people and she must have said something, because they all turned and looked at me and started laughing. I left the convention and went home and decided I didn’t want to go to any more comic conventions.

I bought a packet of condoms and practised putting them on so that I wouldn’t have so much trouble in the future. I even read the little bit of paper inside the box about how to use them. I put a condom in my wallet so that if I met someone then I would have a condom and not rely on them having one.

Later that same year, there was a young woman at work who was about my age called Andrea. We had to work very closely together on a project. One time we were working late and everyone else had left the office. She came over to talk to me and lent so far forward on the desk that the front of her top fell open. I could see right down to her breasts. Two weeks before, a man had been fired from the company for sexual harassment of one of the women, so I was scared that if I even looked down her top, then the same thing might happen to me. So, I stood up from my chair and stepped sideways so that I couldn’t see down her top anymore. I kept talking about the project and tried to act like I hadn’t noticed that I could see down her top. She kept leaning there for a moment but then she stood up and went back to standing normally while we talked.

That night I thought about what she had done. I thought that maybe she had done it deliberately and that maybe she was trying to give me signals that she wanted to be my girlfriend. But when I got the job, I was told that office romances were strictly against the rules, so I was scared to get involved with her. The project took another three days to finish and for all of that time, she kept rubbing up against me and standing so I could see down her top. It was very embarrassing, and I didn’t know what to do, so I kept trying to be nice to her. At the end of the project, I gave her a little box of chocolates and a card. The card said I had really liked working with her and I really liked her, but I couldn’t date her right now because of the office rules. But then it said if either of us stopped working in that office and she was still interested then I would love to go on a date with her. And I put my phone number at the bottom of the card. She read the card and smiled at me and said that I was really sweet, but then she put the card away in her desk drawer and we both went back to work.

About 5 months later, I heard that Andrea was leaving so I went up to her and asked if she was interested in going on a date. She looked at me and said she was really sorry but she had a new boyfriend and she couldn’t do that. I said okay and went back to work. I was sad that Andrea had found another boyfriend, because I would have liked to get to know Andrea better.

Sometimes I went to a bar near my apartment. I thought maybe I might meet someone there who would be my girlfriend. The women who came to the bar seemed to either come with a boyfriend or they came in a small group of women. I figured that maybe those women didn’t have boyfriends but I had no way of telling. I saw one woman who was like a grown-up version of Lina, the Exchange Student from Germany. Lina was very pretty and this woman was pretty too in the same way. She was with two other women, so I thought it was possible she didn’t have a boyfriend. I went up to her and said, “Hello.” She looked at me and scowled and said, “I’m with my friends.” I could see that she was with her friends, so I was confused why she said that. Then she said, “Go away.” So I turned around and walked away. I decided that going up to a woman when she was with her friends was a bad idea.