I was born twenty-nine years ago, the offspring of an incestuous relationship between my father and my older sister, Caroline. As of this writing, if my sister is still living, she is forty-three; my mother has passed, and my father is seventy-one. He suffers from severe emphysema, has suffered a stoke, and is unable to care for himself in any meaningful way.

That is why I still live at home and why I have lived in this house since a very few months days the day I was born.

My mother and my thirteen year old sister left the house almost immediately after my sister's first appointment with a gynecologist. During it, she disclosed the only person who had ever been 'inside' her 'like that' was my father. Understandably, it was not long before my mother and father were divorced.

If my father is to be believed (and I have no reason to doubt him), I was, quite literally, left on his front doorstep, in an open picnic basket replete with handles, wrapped in swaddling clothing, just like Jesus. Dad found me when he answered the doorbell.

I haven't ever seen, or for that matter, met my mother. My father tells me she never came to see me. I harbor no resentment over that. After all, I was not her daughter. I was my sister's daughter.

I have a vague, very vague, recollection of something with a young woman when I was three or four and at a park, but I remember almost nothing of the encounter. I don't remember anything, really, except she was wearing a hat of some sort and that something happened involving a pencil that amused me. I have another, slightly more clear, recollection of another young woman who held and kissed me when I was, approximately five or six years old. One of the things that I remember most is that when she hugged me, just before she left, she squeezed me more tightly than I had ever been squeezed.

I suspect these encounters were with my mother/sister but I don't know.

My father was not a professional man. He graduated high school, but after that, he was a carpenter's apprentice who worked himself up, through the ranks, in a very large international property development corporation to become a highly respected construction superintendent. And, before he retired, he managed very large projects and many smaller ones. He was well-paid, although not in the manner of a lawyer, engineer, or physician. I suspect, in retrospect, he might have made better for himself if he was able to travel. Some of his contemporaries were managing projects all over the world, in faraway places, but my father never seemed to accept these assignments and I know, for certain, he refused because of me. Nonetheless, we lived well. We did not live extravagantly, but we lived well.

While I was growing up, I had an African-American, black, babysitter or, as we call them now, a nanny. Her name was Olivia and I loved her dearly. She took care of me every day while my father was at work and she cooked most of the evening meals for us, so dinner was ready when my dad walked through the door, no matter what time it was. I was spoiled on her cooking and I became a little pudgy in grade school because of Olivia.

My father usually left our house before 6:00am and didn't return until 6:00pm or, perhaps, somewhat later.

In the evening, we would have dinner, clean up the table and dishes and then we would clean ourselves up for the following day. When I was very young, my personal cleanup consisted of baths. I certainly was naked in the bathtub and I am sure my father touched every part of my baby body. Even so, he would dry me with towels, fluff my hair and dry it, too. I would attempt to brush my teeth while my father would shower afterward.

Later, when I was about four or five, I suppose in the interest of efficiency, we combined our time together in the bathtub/shower, so I was very young the first time I was with my father and we were both naked.

To this day, to me, it just wasn't a particularly big deal.

Let's say I was five years old at the time: Yes, I was in first grade. Yes, I had friends at school. Yes, I had teachers. Yes, there were responsible adults around. Nonetheless, it never crossed my mind that something might be wrong with what my dad and I were doing. It wasn't an issue for me and I certainly never had the ability to do a 'right or wrong' analysis on it.

However, for those of you who remember those times, in the 80's, the subject was not incest, or pedophilia, or perversion; the conversation was about the new 'gay' disease: AIDS.

Teaching kids to be afraid of 'sexual everything' was not the norm until the mid or late 90's. At least, to me it wasn't and my father and I were entwined in a sexual relationship long before that, anyway.

One night, when I was about eleven, my dad and I were showering together. Without prompting from him, I started to wash his back and his butt. He had been doing mine for years and I thought it perfectly normal. Over the years, he used a soft wash cloth to soap between my legs and along my butt but, he did that almost everywhere else on my body, too.

Later, we had this big loofah sponge that was a little rough on the skin, but I loved it. I thought I could feel scales (as in lizard scales) falling off my body as daddy used it on my skin. I felt I had no choice but to return the favor. In fact, I wanted to do it.

About the same time (but I don't remember when), I seem to remember, more and more frequently, I started to see my dad outside the bathroom without any clothing. He would walk, naked, through the living room or through the den on his way to the kitchen to pour a drink or grab a snack from the refrigerator and he didn't seem to think it was any big deal and so, neither did I.

To be honest: For the most part, I didn't notice and I didn't care.

By this time, I was more than a little familiar with my father's body and to a smaller extent, his penis. He had spread his bottom for me and I diligently scrubbed between his cheeks whenever he asked, but I never thought of anything that might have anything to do with sex. And, after all, I had access to look at, even peer, at his body almost daily, every day, for the last five or six years.

What did I care?

By the time I was twelve, I was starting to develop into a young, very young, woman with little or no maturity and absolutely no knowledge of sex. I had little, puffy breasts that barely showed, no matter what I was wearing, but I possessed some new sprouts of fleecy, soft, thin pubic hair between my legs, which alarmed me to no end. Even under my arms, something was happening and I wondered if someday, I would have to shave as my father did every morning.

Little did I know.

When I was just short of, maybe a month, of my thirteenth birthday, my father and I went on a vacation to Belize. Wow. We stayed in an elaborate and very expensive hotel right on the beach. Literally, we could get to the shores outside in less than three minutes. Three minutes flat, actually. I timed it.

The beach was broad, flat, and one of the whitest beaches I have ever seen and between my father and me, I have seen many beaches over the years. The skies were blue the entire time, the hotel was beautiful, and that was the first time I realized my father was a pedophile.

By this time in my life, I was becoming aware of a few things. I knew a little about sex, due to Health Class. I knew a little more about condoms, the pill, and IUD's. I knew about my period, which would come soon, and I knew about AIDs and STD's, all of which scared the living crap out of me as I entered puberty.

The next moring, I was more than a little surprised to realize that during the night, I bled between my legs and I knew I was a fertile woman, but that's all I knew.

Upon awakening, my father knew something was changed and he asked.

I told him I thought I was having my first period and he did not hesitate. He picked the phone, ordered up the appropriate size tampons for a thirteen year old girl and then, scooped me up in his powerful arms and carried me to the toilet.

Once I was there, my naked father stood before me expecting to do something, but I had no clue what and he wasn't saying. After room service arrived with the tampons, my dad removed one from the box, stripped the paper down and held it between my legs. I had to spread open a little more before he was able to insert the tube, but before that, he told me he had to check something and he inserted a finger into my bloody vagina. He stopped not very far inside me and, in retrospect I think he was checking to see if my hymen was intact.

This routine continued for the next three days until my flow ceased on the fourth day. Each morning, he would insert a finger inside me, and then I would insert the tampon. By the third day of my period, he would leave his finger in me, moving it around for a minute or two. Not a second or two; a minute or two.

During this time, we continued to shower together just as we always did but my father started to touch my vagina differently; from then on, when we showered, he always felt inside me as he washed my body. I was requested to touch his penis differently, too. He asked me to start using my bare hand, rather than the wash cloth, to wash his penis. I did and was neither surprised nor alarmed when his penis would start to stiffen and grow harder as I stroked a slippery, soapy hand up and down his shaft.

Washing his penis could require many minutes of stroking because the signal that it was clean, when his sperm would erupt, could sometimes take a very short period of time and sometimes it could take a longer period. Either way, I never stopped until my father ejaculated.

Later in my thirteenth year, I was beginning to fill out a little bit. I was growing taller. I was about 5'4" and my breasts were more than budding; they were actually developing nicely. Not real large; but large enough that I had no reservations about other girls seeing me naked in gym class. I had more than my fair share of thin, wispy pubic hair and I was having my period on a regular, clockwork schedule.

My father's and my showers took on an event sort of air. In other words, they seemed to have an excitement, a sense of anticipation, for both of us and it was not unusual for my dad to offer a hand to me before leading me into our bathroom where we would undress together.

One evening, as I was about to remove my clothing, my father told me that he would do it and he did. He removed my clothes and then stood back from me. He turned me toward the mirror so that I could see myself and then he told me I was a very beautiful little girl and asked if he could touch my breasts. He would be touching them very soon, in the shower, so I saw no reason for him not to touch me while we stood there.

From behind me, he used his hands to cover both of them and while he did so, he leaned forward and kissed my neck. That was strange. Well, maybe it wasn't strange, but it was different. My father kissed me frequently on the lips, usually when he came home from work (and after Olivia was gone) and we always kissed, sometimes three or four times, before he would leave for work. And, there were times when we would be together on the couch. I would be in a position, facing him, and he would kiss my lips while we hugged. Even so, this was the first time my father kissed my neck.

One day, at school, I was with a group of girl's and one of them brought up something that her boyfriend wanted her to do; he wanted her to put his penis in her mouth and suck on it. There were protestations from the girls, of course, but I was curious.

That night, in the shower, I asked my father if I could kiss his penis and he told me I could do anything I liked with it and so I did. I sat on the edge of the tub and took the head of his penis into my mouth. And, I did what the girl at school said her boyfriend wanted her to do. I sucked, but I didn't suck like I do now, not by any stretch of the imagination. I literally sucked like I had a round 'tootsie pop' in my mouth: nothing more, nothing less. I didn't move head or hand and my father didn't move his penis. I sucked and finally stopped after wondering what the big deal was, however this was the first time he called me 'Baby Girl'.

I suppose it was anticipation on my father's part that he took me to the gynecologist and had me examined by a doctor. We found out I was perfectly normal, my hymen intact, and the doctor wrote a prescription for birth control pills before we left. We filled it.

It was during this time that many of my friends at school were entering into sexual relationships of one kind or another and there was a lot of talk about what was happening in each of these relationships. The conversations either took place in gym, or at lunch, or at other times the girls found themselves with some privacy and the conversations could become fairly graphic.

It was about this time, before my fifteenth birthday, that I manufactured a mysterious boyfriend from another town and another high school to protect my father's identity as the man I was being sexual with. I substituted my dad's first name for the imaginary boyfriend's and none of my friends ever questioned his existence.