Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

I do not melt into it—the memory of the original pain, and the night I snuck into my parents’ room to tell them, and their reaction, is still too vivid. It prickles over the skin like a sweat, or a flush. My mind fixes on the indelible image of kneeling next to my mother’s side of the bed, in that bedroom filled with decorative gold balls, and telling her what had happened, and her asking with a sob, “But you didn’t sleep with him beforehand, did you?” And when I told her I had, of my father rising, holding me against his great patriarchal stomach, and making the sign of the cross over me to absolve me of my sins. It moves next to the image of sitting in the cold, clinical office of the pro-life gynecologist my mother had designated for all her daughters, and telling him what had happened and hearing him say, “Well, now you’ve learned that you can’t trust everyone, can you,” in a voice wiped entirely of human sympathy, as he squared my file with two brisk taps against his desk and stood to leave. It must have been then I began to suspect, something is not right with the way these people have arranged the world, no matter what their intentions.