After feeling obsessed with a "Days of Our Lives' story line, in which Eric Brady, then a priest, was drugged and raped by Kristen Dimera, and slowly recovered memories, I had an epiphany. I wondered if my uncle had molested me or raped on during the trip to Tennessee for my grandfather's funeral.

I do remember lots of inappropriate comments and touching when I was a kid and I certainly remember his attempted rape of me when I was 17 after my grandmother died, because he was angry his mother had died and angry that he was going to prison for molesting a boy at church.

will I ever know for sure if I am suppressing memories? no. but it does make my childhood make sense. It never made sense why I went from a happy, social preschooler to a fearful troubled kindergartner. It never made sense why a kid with a detailed, photographic memory would only remember falling in the snow at a rest area and nothing else from the first funeral she had ever attended in a town she had never been to before. It makes the fact that when my uncle threatened to touch me in a certain place during a game of 21, make more sense that, for some reason, he sounded like he was very familiar with my body already. and it makes more sense that his "go to" reaction to my grandmother's death was attacking me, because that's what he'd done 12 years before. and it makes sense because my mother believes he raped her at age 5.

I know I should stop thinking about this. I just had a random thought a few days ago. When I was 17, I made the decision to change the spelling of my nickname that I go by to the way it was spelled in preschool. For some reason, I wanted to reclaim my preschool self, which I felt was my "real" self. I remembered that and realized it eerily supports my epiphany.