I got raped and I have no memory of it, nor can I tell anybody (NSFW)

Hi, throwaway account. Just kind of wanted to write this down and share since I’ve never had the chance to actually share this story. And I can’t exactly talk about to anybody involved since it’s supposed to be past me.

When I (20m) was 3 years old, stayed with my grandfather of my mother’s side when both my parents when on a deployment to either Afghanistan or Iraq, I don’t know which one it was at the time I just know they went to both. My grandfather didn’t live with my grandmother but was divorced and lived with his new wife at the time who volunteered to take me and my older brother in while my parents were gone. Like I said, I was 3 years old so I have almost no memory of living with them and I wasn’t cognizant until months later when we moved in with other family members. While we lived with them, apparently I had gotten really sick. throwing up blood, discolored and pale bowl movements, and it was bad enough to the point I was supposedly in and out of the ER. My grandmother had to get involved begging for my grandfather to let her take me and my older brother until my parents got home and for months, my grandfather fought hard that he was we equipped to handle and maintain me and my older brother. It wasn’t until the police got involved was a transfer put in place.

By all means a sick toddler is nothing to jump the gun over. but when I was 8 years old, I remember months of going back and forth over to my aunts house to play with her son while my parents talked to her and also investigators that would come talk to me and my older brother of what we could remember at my grandfathers house way back then. And following that, we sat outside a courthouse for hours one night playing in the backseat while my mother was inside testifying against her father for a crime we knew no specifics of until years later. I just remember her telling us he had been sentenced to 3 lifetimes in prison.

It wasn’t until I was around 17 that I’ve gotten curious about what crime exactly had put him behind bars for life and started google searching everything detail I could, and than I found the court files. Everything that I didn’t want to read I had read, my grandfather had over and over again raped my aunt creating my incest cousin on my aunts side, he had raped other children in the neighborhood, and most disgustingly, it had cited my mother’s testimony of having her 2 sons staying at his house while she was on a deployment with one showing signs of anal trauma. I had brought up my grandfather to my mother shortly after not telling her I had found the files and all she would say was “you were never the same baby before” and “it was my biggest regret leaving you in their care”.

Now that I’m older and he still comes up in conversation whenever one of them tell my little brothers they look like their grandfather or when my older brother tells me him and my mother are starting to write to him in prison, it definitely makes me feel some type of way. I don’t know if it’s valid since i have no memory of it but reading those files had me me want to vomit. Nobody else to my knowledge besides me and my mother in my immediate family knows what’s inside those files, and I just can’t believe she would still want to write to him, nor could I ever believe they would utter his name to tell one of my little brothers that he looks like a man he will never in his life be able to meet. I don’t know why I feel so affected by them even though I have no memories of it. But it makes me sick.