Reversal.

My greatest fear, the one that scares me so much that it occurs to me even in dreams, is that I'm the one at fault when it comes to hurting my family.

I'm the one who's the villain in all this. It's all my fault, and I'm the one who hurt people. And I'm the one who is rejecting my family, their form of forgiveness and a better life. My greatest fear is that I'm the one who made the most mistakes, caused the most harm. Everyone is behaving as though nothing happened. Everyone has family around them. They have faith, religion and each other. I have my holidays alone. I don't let go of the grudges and memories that my mother tells me, in weaker moments that I say lack sensitivity toward my situation and my feelings, that I just need to get over it.

Yeah, so I say my stepbrother messed with me, showed me things that he shouldn't have showed me. That's past. Get over it. Come and have Thanksgiving. Come and hug his baby. Everyone else is able to do so, including my mother. I'm the only one who came out of all of it as gay. I'm the only one of them all who's in therapy. I'm the only one who still doesn't come by on holidays. Surely I am the only one who's holding on to things that are best gotten over. So it's my fault. I ruined Christmas. I ruined Thanksgiving. I am the family outcast by my own choosing, and it'd be easier for everyone, including my mother, if I just bought gifts for the people who I say hurt me and smile at them. Because it's less difficult for everyone if I'm not the one acting like anything's wrong.

Yeah, my stepfather was a jerk. But he's married to my mother. And I want to make her happy. So I should just smile and gloss over stuff that he did. My mom is the first to remind me that the end-all, be-all fight was years ago.

"You both went places you shouldn't have gone that night," she said to me. "It was actually both of your faults. And you're still carrying one heckuva grudge. And it makes everyone uncomfortable."

I remember that night how she chose to break up the argument between my stepfather and me, which he was threatening to turn violent. When I told him to go ahead and hit me if he wanted to, my mother covered my mouth, pushed me into another room and told me to "shut up before he kills you." So he kicked me out of the house that night, and she drove me to my apartment.

And I reminded her of what my childhood and adolescence had been. The name-calling, the unreasonable arguments, my stepfather's tantrums and, eventually, my sexual relationship with my stepbrother, brought about because he could manipulate my need to belong among people who were my family but didn't like me.

She cried the night of my fight with my stepfather, telling me that she hated being put in the middle of it all. Two days earlier, she and I had been complaining together about how Jerry was selfish, lacked compassion and understanding. She told me then that it was difficult for her to sit silently while he praised Jeremy over me and my brother, for she's known for years what Jeremy did to me. What she'd said to me that day gave me the courage to stand up to Jerry, but she wasn't there for me when I did it. She said, instead, that I'd put her in the middle of the tension. That was when I realized no one was on my side in any of this. And if I chose to stand my ground against being abused or insulted, even in my 20s, it was my fault for daring to bring it up.

Two weeks after Jerry threatened to hit me, called me a faggot and told me that he never wanted to see me in the house again, my mother called me on the phone and asked me why I hadn't stopped by. Seriously.

"So do you never intend to come by the house ever again?" she asked me.

"No, I don't," I said to her.

That was when she told me that the fight was as much my fault as Jerry's, that people had said things they didn't mean and that I should still come by the house and try to make things better.

I haven't. So it's my fault that things are awkward. It's my fault because I felt like standing up for myself. My mother told me I was being stubborn.

Running into my mother and stepfather at the mall that year and since, I don't usually acknowledge him or say hello to him. My mom told me once, in a phone conversation, that my actions were cruel and mean and obvious. She said Jerry felt slighted when I did it, so I should make an effort to be nicer to him, to say hello, to introduce him to my friends.

"He comments on it," she said. "If you don't say hello to him but say hello to me, then he comments on it."

"But you know why I don't say hello to him," I said.

"Why haven't you gotten over that yet?" she asked me.

When I was in the fifth grade, I would correct my stepfather's grammar. It irked him, but I had been taught that grammar was important by my mother, who valued reading and is rather intelligent. So I was confused.

Jerry said that I should be called "Pee Wee" every time I corrected his grammar or made him feel bad about himself. And he told my brother and stepbrother that they could feel free to call me "Pee Wee," too, to teach me a lesson about being a smart aleck who always had to get in the last word.

This went on for a while. My brothers let people know that was the name to call me. My stepfather knew it bugged me, that I hated it. So he told them to keep doing it. He liked to see me squirm. That was what I got for being smart.

You see, I had this disability, but I was smart. So I thought I was special. And my stepfather wanted to teach me that I wasn't.

I'd complain about the name-calling to my mom, and she'd tell me that there wasn't anything about it that she could do. It was easier just to get past it, develop a tougher skin.

"They only pick on you because you react to it," she said. "Stop reacting to it, and they'll stop. Just don't let it bother you."

The house was easier to live in if I didn't upset Jerry. If the phone rang while he was napping, he'd get mad at whomever it was for -- as though they could control the whims of the people calling them. If you were on the phone while Jerry was watching TV, then it was your fault for talking so loud.

Once I got a cordless phone for Christmas, and we hooked it up to the phone jack. And Jerry said the reception wasn't as good, so he got mad at me for hooking up my cordless phone.

When I was in the ninth grade, recovering from a surgery that severed my Achilles' tendon, stretched my heel cord muscle and left me in a cast, I was doing some rather painful physical therapy to improve how I walked. My mother was helping me through some stretches. Jerry said that my howls of pain were too loud, and he didn't understand why I had to scream so much. So my mother stopped doing so much physical therapy with me, lest my horrible pain got on Jerry's nerves.

Because I complained about the fact that we only ever went on vacation to Panama City Beach, I was seen as a vacation-spoiling pest. So, when I didn't go on the last one my junior year of high school and opted to spend Easter by myself at the house, I was seen as the family rebel. It made my mother unhappy, but Jerry said it was better than having me complain that all we ever did was go to Panama City Beach.

A couple times, Jerry would wax nostalgic to me, my brother and my stepbrother about "all the freedom" he gave up by having children around him. He and my mother went to the lake by themselves a lot, once my siblings and I became old enough to stay at home alone. During their trips out, Jeremy and I began what I later chose to call "our experimentation gone awry." It went on for four or so years. My parents never suspected that it could happen in their family. It didn't go on right under their noses, though. It happened while they were out. There was a time when it happened, I think, more than once a week. But Jerry's perpetual, leathery suntan was really great that year.

When I was living there after my firing from CNN.com, a package once arrived for me in the middle of the day. The UPS man knocked on the door, waking up Jerry, and he screamed at me and then stormed off in a huff. And my mother looked at me like it was my fault that the delivery arrived while Jerry was sleeping.

My mother wears a hearing aid. She has only 20 percent hearing in her left ear now. Sometimes she wouldn't be able to hear the television, but Jerry would claim she had it up too loud. So she'd turn it down. Whenever they'd have conversations sometimes and she'd ask him to repeat things, he'd claim she had "selective hearing loss" - pretending to hear only the things she wanted to hear.

I remember once that my mother used Romaine lettuce in a salad, just to try something different. She worked on the salad from a recipe and was excited to try something different. Jerry tried it, told her it was garbage and that she should throw it out. When she looked hurt, I went up to him and glared at him angrily, for I had known how long she'd been planning it and how much something as minor as a salad had come to mean that we were trying something new. Jerry could tell I was really angry, and he asked me what exactly I thought I was going to do to him. My mother held me back then, too. She told me to go to my room. I think they had an argument after that, actually. But the arguments usually ended when Jerry got tired of not getting his way, so he'd drive out to the lake and walk around until he felt like returning home.

The day my mother bought me a used car, my red Dodge Daytona that I had through college, she was very excited about it. I mean, she was doing something for me that she thought was wonderful, something that was within her means to do, so she got dressed up in a new green blouse and a matching jacket and took Jerry and me to the car lot. I looked over the Daytona, decided that I liked it, and she bought it for me. Midway through signing the contracts, Jerry pulled her aside and told her that her new blouse had too low of a neckline. He asked her then if she enjoyed showing off her body to the strangers at the car lot. So we drove home in my new car, and she went up to her bedroom and shut the door. She came down a few minutes later, wiping tears from her eyes. She'd hiked up the neckline of her blouse by using hairpins to pull up the fabric in the shoulders. The fabric was bunched up around her shoulders, so she put the jacket back on over it to hide the pins. Jerry told her that it looked better now that she was more covered. She said to me later that Jerry had ruined her good mood.

There are other stories. I don't like Jerry. I'd rather not say hello to him. I don't want to buy him a gift. I don't want to spend holidays pretending to like him.

I fear that I hurt Jeremy, in our exchanges, as much as he hurt me. I fear that, because he embraced the church and has a wife and two children now, that the only reason our situation happened is because I was the instigator. There were times when I enjoyed it, wanted it. So it's my fault. I was never the recipient when sexual things got truly out-of-control, so surely I was the one responsible for it. I did it. It was me. I'm the gay one, so blame me for it. I'm the one who still talks about it. I'm the one who cracked about the secret when I was talking to my mother and my high school counselor, so I'm the one who couldn't just forget whatever happened. I was the only one who ever attempted to assign blame, so, for those reasons, maybe what happened when I was a kid was my fault. I'm the one who plays the victim. If I wasn't seeing this situation from my own perspective, if I were just an outsider, what would I think of what I'm saying?

I should be nice to them, for the sake of keeping things peaceful.

The night Jeremy lost his virginity to a girl in my class named Heather, he came home from that date and had sex with me. Full-on sex. That was the night he begged me unsuccessfully to submit to him. (As a result of my dealings with him, I've still submitted to no one.) He told me after we'd had sex that he'd done it with her. He told me AFTER, not BEFORE. I can't figure out why we did it that night. Was he testing himself? Was he testing me? Or was it about something else, about power or about being stronger than me, stronger than Heather and capable of making both of us do as he wanted?

Now they wonder why I haven't wanted to see his babies.

My mom, who after she found out about what had happened to me, told me that she thought sometimes about destroying Jeremy's life by harming his children the way he'd harmed hers.

When she told me that Jeremy's wife was pregnant, my first comment to my own mother was, "Don't hurt the baby." She pretended not to know what I was talking about.

Now it's her beloved grandchild.

I don't want to see it, I tell my mother, because I don't want to feel responsible if abuse happens to it. I don't want anyone to look to me after-the-fact and say that I should've said something.

Mom says people wonder why I haven't seen the baby. I told her that they should ask Jeremy, for he probably doesn't say anything when they ask. If he doesn't realize why, then he's dense.

At the holidays I used to attend, where Jeremy and I would be in the room in front of each other and not speak, Jerry would wonder what was going on, but he would never say anything about the tension out loud. He would ask my mother about it later, who in turn would tell me that Jerry was asking questions.

I don't really know what's going on in the psychology of the rest of my family. I don't understand the layers of denial.

They're uncomfortable, but they'd rather be uncomfortable than ask too many questions and find out about stuff they don't know. They blame me. I'm the anti-social one. I'm the rebel. I'm the one who chooses not to get along with everyone.

I'm the one who's hurting my mother's holiday by not letting go of grudges and memories. That's what she tells me.

She chose them. She didn't choose me. It was easier for her to pretend like nothing was wrong. It always has been. It's easier just to keep Jerry happy than to admit.

It's easier for her to cover my mouth than to try and stop him from getting angry. That was her choice on the night of the fight. It's that way for the rest of my life.

But if I'm the only one who's speaking the truth, who's not living a lie, who's choosing to see things as they are, then why am I the one most plagued by these things? Because I'm the guy who doesn't choose to get along?

They're in denial, but they have their fallacy of family. I speak the truth, get my mother's guilt and grief and complaints, and I find other places to spend my holidays.

So maybe I'm the one at fault. Maybe this is all my fault.

It's my fault for being gay. It's my fault for being angry. It's my fault for letting the abuse happen, for not shutting up and letting Jerry be.

They only pick on you because you react to it, my mother said to me.

It's my fault for just not getting over it. And I ruin my mother's holidays because of it.

My therapist today asked me what sort of closure I can get on this situation. I told him that a reconciliation with my stepfather wasn't possible. I said I wouldn't want it because my final fight against him was one of the proudest moments of my life.

But where do I go to find happiness over this? How do I not deny what happened and yet not get so bothered by it?

One of my other therapists, one I saw a long time ago, told me that I needed to remind myself constantly that none of these things that happened to me were my fault. I told the older therapist that I believed that to be true.

But the nightmares I have with Jeremy in them, and I've had them for years, are frightening because he offers himself to me. And, despite myself and knowing how I feel, I betray myself and accept what he offers me.

So maybe I'm the one who's wrong.