How would that excuse it? My dad commented on my weight for years until I cut him out of my life for a year. We’ve since reconciled and he has finally stopped.
And I wasn’t even overweight. Not that it matters.
The rest of the story, as you tell it, makes sense and sounds to me like it was “Molester Dad”. As a childhood sexual abuse survivor myself, who has done plenty of group therapy with other CSA folks, I interpret “began remembering being sexually abused as a child” as something more nuanced than the reappearance of memories that had been completely repressed. We all have memories of physical events that come with interpretations layered on top of them. When old childhood memories float to our consciousness more and more often in adulthood, it can dawn on us that the interpretations we had stored with them aren’t plausible anymore to our adult selves. Did your parents kiss you? Probably. Everybody knows that getting kissed by your parents is normal. But as adults we also know that there are ways of being kissed that are definitely sexual and not part of parental affection for a child. It may require some adult perspective to recognize that. I think remembering old events with an adult’s perspective to help correctly interpret them is what some of us fairly describe as “beginning remembering abuse”, because we couldn’t remember something as abuse until recently.
No, I’m pretty sure I’m right. If you saw “a butt squeeze to your daughter is okay” in any of the posts above, then they are wrong.
It’s still creepy, sexual behavior whether or not the family wants to admit it. Copping a feel on your kid’s ass (or boobs, or crotch) is not reasonable behavior.
My dad was not touchy feely. The only thing I can ever remember him doing was shaking hands, swatting acquaintances on the butt, goosing me, carrying me around on his shoulders, that kind of thing. I don’t remember him ever squeezing me or my sisters on the butt: if he had, he would have thought that much less annoying than I did. Like being goosed. He treated me like a kid my whole life until he died. He preferred the kind of hugging you can do at an arms length.
I also see mothers around here kissing their grade-6 boys on the lips. Yuck. But I don’t think they are all sexual abusers.
Agreed, re the grade-6 boys.
What do you mean by goosing?
Huh. I wouldn’t give it more than 8.0.
I don’t know what the rules are, and I don’t care. I am very circumspect about how I relate to my (beloved) step daughter. I cherish my relationship with her, and I’m always cognizant of the fact that I’m not her father, and that fact leads me to be supremely careful about any sort of physical contact. I so want her to look up to me, and look up to me as the one adult in her life who has always got her back, always got her own best interests in mind, and that I admire her for what she is, not what she looks like, and our relationship proceeds from the assumption that I will never ever give her any reason to think I’m creepy or that I see her as anything other than my (aquired) daughter and family member. I would never touch her butt under any circumstances.
Technically 
Goosing is delivering a pinch such as a goose might give, to the area a goose could reach. Generally, it is a humorous practical joke consisting of a surprise touch in such a way as to startle the victim. So effectively ‘goosing’ someone may be more of a brush up the inside leg from the back, heading towards the buttocks for the pinch, which isn’t actually achieved because the victim jumps. If you are goosing a bloke, you might actually be heading for the testicles.
It used to be more common than it is now: it has long been banned for Disneyland ‘cast members’, but that wasn’t always the case.
If my Dad did that I’m pretty sure I would throw up on his shoes. Or deck him, if I didn’t catch myself before the punch landed.
Very creepy. Barring some convoluted one-off set of circumstances, I can’t see how it could be anything but creepy.
Given the additional information, I suspect the OP’s interpretation is correct.
Ah. “Goosing” generally means something different here in the US. Exact definitions of the particulars vary, but “goosing” is both predatory and sexual. Around here, a creep gooses an unsuspecting woman on the subway. A normal parent does not goose their child.
So you can see why a clarification was requested.
Huh. I grew up primarily in the US. With the exception of a couple of years abroad, I grew up in the South. My definition of goose pretty much matches Melbourne’s, except for the brushing up the inside of the leg part. I think of it as a pinch to the buttocks. It can vary from light and playful – something a parent might have done in a game of chase with a younger kid – to something more like a punishment intended to speed someone up by applying pain. (I’m not advocating either of these activities – they’re just things that were unremarkable at the time when I was growing up.) But looking at a couple of American dictionaries, it seems to have a very different definition here. Maybe this is an odd case of my having picked up the meaning while abroad, and not knowing all this time that my understanding was different. Weird. Sorry for the hijack.
As for the OP, it doesn’t 100% have to be creepy, or at least, the intentions do not have to be creepy, but with the added info, my guess is you made the right call. There are a lot of ways that people who have been abused might choose to disclose the abuse. It’s pretty common to hedge in some way, or to make test disclosures to ascertain what will happen. Saying “I’m starting to remember being abused” doesn’t necessarily mean the person is asserting that they had forgotten (as already explained), and it certainly doesn’t have to mean that the person really had forgotten. I also think it could be pretty significant if the disclosure happened after you saw the incident described. She might have felt more confident that you would believe her, having seen that behavior.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Sis might have hedged a little.
Also, I didn’t see the butt incident, I wasn’t in the elevator. But Dad didn’t deny it; he actually described it, so I’m sure it happened.
It’s all such a mess.
the sister might have forgotten and then the grab triggered the memories its happened to me … when I was a teen i’d mostly forgotten what happened to me until someone ran a finger down my back in school a certain way to get my attention when I was absorbed in a book and then i remembered things that i hadn’t thought about in years …
My Dad was from Michigan. Many things that my parents did would have different meanings now than they did then: for example, naked but for his officers belt while operational in the Navy. He was neither predatory or sexual and the point is that you can’t judge the meaning of social actions just by the meaning of social actions in your own community
And that includes both finger pointing and inappropriate touching.