My Mom Is Going to Kill Me! A Life in Pornography” by Abby Rodman. Abby Rodman is co-creator and co-host of the Adult Time podcast. I feel like a kid again on the inside of my parents’ house. I don’t know why that’s true—why should I feel like a kid again after all those years that I spent feeling like an adult? Maybe I’m just happy to be here. Maybe I’m just looking forward to all the shit I get to do today. I don’t know. I did not live in a family with porn at the time. It’s just—my entire life was in that room. I was twelve, twelve and a half, when my parents walked into my bedroom with a bunch of cameras, my computer, and a box full of DVDs. They didn’t tell me what they were going to do. But as the first DVDs were inserted into my computer, and as I felt the weight of the cameras as they hung in the air, I knew. This is happening to me. This is happening to me, too. I remember asking for a glass of water, but I knew—they were recording. I think I remember wanting them to stop. And the camera is like a fly—hovering, moving. I remember asking them to put the cameras away. But they didn’t listen to me. They just didn’t. So, yes. This is happening to me, too. I used to feel like the kids in those videos. These are my thoughts. These are my experiences. I have had thousands of experiences since then, but for some reason, they are stuck in my head. I am not able to forget them. I have been trying to be quiet about my experiences, trying to do the adult thing and not talk about it, trying not to cause drama. But the more I talk about it and get people to talk about what they went through, the more people will get to see my scars. I am very afraid of scars. Abby Rodman is the co-creator and co-host of the Adult Time podcast. I used to wear short skirts, fishnets, corsets. I would wear very revealing clothing—just always trying to outdo each other. I had a really bad habit. We had a stage in the house that was on wheels, and we would prop the door open with a chair. One night—we were all sitting there, and I remember it was my sister, my best friend, and I. And we all looked at each other and were like, “I want to take you home.” We all said it, but me being twelve, I was like, “Fuck you! No you can’t, not me!” And she was like, “You said it!” And then me and her came up with this idea. And it was one of our first ideas as a duo. We came up with it a year later, which was also after we came out to my mom. We were saying—we were sitting around that same stage. And my mom comes up, and she’s like, “Abby—why don’t you come up? Come on up and kiss your mother.” She was like, “You guys kiss and make up.” And that’s when I knew. I was like, “Oh God.” The next day, me and her were at school. And it was our first day of school in the new school, and my sister was already friends with this girl. We had one hour before school started. We were walking in, and the girl was sitting at a desk—and I said, “Where are you sitting?” She said, “I’m sitting there.” And I pointed out the desk that I had sat at—the seat where the other girl had sat. And she started to cry. I said, “Why did you cry?” She goes, “Because you sat there!” That was when I realized that I was too afraid to move on. We couldn’t really be close to anyone. Because even if we tried to be friends with someone—we would get together with all the people that we had met in porn. We’d just stay together, and I felt like I couldn’t be around people, especially since they were talking to me and all. I feel like a kid again on the inside of my parents’ house. I don’t know why that’s true—why should I feel like a kid again after all those years that I spent feeling like an adult? Maybe I’m just happy to be here. Maybe I’m just looking forward to all the shit I get to do today. I don’t know. I did not live in a family with porn at the time. It’s just—my entire life was in that room. We were all close, but we had to be careful about what we said. My sister—she told her parents everything about what was going on. And she was like—her parents, they were the type of people who would say, “You have to go to church. You have to go to confession. You have to go to mass. Don’t worry about this world.” And she was like, “Okay, I’ll do that, but I still have to go to school.” We just didn’t know how to really express ourselves—how to communicate about what was going on with us. And then my brother—he wanted to go to an all-girls Catholic school. And we were like, “You can’t go to that!” We wanted to protect him, because we didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. So he stayed in the city where we lived—but we lived in another part of the country, so he couldn’t see us. I think that was our first experience of how hard it can be—like, to be on the other side, how hard it can be to protect him from this. That’s when it really hit me hard. I went to sleep thinking that there was no hope for us and that he could be at risk. Abby Rodman is the co-creator and co-host of the Adult Time podcast. We didn’t know how to protect each other from this. I was fourteen, and I started going to therapy. I would have breakdowns. It got to the point that I would leave work and just walk—not even jog—I would just walk, crying and alone, as it became apparent to me how out of control it all was. Therapy helped me start to piece myself together, but then I also started to get really, really depressed. I would wake up, and it was impossible to not think about this—I was going to have to deal with this for the rest of my life. I started thinking about this a lot—the way it made me feel about myself—what kind of problems I had because of this—how people would see me differently. I got really depressed. And the way I became suicidal was that I didn’t want to be alone anymore. I wanted to get sick and die so my family didn’t have to deal with it and have to feel guilt that I had done something like this to myself. I wanted them to feel guilty, because that was what I felt guilty for, because I didn’t want them to feel guilty. I wanted to die. And I kept it up for a good three years. Every morning, when I would wake up, that was the first thing that would enter my mind, and I would wake up feeling it. And I would say to myself, “I am going to kill myself.” And that’s the best way to describe it, because I would just want to end my life and never wake up again. I wanted to take away all my pain and shame. I would think of this and say, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to end my life.” But I just didn’t want to be alone. And what started happening was that when I would get to this point, it was not necessarily that I was thinking about wanting to be dead. It was more like I wanted people to hurt me. And it would happen like this—I would get a little bit of attention from people because of it. And then I would be fine for like a month. I would stay busy with school and with work, and I would just have fun. And then one night, out of the blue—I was living in a dorm, and we would all go