Rabbit Cage

Imagine growing up dirt poor, like the other kids made fun of your shoes dirt poor under the "care" of a dangerous, violent, delusional psychopath. That's what I had going on. My father somehow ruined his mind with the most gentle "drug" experience that exists. He smoked a lot of weed and somehow it backed his mind up into his own special form of insanity and somehow, he remained violent...then he met my soon to be step-mother, a horrible, nasty, violent cunt herself. She once purposefully slammed a car door completely closed on my hand when I was in third grade. When she opened the door, my hand was shaped like the space between the door and the body of the car. It didn't break due to the incredible pliability of children's bones but I was both in pain and horrified. Yes, these are the two people that "raised" me and often let me know that my only value to them was a child support check. My birth mother was the first woman in Kentucky state history to lose custody of her children (she abandoned me as an infant, to die in the winter. I was an original trashcan baby. In her defense, so was traumatized by my father). I really lucked out with my childhood circumstance it seems.

I was in 6th or 7th grade and my father had come up with a delusional survivalism plan and was already unhinged. A great deal of his master plan was to raise and butcher rabbits, and I admit that rabbit meat is delicious, and I did not particularly mind the butchering process. A full belly trumps a lot of arguments.

My job was to feed the rabbits. I fed the rabbits. I guess Danny (father) had a bad day at work and so he came home and insulted my rabbit feeding track record, and being (still) naive, and not understanding that this was a prelude to a beating, and even though I received random beatings, I tried to rationalize with him, and explained my position, but the decision to give me a beating had already been made. By this time, he had refined his technique. He just slapped me, with all 230 or so pounds behind him to my maybe 70 pounds. He slapped real hard on the side of my head, on the other side of my head, and who knows what else I was simply on the receiving end of a barrage really jarring concussive blows and at some point, my brain must have bounced off from the inside of my skull, which knocked me unconscious. His life must have really sucked at that point. Clearly, he wanted my life to suck at least as much.

The rabbit cages allowed for rabbit waste to fall through to the ground. He must have been particularly angry because when I came to, I discovered that either he had thrown me under one of the rabbit cages, in their shit, or I had simply landed there. I awoke to rabbit piss falling on my face. When I came back inside to disrobe and wash the rabbit piss and shit off from my person, he was getting high (which to this day, I have no comprehension of how he was a violent stoner; that makes NO sense), I heard my stepmother praising him for “giving (me) what (I) had coming”. They were horrible, horrible people. To this day I have no idea of their motivation. I was just a child, but unlike most victims of abuse, I was able to separate the experience of the beatings from my personal value. That is a superpower to the horribly abused. I knew they were wrong. Later in my life, I ceased being the abused and became the abuser. Decades later, thankfully, I am neither.