Sticks and Ashes

Everyone says that Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. If only that were always the case. Growing up, I enjoyed the holiday, but I never truly felt like it was overly wonderful. And never was I more disappointed with it than the year "Santa" gave us sticks and ashes. 

Tracy and I were 10 and Fred was 11 the year "Santa" brought us these gifts from our grandparents' wood burning stove. Needless to say, I felt disappointed and angry that this was my holiday experience. 

That particular year, we had been fighting a lot, but it felt like no more than previous years. Still, our parents were not happy and kept threatening that Santa would notice and we wouldn't get presents if we continued to be naughty. 

The minute I opened my box and saw what was inside, I felt angry and certain that Santa wouldn't be this mean. That was the year I stopped believing in Santa Claus. I may have been older than most, but my belief in him was something to hold onto to make the holiday special. But this act of getting sticks and ashes felt like a betrayal and something evil - definitely something my mom would do. We opened those gifts before our morning chores. Then, it was business as usual. We had to go out and do our chores without being angry or disappointed because that would cause more problems and backlash from one of the adults. 

After we completed morning chores, we sat down for our break and were asked if we'd like our "real" gifts from Santa. We were told that he had given them to our parents because we were naughty. But even these gifts turned out to be nothing special. We each received a new backpack for school and a handheld game that was relatively cheap at the time. Later that day, I was snooping around in my parents' bedroom when I saw the receipts for our backpacks and games. This solidified my suspicion that these gifts were bought and that Santa was not this evil person, but rather a made-up person to try to make children behave better. 

The hardest part of Christmas was when the winter break was over and we had to return to school. All the other kids were bragging about all their awesome new gifts while we were like, "Yeah, I got this new backpack so I could carry my school supplies..."

Merry Christmas to us.

The Day I Lost My Innocence

I’ve previously mentioned that my siblings and I suffered physical, emotional and verbal abuse - mostly from our own mother. However, that abuse never prepared me for a new kind of abuse, a kind I had never even heard of and had no idea was classified as abuse. To be honest, none of the abuse I experienced as a child felt like abuse at the time - it was just the way life was, and it was expected that I would take it and deal with it.

Because most of the abuse we endured came at the hands of our mom, I never thought our “dad” could do anything terrible to us. And I didn't consider anything he DID do to be really all that bad.

If you have been reading my blogs, you know my siblings and I were adopted when I was 8 years old. After the adoption, I was always looking for ways to truly feel like part of the family.

About a year after the adoption, I thought that moment had finally come! Every morning before chores, we would all sit as a family to watch the news, mostly to see what the weather had in store since we would be working in the elements. I remember perfectly how things changed on this particular wintry day. We were all watching the news like normal when my “dad” saw I was cold and put his blanket over me, so we were both covered by it. After a few minutes of sitting under the blanket together and warming up, he took my hand in his. What happened next shocked me and made me feel weird and a little wrong.

He put my hand on his penis. Then, he proceeded to use my hand while masturbating. My hand was under a blanket on my “dad’s” penis, which I had never seen, let alone felt, before! When he was finished, there was weird, slimy goo on my hand. At the time, I wasn’t aware of what that was. It was his semen. There wasn’t a lot, so he kind of wiped it on his underwear, put his penis away and then took the blanket off of us. It was time to get dressed and start our morning chores.

This was the first of many times this happened over the next year. I never told anyone. A part of me finally did feel different - special. I now had this secret that connected only me to my “dad” and helped secure my spot as “daddy’s little girl.” I was 9 years old and had officially lost my innocence.

Having a Cow

Growing up on a farm is definitely hard, and it takes a lot out of anyone, especially a child. But there are some good parts about it, too. One of the coolest things about living on a dairy farm is that there are cows everywhere! Plus, new calves are born regularly. 

As dairy farmers, we would keep only the female calves and would send all the bulls to the Marlette stockyard, where they would be sold. We would also send females to the stockyard if they were no longer producing enough milk. Running a dairy farm is all about having milk, so we couldn’t keep those that didn’t produce, even if we liked them.

Speaking of liking cows, we would give every new calf a name from a baby book. It was fun to come up with names and mark them down in our records. Eventually, all of us kids had a cow named after us, too! It was incredibly cool to share a name with a cow. Since Fred was obviously a boy, and we got rid of all the male calves, the cow with his name was actually Frederica. 

There was this huge chart where we would keep track of the cows that were fertilized to monitor when they should have their babies. A veterinarian would come out to the farm on a regular basis to help keep track of the cows and make sure there weren’t any complications. He could also let us know if a cow was going to have twins. Usually, if a cow had twins, both calves were sent to the stockyard to be auctioned off, no matter what their sexes were. Generally, a calf that was born as a twin didn’t produce enough milk to keep. 

However, we did get to keep some of the twins. Tracy and I loved when we got to keep twins! One particular set was born early, and they were so tiny that they both fit in a wheelbarrow together. We kept them around because they were both females and because they were so tiny we wanted to nurture them to see if they would be good milk producers when they got older. They actually turned into some of our best cows, but when they were babies they were just super cute! They were so tiny they could slip right under the gates that kept in the others, so we created a straw pen that prevented them from escaping. I remember spending a lot of time hanging out with those little girls because, for a while, it was touch-and-go as to whether or not they would survive. 

It was always amazing to see new life when a calf was born. I’m sure it would gross out some people, but it was always awesome to experience a birth and to be there to help deliver a calf if the mom was having trouble. We would put chains around the ankles of the calf while it was still inside the mom, and then we would pull. If the mom was standing up, we would have to be extra careful and have someone to help make sure the calf didn’t fall to the ground and get hurt when it came out. There were also times when a calf would start to come earlier than we had planned and we wouldn't have time to get the chains. We would just have to hold onto the legs and pull. That mostly happened when one of us kids saw a cow going into labor and wanted to be the first one to see the new baby and bring it into the world without the adults knowing. Some calves were born with a lot of goop in their mouths and noses, so we would have to pull all of that out. Sometimes, we even had to do a sort of mouth-to-mouth with a calf. But the minute the little baby mooed, we knew it was going to be OK. The miracle of a baby being born is just magical,

and it made all the issues of farm life seem insignificant for that brief moment. 

Just Beat It

As a kid, I thought my siblings and I had a pretty normal life, and I believe others thought so, too. At least from the outside looking in, it seemed to be normal. My mom would beat us if we lied or lost something, but, “Didn’t all moms do this?” Since she began beating us when we were very young, it seemed normal when other adults treated us the same way. This was all we had ever known, and so we thought that every kid must have been experiencing the same things in their own homes.

After moving to the farm and developing routines, we would get beaten or punished if things didn’t go according to routine. It seemed that Fred would get the most beatings and punishments, but that was mostly due to the fact that he would talk back to the adults more frequently and the adults absolutely hated that. We were also constantly told to respect our elders, which meant we always had to abide by what the adults said. Fred sometimes would act all high and mighty around Tracy and me and tell us to respect our elders because he was a whopping 14 months older than us. It was that kind of language that landed him in harms way more often than not.

But none of us were immune to trouble. Even the smallest lie could result in a beating. Our tiny single-wide trailer wasn’t the most well-built house in the land, so things tended to break pretty easily. Once, the toilet paper holder in the kids' bathroom broke when Fred was in there and was kind of hanging on by a thread. We knew it was broken, but we were all afraid to tell our parents, so we just acted like it had never happened. Eventually, they noticed it was broken and asked who had done it. No one wanted to fess up, so we acted like we had no idea it was broken and no idea when it had happened. Because no one would take the blame or point a finger, we all received beatings with a wooden paddle. We were each hit at least 10 times on our butts. It was not the first time we had received beatings like this, which was why we all had been afraid to say anything. Unfortunately, our silence meant we all paid the price.

We went to the flea market up by our grandparents' house often in the summer months. While there, our mom would come across new paddles and would ask us which we would like best for our next round of beatings. There were plain wooden ones and wooden ones with holes. Mom liked to point out that the ones with holes would actually hurt more because they could catch wind before hitting us, so of course, no matter our preference, she would end up purchasing one of those. But she wasn't limited to paddles when beating us. She would use basically anything lying around the house if she couldn’t get to the paddle she had bought. So there were times we were beaten with a fly-swatter or belt along with our chosen wooden paddle.

One time, our mom misplaced her knitting needles and insisted one of us kids had taken them and needed to return them immediately. It turned into this frenzy, with all of us searching the house frantically to locate them so we wouldn’t get beaten, because we knew that was coming next. After searching for a while, we still hadn't located the damn needles, so we were all lined up, and we prepared to get our beatings. If we knew a beating was coming, then we might be sneaky enough to pad our pants with a shirt or something inconspicuous so it wouldn’t hurt, or at least wouldn't hurt as badly. We all got hit another 10 or so times. Shortly after receiving our beatings, we located the knitting needles, and they were exactly where Mom had left them. She never apologized for beating us, even when she had to have known she was in the wrong. That’s just the way it was in our household. You got a beating and understood that it was always your fault.

When Tracy and I were still relatively young, I’d say around 6 or 7, we were doing one of the “easy” jobs on the farm. We were holding the cows' tails so the adults doing the milking wouldn't get slapped. Suddenly, the tail Tracy was holding slipped out of her little hands and hit our “dad” in the face. He was not impressed by this so he took the tail and swatted her HARD across the face. She had a nice-sized gash across her cheek for several days and had to go to school looking like that. I don’t remember anyone asking her about that mark.

Looking back, I realize that our “dad” rarely ever beat us or made us afraid that we would get a beating for doing something wrong. He always seemed to be the more nurturing parent. However, there was one time when he got really pissed at Tracy and me. We had to have been pretty young, like 6 or 7, when we thought it would be fun to stand on the roof of his car. Apparently, this car was his pride and joy - some kind of fancy make or something - and he was NOT happy to look up and see us. He’s a big man, over 300 pounds, and we had rarely seen him move quickly. However, that day, he ran pretty fast and chased us around our trailer until he finally caught us and gave us each a good beating. Outside of that one instance, though, I don’t remember him ever being the enforcer of beatings. If he did seem unhappy with something any of us had done, he would just threaten to tell our mother. No one wanted that!

Our new "grandpa", who never even cared to learn our names, loved to beat us and took joy and pleasure in finding new ways to hurt us. He didn’t use the paddles that our parents bought. Most of the time, he would just use his own strength and force over us. I remember one specific time I was on the receiving end of his abuse - and it was not fun. Usually, it was Fred whom he targeted, because Fred would talk back to him and our new "grandma" a lot. Our "grandpa's" favorite way to punish us was to slam our heads into a cinder block wall. In this instance, I was slammed into the corner of the wall so that the sharp, protruding portion went into my head. It hurt a lot! Since I had long hair, it wasn’t noticeable, but there is still a small bump on my head from when this happened. Fred got his head slammed into the same cinder block wall or another wall countless times by this man. As we got older, our "grandpa" would try to find new ways to hurt Fred. One of the worst things he ever did was hold Fred up by his neck and choke him! Fred couldn’t really breathe, but our "grandpa" didn’t care. He was mad that, once again, Fred was mouthing off to him. After that particular incident, Fred had actual hand-prints around his neck! I don’t remember the timing of when that happened, but I think it was over a summer break. All of us kids tended to get in more trouble and fight more frequently over the longer breaks from school because we were expected to do so much more of the farm-work during these breaks.

We were constantly walking around in a state of fear, wondering what we would do wrong next to incite another round of abuse - be it physical, verbal or emotional. Looking back on all that we went through and all that had to have been apparent as abuse, it’s a wonder our school-teachers never got involved to call the authorities. I know, that today there would definitely be more questions and concerns from teachers and school staff. It just goes to show how much things have changed in the past 20 years.