Household

My dad was gone a lot.  He did that.  He’d leave us for days, weeks, even months at a time.  Isolated in the middle of nowhere, the house itself was a filthy hoarder’s den of my stay at home mother’s making and my bipolar father couldn’t cope with the house or his wife and children so would just leave.  He had plenty of mistresses demanding his time anyway.  K was often gone, too.  Six years my senior and the first born, she was also the first to figure out crashing on couches.  When she was home she was usually tormenting my sister E who splits our difference in age.  E took that torment she received from K and our parents, then amplified it onto me when I could be found.  It seems people who are abused either decide that others should have to experience what they have or that no one should experience what they have.  My biological family all shared in their instinct to re-inflict while I was fortunate enough to hone compassion.  You see my years living mostly feral in the woods weren’t spent alone; I had so many other wild souls out there with me.  My need for comfort was filled by giving comfort, and I fear I orphaned a great many kitten in my day when trying to take care of babies.  When trying to take care of myself.  There were stray dogs dumped in the country and all types of North Texas wildlife.  We also had an old horse who was happy to share her pasture with me.  As a toddler stumbling up to her alone, she would kneel down and let me pull myself up with her mane and we would pass our days together.  It was magical.  Ridiculously dangerous as an adult now with hindsight – the snakes and scorpions in the tall grass or the barbed wire I squeezed through to get to her and the sheer power of the horse herself – but still magical.  My dad had Mare Mare since he was a boy himself.  If that man is capable of love, she’s likely the only one who ever received it from him.