Test!!!!

[isittoolate]

Hi
WHAT ON EARTH DID I DO TO DESERVE 5 LAZY LITTLE BASTARDS LIKE I GOT?"..dad

This ought to read "WHAT IN HELL DID...."

When he said that, we kids were so lacking in voice that we said nothing, as my sister and I were milking 12 cows before going to school. Up at 5:00 to clean the cow stables, the bull pen (and we were left alone in that bull pen without protection from it), clean the horse stables,  clean the pig pens, freshen the straw bedding for the bull, the pigs, the horses and the cows, separate the milk, and give the skimmed milk to the pigs, after we mixed up their chop etc, and spread it in the trough, and the cream went to the house for mom, which she sold for butter--and one pail of fresh milk went to the house for each day.

Go upstairs to the hay mows and drag out enough to throw down the chute to another sister to feed all the animals, except the pigs. Go up there where there are no  lights and it's freezing cold and try to figure out if you are doing it right or get blasted by dad.

The pigs were the last to be fed and squealed the whole while we did all this other crap and as I'm milikng my 6 cows I hear my dad raging that I am "A LAZY BASTARD". I will never forget it, and I wish I knew enough to say"Lazy? You call  all this work I do---LAZY?-- you raging bastard!

and as well I help with the haying and the harvesting and you just mumble and grumble the whole while. We are all just free labour for you on this fricking farm".

I did those chores morning and night from age 8 to age 16, 365 days a year, without one word of thanks from him. I was his child labour!--beaten as well as he beat the animals, once blinding a cow.---just speaking for myself, but there were always 2 sisters in this position, depending on when we reached age 8, or reached age 16.

Damn it! There are so many times I needed a voice and never had it--never knew I was entitled to it!
******
Then in 1976 I sat at  his bedside in the hospital, as he was in his last 6 months of dying, all I asked for was his signature on their Tax Returns that I had been doing every year, and....left...

3 months later as mom nursed him at home, for his last 3 months, he was a skeleton with skin and couldn't speak, just eyes looking at me and I felt nothing!!! Absolutely Nothing! I said nothing....Then he died  the next morning!
Izzy

[pennyplant]

Izzy, Your father was the lazy one and he knew it and hated that about himself and projected it onto you kids.  A terrible injustice was done to you kids.  I remember learning  in college about horizontal violence.  That is what occurs in situations where people are in no position to overthrow the ones in power so they take it out on each other.  Black on black crime, co-workers bickering among each other, rioters attacking innocent by-standers.  And perhaps.... siblings who were in no position to take on the violent and unreasonable head of their family.  Perhaps this is part of why you were the scapegoat of your siblings.  Your father was behind that abuse too due to his power over everyone in the family.  What a pathetic man he was.  He got what he had earned in the end.

Pennyplant

[isittoolate]

hiya pennyplant

horizontal violence.

Thank you for the post.
That sounds exactly what could have happened and I never knew the phrase/condition existed....just amongst the squabbling, fighting, stealing from, taunting etc. in our family.

Thanx
Izzy

[Hopalong]

Izzy,
This may sound dumb but for every fresh and nourishing meal I've ever eaten that was possible thanks to the grueling labor of children on a farm....

thank you.

love, and every healing thought poured back over your painful memories,

Hops

[isittoolate]

hiya Hops

That is not dumb.

It's amazing how many people eat food and never think of the source!

I'll tell you a couple of other unbelievablel things of my dad's sick behaviour, when we we growing up and less than 14-15 yrs old.

When we needed veal, we had to help him hold down a little calf and watch him hit it over the head with a large sledgehammer to kill it----- veal for the people, and us

We had to help him corner a large pig in a horse stall and hold it down while he slit its throat to then hang it up to bleed out. Then we kids had to take the carcasss and rub it up and down a barrell of scalding hot water. The edges if the barrell scraped the hair from the pig's skin----otherwise people would be getting hairy pork.

Mom would say, "Go get a chicken for dinner" and without even thinking, I would pick up the hatchet, go get a chicken and cut off its head then bleed it out--then mom would pick off the feathers and ===Onward Ho. Chicken for dinner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have no thought of thinking these things were not "right for a child". I must have flipped a switch within me!

Izzy

[gratitude28]

AAArrrggghh... it ate my answer to you Izzy...

(((Izzy))))

[CB123]

ed

[isittoolate]

Thank you CB

I think that context is everything.  You were verbally and emotionally abused in the midst of all that.  That is going to get all mixed up with what you were doing.

Well at least I didn't become another John Wayne Gacy!