Even in the hardest places, I kept looking for light

As told to Sara Bonchek

September 1998

The room is dark. Only the large overhead barn light that mysteriously turns on every night and keeps the ducks safe with its luminosity shines through into the room. I’m small in size and in the world. I’m not in my bed and no one knows. I’m sitting on the wide window ledge high up off the ground. My small body presses against the glass pane, where cold air leaks through tiny cracks despite the winter glass screen. Huddled on the wide lip of the centuries’ old farmhouse window well, I lean against the large rounded left side of the little alcove. My small body aches for my mommy. Be rational, I tell myself. I’m old enough to have a sister, and I’m old enough to act like a grown-up. They tell me I shouldn’t cry or they will give me something to cry about. I make myself stop crying and drag myself off to sleep.

The hardest part of growing up in a non-nurturing, angry home is the effect it has on your self-esteem. I didn’t feel loved and loveable, or even likeable.

Growing up on a farm in rural Maryland — far from the pollution and frantic pace of the city, in the fresh country air — may sound idyllic; for me it was anything but. Most of my time outside of school was devoted to farm chores: feeding and watering the large numbers of chickens and turkeys, shoveling the chicken house, collecting eggs, baling hay, mowing grass, manning the farm store, and helping with the butchering of animals.

Summer vacation meant crouching down weeding the garden and cultivating produce we would then feed my extended family over the winter, and cutting down trees and chopping wood so we would have enough firewood to heat the house in the winter.

It was hard work. But the risk of messing up any of my chores was harder.

July 2003

I need to collect the eggs, feed and water the laying hens, feed and water the chicks in the chicken house, check the barn, feed and water the rabbits, and I’m not sure what else. We split up the chores three ways, but I hate doing the meat birds. I hate how much effort it takes to take care of them. I’d rather do a bunch of other chores and leave the meat birds to my brother and sister. Today, I forgot to do one of my chores. I don’t remember which one, but when my father asked me if it was done, I remembered I didn’t do it. I got in big trouble because he thought I did it on purpose. But I didn’t! I just forgot.

We were terrified of my father, and I spent a lot of my childhood hiding from him to evade punishment. He would beat us regularly for talking back or forgetting to do chores. My mother was no protection; she’d “turn us in” when we misbehaved, knowing he would hurt us. My parents main discipline technique, besides physical fear, was to shame us. If they shamed us enough, they supposed, we would act appropriately.