CONTENT WARNING: Animal Neglect

My husband and I went away for a week. I agreed to pay my younger sister (age twenty-seven) $100 to drive fifteen minutes to my house once a day, make sure my two cats had food and water, and empty the collection bin on their automatic litter box. I checked in with her every day, and she assured me all was well.

When we came back, the cats had no food and no water, and their litter box was so full that it had stopped cleaning. But the $100 I’d left for [Sister] was gone. So, I called her. 

Me: “Uh, hey. What happened here? Did you not take care of my cats?”

Sister: “Well, [Her Husband] and I decided to go out of town, too.”

Me: “Okay… And the cats?”

Sister: “What about them?”

Me: “You were supposed to be taking care of them.”

Sister: “I did. I stopped by before we left.”

Me: “When were you here last?”

Sister: *Defensive* “I don’t know!”

Me: “What do you mean, you don’t know? I paid you to stop here every day. I want my money back.”

Sister: “Well, I would have, but we changed plans.”

Me: “And you should have told me that before, so I could arrange for someone to care for them. Are you f****** kidding me right now?”

Sister: “What? They’re fine. We came by the day after you left and did what you wanted. What’s the big deal?”

Me: “So, you came by for like fifteen minutes, took the $100, and that’s all you did?”

Sister: “They’re fine!”

I hung up. She tried calling back a few times, but I just kept picking up and hanging up so she couldn’t leave a voicemail. The cats are fine, overall, but my relationship with my sister is forever ruined.

CONTENT WARNING: Child Neglect/Emotional Abuse, Nightmare Fuel

People seemed to believe this story I wrote was true, which is good because it is, so I think I can dredge up another story or two about my insane parents from those memories I try not to think about anymore. 

I’ll start with a cautionary tale about what NOT to say to young children. 

When I was three, I had that most common of afflictions for children: believing in monsters that hid in the dark — under the bed, in the wardrobe, peering in the window, or out in the hallway peeking in the door. At the time, I spent the days with a childminder who was a better mom to me than my mother ever was, as both my parents were working full-time, and her family treated me like their own.

Every so often, events conspired so that I’d stay the night with them, on weekends when my parents had to travel to go to some big meeting or wanted to go drinking. They had been working on getting me to sleep in the dark by providing me with a hot water bottle that was also a plush toy, sleeping in the same room as me with the lights off, or using a dim red bulb in the bedside lamp to acclimate me to it. That glorious woman did a lot more for me than that, and I credit her for my love of helping and comforting others, but this isn’t a story about good things happening. 

My father was a military man. He had left the army not too long before this and had carried a number of bad lessons from it. Discipline is all well and good, but you can’t expect a child to sit quietly through a six-hour car journey with nothing but classical music to listen to. Stoic self-reliance is commendable, but you can’t tell a child they’re too big to cry when they wander through a patch of nettles. And you absolutely cannot ever do this. 

I was crying in bed, begging him not to turn the lights off, begging him not to leave me alone in the dark, begging him to at least close the curtains, and begging for something to keep me safe so the monsters wouldn’t get me.

His response?

Father: “You’d better go to sleep quick; the monsters can’t get you while you’re sleeping.”

Then, he closed the door, turned off the hallway lights, and walked away, step, step, step against the wooden floorboards echoing up through the darkness, accompanied by his chuckling, celebrating a good practical joke. 

I didn’t sleep that Friday night. Nor the night that followed. Or the night that followed that.

That Monday, I spent all day asleep on a couch, listening to my childminder pottering about her kitchen, finally feeling something close to safe. I concluded that the only way I could sleep was if I had something to fight the monsters. 

And that is how I spent sixteen years sneaking kitchen knives into bed so I could sleep with a weapon under my pillow. I only recently shook off the rest of that trauma. I spent two and a half decades with my imagination running wild, seeing pale faces and long clawed fingers peering in or reaching around windows and doors, and having repeated pain-filled nightmares about being ripped to shreds by circling teeth as I fell through a pitch-black pit. 

Next time, if there is one, I should probably go into how I ended up paralyzed for three days because my parents were convinced that my illness wasn’t that bad or how they hid eighteen years of loving gifts and letters that my biological mother sent in a locked filing cabinet. Maybe those are a bit too much, though.

Related:
When The Tree Provides The Apple With The Resources To GET AWAY

My friend’s sons are seven and nine and believe they are too old to be babysat. They are actually little terrors to their babysitter, which makes it hard to find a new one when the old one suddenly becomes unavailable. As a single parent, [Friend] needs to be able to work to support the family. So, every once in a while, [Friend] will invite me over and “just happen” to have to go somewhere while I’m there. 

Friend: “Oh, [My Name], I just remembered that I have to work today! Do you want to stay here, or…?”

Me: “I mean, if you don’t mind, I’ll stay here.”

Friend: “Sure, that’s great. If anybody gets hungry, there’s food in the fridge. Boys, [My Name] is going to be here while I’m gone. You can show her the new game you just got!”

The boys are thrilled to have someone play this new game with them. We pass the time with little drama until [Friend] returns. 

Friend: “Hey, guys, thanks for keeping [My Name] company while I was gone.”

The kids excitedly talk about what we did while [Friend] was gone.

Friend: “Well, it sounds like you had a blast.”

Older: “See, I told you we don’t need a babysitter.”

Younger: “Yeah, babysitters are for babies.”

Friend: “You may be right, [Younger].”

We keep this charade going for about three years until one of them realizes our evil plan.

Younger: “So, [My Name] was our babysitter the whole time?”

Friend: “Well, no. Sometimes she hung out with all of us, remember?”

Younger: “But she was our babysitter.”

Friend: “Yes, sometimes.”

Older: “Oh, man!”

Now they are suspicious every time I come over!

Back when I was a young, dumb, broke college kid, a well-off friend of mine got a ten-month job on an oil platform. He needed someone to live in his very nice house so that it wouldn’t look unlived in, and to take care of his pets (two medium-small dogs, some fish, a cat, a turtle, a snake, a frog, a tarantula, and three birds). He asked me to do it.

We’ve been friends since before elementary school, and he knows that I like very specific instructions, so he gave me very specific instructions as to the times each pet needed to be fed, how to mix their food, how to play with them for enrichment, how often to play with them, how often to clean the cages, and stuff like that.

His cat had an annoying habit of clanking the metal bowl when there was no food in the bowl but it wasn’t time to feed him. He would put his paw in the bowl and tip it just enough to make a “clank” sound.

I have difficulty with noises like that, so I started picking up the bowl when the cat did that and flipping it over so that it could no longer be tipped. After a while, the cat stopped doing that.

When my friend got back, he asked me how I broke his cat of the habit of begging for food every time the bowl was empty.

Me: *Obliviously* “What do you mean?”

Friend: “The cat always clanks his bowl if it’s the middle of the day and he finds it’s empty. I always have to put food in it just to make him stop clanking it.”

Me: “Oh. That was begging? I didn’t realize. I just flipped the bowl over.”

My friend stared at me like his mind was blown; he’d never thought to flip over the bowl.

I don’t really remember much of this story as it happened when I was six. I’ve heard it a lot over the years since my brother held it over my head for my entire childhood. 

When I was six and my brother was eight, my parents went on a weeklong vacation for their tenth wedding anniversary. Our dad’s parents lived far away. We usually didn’t see them much, but they came up to babysit us that week. I was a very anxious kid and was worried about it, but my parents reminded me how much I loved my mom’s parents and said it would be fine.

As soon as my parents left, my brother and I started to feel uncomfortable. My grandparents would tell us, “You’re too skinny! You need to eat more,” and force us to eat past when we were full. They apparently said a bunch of weird things about my interests. I was a little girl who almost always wore skirts and loved playing with princess dolls. I was also a huge nerd who loved reading anything I could get my hands on, even as a six-year-old, and was obsessed with dinosaurs. My grandparents couldn’t put the two together. (I think they could understand girly girls and tomboys but not anything in between.)

They also said something along the lines of my glasses being a crutch for me to use instead of improving my eyesight naturally, and they kept trying to convince me to go without them the whole week. They said it was sad that a girl this young needed glasses. They insinuated that the only reason a kid my age would ever need glasses was to be bullied. I was teased at school but not because of glasses; this was in the early 2000s, and I was far from the only kid at school who needed glasses.

I’ve had glasses since I was a literal baby. I have amblyopia (lazy eye), severe astigmatism, and a really high prescription in general (+10 in one eye, +13 in the other) which hasn’t really changed much since I was a kid. Anything at any distance is too blurry to make out properly without them. When I was in fourth grade, for some reason, I took off my glasses when I went biking, and I almost immediately crashed into a tree and ended up in a wheelchair for the whole summer with two broken legs. So, my glasses were a pretty big deal.

I was a very anxious kid, so I didn’t really stand up for myself much. My brother argued with them on my behalf. I refused to take my glasses off whenever my grandparents asked me to, though, since they were so important for my functioning. They kept pestering me throughout the evening.

When I woke up on the first morning after my parents left, my glasses were nowhere to be found. My parents had given us a slip of paper with their hotel number, so my brother called, and after a few attempts, he was able to tell my parents what had happened. My parents were furious and demanded to speak to our grandparents, who reluctantly gave my glasses back. 

My parents tore them a new one. They were in the act of booking flights to come back up when my mom’s parents, who had been informed of the incident, offered to pick us up and take us to their home for the weekend. We saw our maternal grandparents all the time, and they were loving and accepted us for all of our interests, quirks, and visual needs.

My maternal grandparents came to pick us up before lunch. My paternal grandparents were upset and yelled at our maternal ones for a while, but there wasn’t really anything to do. That was Saturday, so we ended up missing school for the next few days, and our parents did end up cutting their trip early to come back and see us, but it was worth it.

We never really saw our dad’s family after that — apparently, it sparked a big fight with his siblings and parents.

But as I said, I barely remember this incident; I’m just recounting what my brother has told me as he continues to lord it over my head that he saved the day, even into adulthood.