Even in the hardest places, I kept looking for light
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.
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