"bad girl."

“Bad girl.” I shouted at Katie while holding her little snout in my hands. I slapped her in the face over and over. “You see, this is what you do when she’s not being good,” I was showing my little sister how to discipline our Dalmatian, who was only months old. 

I was around seven years old when I woke up suddenly from a nap to my dad screaming at us. My sisters and I were in a deep sleep on the kitchen floor in the pizza shop. We often slept on a blue insulation blanket, right by the large pizza oven; the heat that radiated off of it both kept us warm and put us to sleep. That afternoon, we all woke up startled as my father started throwing things at us, screaming about something I couldn’t make out. I tried to protect myself from my dad, who was trying to hit us with his shoe, by grabbing onto my sister and using her as a shield. What did we do, what did I do? Was it because I was sleeping on the floor in a dress? I know my dad told us not to do that. Girls don’t do that. 

“Follow me,” he said with a straight face. My sisters and I grabbed onto one another, clutching each other for dear life. Following only a few steps behind him, I thought to myself, "Where is he taking us? What's gonna happen next?" The pit in my stomach grew, making it hard for me to breathe. I often found my body starting to seize when papa was mad. I'd start to tremble, and my throat always tightened as I would fight back the tears or hold back a scream. We walked out the back door, and there she was, a beautiful Dalmatian puppy. She was bouncing around in my dad’s car excitedly, waiting to be let out. “She's yours,” my dad said. I was so excited, I couldn’t believe it. He got us a dog. I paused for a moment thinking, "so, are we not in trouble? What just happened then?" Wiping the tears from my face, the fear instantly turned into excitement.

We didn’t have Katie for too long. Each time she made a mistake, my dad would hit her. “Bad dog,” he said as he proceeded to tie her leash tightly to the handle of the potato cutter that was mounted on the wall in the kitchen. He lifted the handle, so it tightened the collar around Katie's neck, lifting her off the ground; her hind paws barely touched the floor. She whined from being strangled, squirming to try and break free as he hit her over and over. Katie would often piss herself in fear whenever my dad entered the room. She would crouch down low trying to be invisible, tuck her tail in between her knees, and hide behind us for protection. One day, Katie started to bleed and a small trail of blood covered the house. “She has her periods,” my mom told us. I’m not sure what that meant, but I knew it wasn’t good. She instructed us to quickly clean the blood off the floor before my dad saw it, but we weren't quick enough. He grabbed her by the neck and, with disgust, he viciously threw her outside onto the porch, until someone put a diaper on her. 

“Bad girl.” I said to Katie again, as she excitedly jumped towards me to play. I curled my tiny hand into a fist and attempted to punch her in the ribs, emulating my father. I didn’t know that this time my dad was watching me. I'm not too sure if that was when he told us that Katie was “broken”. He put her in his car and that was the last time we ever saw her. She was put down soon after.

Two days after my tenth birthday, I noticed a spot of blood in my underwear. I remembered that getting a period wasn’t a good thing, and I was worried I was going to get in trouble, the same way Katie did. No one could find out, not even my sisters. I covered the tracks, until my mom caught on. But, I continued to lie and say it wasn’t me. I knew that if anyone found out and told my dad, that he would think that I was also broken.

I often wonder how accurate my memories are, or if I've fabricated stories from my childhood, piecing together bits and pieces to formulate a full scenario. Did I convince myself that all of this happened, are these memories actually worse, and I'm blocking them out to protect myself, from myself? I mean, it wasn't the first time I had watched my father hurt an animal. I was around the same age when I remember him taking my little sister and I into the garage to show us what to do with rodents. He had caught a chipmunk and put it in a pillowcase, and proceeded to violently smash the pillowcase against the concrete floor. He shot our house cat for scratching my sister once, and admitted to throwing him in the river. But then there were these moments where he showed so much compassion, giving CPR to a parrot at a pet store who flew into a window. Or saving a hawk that he had just mistakenly hit with his car. He'd set up these special bird feeders in our backyard, so we could watch the hummingbirds and would take us to our favorite field, to play and chase the fireflies. My dad was confusing and unpredictable. He showed us these extreme acts of evil and then, within seconds, would show wonderful moments of compassion. It was hard to predict what side of him you were going to get.

I shoved those memories of Katie away for many years, until my husband and I recently adopted a dog. Jax had a lot of past trauma, and his trauma brought out mine. For months, I cried, thinking of how scared Jax was of me, and it was the same sort of fear that Katie had of my father. I knew that if I was ever going to earn Jax's trust, I was going to have to show the sort of love and patience that this little guy had never experienced before. I knew that everything my dad had taught me about how to raise a dog was everything I was not going to do.