Abuse

When I wrote this, I was reminded of the book I have just finished reading, My Story, which contained three of Dave Pelzer’s books – A Child Called ‘It’, The Lost Boy, and A Man Named Dave.

Among the three books, I admire the courage shown in the first book – A Child Called It. A Child Called It recounted the days when Dave was four to twelve years old. His horrendous ordeal with his mother whose brain had gone haywire made me shiver while reading. Imagine a little child to have experienced these:

• face smashed on the mirror
• blood gushing out of the nose because of a smack in the face then the tissue paper being rammed up in his nose
• punches that seemed to last forever
• left arm injured because of severe grips and punches
• go without dinner and accomplish whatever chores his mother asked him to do
• sent to the garage to stand until his mother called him to go to bed
• smacked, punched and kicked until he crumpled to the floor
• a bar of soap crammed down to his throat
• asked to strip off his clothes and stand by the kitchen stove
• arm held in the orange-blue flame of the stove and was asked to climb up the stove to lie on the flames to which he refused and by doing so received blows around his head and chest
• was brainwashed to make excuses about the bruises and marks on his body
• denied dinner for a week which became frequent until he had no dinner anymore causing him to steal food from his classmates’ lunchboxes, and at the school
• referred to as ‘The Boy’ then later ‘It’
• was blamed why her mother and father had arguments
• face was smeared with his brother’s soiled diaper then asked to eat the feces
• stole food from the garbage can to have something to eat
• was made to vomit after arriving from school because of his mother’s suspicion that he stole food then asked to swallow them all
• for months, slept under the breakfast table next to a box of kitty litter then was banished downstairs to the garage
• was made to swallow a tablespoon of ammonia then on the following day made to swallow two tablespoon of ammonia in front of his father
• was made to swallow spoonfuls of Clorox and dishwashing liquid (which was her favorite), too
• was demanded to sit on his hands with his head thrust backward, in a ‘prisoner-of-war’ position, at the bottom of the stairs
• was accidentally knifed just above the stomach when his mother was drunk waving her hands to him with a knife
• took care of his wound from the knife when it got infected because he doesn’t want to ask help from his mother who seemed to have gotten back to her ‘normal self’
• was starved for about ten consecutive days
• was asked to clean the bathroom under a time limit with the door closed and with the mixture of ammonia and Clorox also inside the bathroom causing him to cough up blood for an hour
• was asked to mow lawns and meet the impossible quota on his earnings
  

This list does not speak enough but I decided to cut it short just to give a picture of how appalling his ordeal was. Those punishments were made for mere reasons and most of the time without reasons at all. I cannot and will not blame Dave Pelzer for calling her a bitch and looking on her as a monster because she was truly a monster.

Dave Pelzer said in his afterword, “Some readers will find the story unreal and disturbing, but child abuse is a disturbing phenomenon that is a reality in our society.” Dave Pelzer’s case is one of the three worst cases of child abuse in the US.