seaturt209
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2024
Seems all of zoes and jakobs logs are gone from jstlks discord, I managed to snag a message from zoe about about why she is a whore today, im sure this will send everyone involved into a spiral
$\quad$This is a story that embodies my biological mother's mental illness. But in other ways, it captures glimpses of what made her a very endearing character. Prior to losing her share of custody over my brother and me when I was roughly 6 years old, my mom had been in the throes of an extremely abusive relationship with a man who would become our on-and-off-again stepfather. When they would break up, it was a gamble whether she would become deeply depressed and confined to her bedroom for days on end without checking on us, or alternatively, have a surge of positive energy, become religiously enlightened, and seek out other quick fixes to improve her situation. Essentially, she could not have been a more classic case of manic-depressive bipolar disorder. But as a child, there isn't much psychoanalyzing you do beyond noticing that "mommy is sad" and "mommy is happy," and you just learn to really lean into the happy times when they are in front of you.
$\quad$The morning after a particularly awful fight, my mom took us out to a diner for breakfast. She explained to us that she was optimistic that this tumultuous relationship was finally over and that she was going to reconfigure her life, focusing on making us her main priority. She would often buy us gifts after we had witnessed things we shouldn't have, and this morning she wanted to take us to the pet store for a treat. The decision to purchase parakeets was made out of convenience because she already owned a large vintage birdcage that had been sitting in the living room as décor for quite some time. The trouble was that this cage was meant for a single bird of a much larger size, most likely a parrot. My mother's solution to the mismatch between the size of the bird and the cage was to come about via some simple manic math - buying eight birds instead of one. However, she did not factor in that the bars on the cage were too wide to contain the birds, leaving them free to fly about the house. Have I mentioned that we also had multiple cats and an obnoxious Pomeranian in the home? You can see where the story is trending. When we came home from school the next day, there were dead parakeets scattered around the home. My memory of this event cuts out at the sight of one of them, a beautiful ivory parakeet, lying dead on the sofa. I don't remember how we dealt with the bodies or how any of us reacted emotionally. I truthfully didn't even remember this event entirely until a visit to my grandmother's home some time later. My grandmother, bless her heart, was always there to pick up the pieces of my mother's impulsive choices. As it turns out, only one bird survived the parakeet massacre, a blue male which happened to be the only one that I had picked out myself. My mother must have called my grandmother in for backup and decided he was in better hands with her than in our home. My grandma proudly named him Darwin.
$\quad$That wasn't the first nor nearly the last time that she would cling to animals for hope when things looked bleak. She loved large aquarium fish tanks but neglected to research what kinds of fish can cohabitate in the same tank. On more than one occasion, I remember her excitement at adding vibrant new fish to the tank just for them to have been eaten up by a larger fish by the next day. I also remember beaming with pride when sharing my fun fact about myself with my first-grade classmates: that I had over twenty-five pets (this included the fish, but there were at least five cats my mom had rescued as strays). When I was a teenager, I probably saw her less than once a year. One of those times was for a Thanksgiving meal in which she brought a pet chicken, stuffed inside of a cat carrier, which she was nursing back to health because it had been born unable to walk. She fed the chicken a slice of turkey at the dinner table.
$\quad$When ruminating over these events, I have always held onto anger at the idea that my mother was so keen on bringing new animals into her home to take care of them, but she didn't fight to take care of us, her children, seemingly at all. And as a child, I truly believed that it was as simple as her picking animals over people, that they must have been more lovable than us in some regard. But as I write this, the obvious has occurred to me: my mom has been fighting for her whole life to successfully take care of someone, anyone. The birds, the cats, the dogs, the fish, her children. She is addicted to the prospect of being the kind of person who can care for others, but fails the execution every time, regardless of species. During the time my brother and I were in her care, we may just as well have been uncaged parakeets in a home with feral cats, or guppies in a fish tank with carnivorous fish. We saw and went on to suppress things no child should bear witness to, things that undoubtedly changed the trajectory of our paths in life. In my heart, I know she wanted to be a good mother, but her brain made it impossible.
$\quad$ Last year, I adopted my first dog. The condition he was in when he was rescued by the police was horrific, being one of dozens of dogs at a residence suffering from mange and malnourished to the point of being close to death. These animals required months of rehabilitation and diligent care. I am not an animal abuse sympathizer; In fact, nobody could be more angry at the elderly couple that did this to them than myself. To say that my dog has been anything less than a tsunami of joy and good fortune in my life would be an understatement, and I am fiercely protective of him. However, when people hear Cottons story, they are quick to jump to conclusions about the intent of the people who caused his suffering. I had not been able to place this sense of discomfort until writing this, but I can see now that my experience with my mother has made me empathetic of the desire to cling to animals in times of desperation.