Breaking Puppies

My first memory is of abuse. I carried it with me for the longest time, a dark seed of knowledge that was both irrefutable and incomprehensible. My parents never spoke of it afterwards, not as a joke, and not as an example of what a terrible kid I was. They never tried to justify it or explain it away. They simply behaved as if it had never happened. Instead, it stayed in me, waiting for an explanation, some light I could cast on that seed to grow it into the proof of mistreatment it had always been. It finally came the year I turned eighteen.

That summer, I was incredibly bored, and also anxious about the unknowns of starting college. That combination meant that I read every book I could find on my parents’ shelves, no matter how boring or ancient it might have been. At one point, having read all the Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe we had available, I reached for a manual on training puppies.

I knew when it had come into our collection. My mom had briefly had a German Shepherd named Duchess, who was trained more like a body guard than a guard dog. She would put herself in front of my mom and anyone she was talking to. Her resting position was between my mom’s legs or at her feet, and she paid devoted attention to anyone she thought might be a threat. Duchess was no match for the Tennessee summer, and she died of a heat stroke fairly young. Still, she was the mold my parents used for every dog after her, and this book was part of that process.

I thumbed through the book without much interest, until I hit the section on how to start training puppies, complete with photos of the techniques. It felt like a thunder clap directly overhead as I dropped into the first flashback I can remember having. I’d never forgotten what my parents did to me that night, not really. I’d pushed it as far back in my mind as I could, only remembering it briefly and rarely, but suddenly I was in it, plunged into a cacophony of sound and sensation. There was a ringing in my ears that I don’t know if I experienced in the present moment or on the night of the incident. I could feel the scrape of cheap carpet on my cheek, the weight of my dad’s knee on my back, his demand that I apologize as I struggled to breathe. Then there was the increase of pressure, my mom’s pleas that I just say “sorry” as grey edges formed around my vision. The open closet and my mom’s feet faded to black and so did the flashback. It was maybe twenty seconds long, but with it came everything leading up to and following that scene.

I’d been playing with my dad in a way that I now recognize was abusive on its own. He would elbow or punch me in a soft, playful way. If I hit him back, he would hit me harder, until he was leaving sizeable bruises. I realize now that he was looking for an excuse to hurt me. Back then, it was just a game I didn’t like.

I don’t remember exactly how, but the game got out of hand that night. I ended up on the floor, with my dad’s knee between my shoulder blades. He told me to apologize if I wanted to be let up. At first I refused, but as he applied more weight to my back, I found that I couldn’t get enough air to say much of anything. For a few moments, I was screaming that I couldn’t breathe. I remember my dad saying if I could scream, I could breathe. Not long after, grey edges formed around my vision. I remember the shock of that change, how I thought I was going blind. The next thing I remember was waking up in bed, on top of my covers. It was dark, and although I don’t know exactly what time it was, I know it was the wee hours of the morning. I could hear my dad snoring through the walls.

No one ever mentioned that night again, but there it was, laid out in detail as a method of breaking puppies so that they would see their owners as the “alpha”. I’d seen my dad do a less horrific version of it with our boxer just a few years prior, pinning him to the ground until he licked my dad’s hand in submission.

I tried shoving the memory back again, but with it had come the context I’d been hungry for my entire childhood, and that was difficult to ignore. I understood, for the very first time, what it had all been for. All the humiliation, all the demands, all the beatings, the silences, they were all about control. More than anything else, my parents wanted to control me until I was as well trained, attentive, and obedient as Duchess had been. There was a reason I was punished severely any time I contradicted my parents. To them, it was evidence that my training was incomplete. If I could form a thought that wasn’t theirs without apology, they hadn’t made me submissive enough.

In many ways, reading that book was the beginning of the end of my relationship with my parents. In college, I started making moves to shake off my parents’ influence, changing majors from education to journalism and creative writing. I didn’t join a sorority or the band like they’d hoped. I didn’t get married or even date seriously while I was in my undergrad.

That said, eventually I was successful in shoving the memory back down. It had changed, though. The dark seed now existed in me, not as a question, but as a fact. When my parents treated me poorly, the truth of that moment flooded back, and I remembered not just what they did to me that night, but why they did it. They’d tried and failed to train me like one of their dogs. I did feel like I had to appease them at every turn, and that didn’t end overnight. Slowly, though, in the instances that I couldn’t be the impeccably trained puppy they were hoping for, I stopped blaming myself and started blaming them.

The dark seed they planted had finally started taking root, and while it took years to blossom, every instance of bad behavior on their part only fed it. When finally the buds started to form and I was ready to talk about their abuse, the first topic of serious conversation was how my parents broke their puppies.