Yes, 2020 has been a difficult year for the entire world. But think about it, with no world war or pandemic for many years, we’ve been lucky until now. We should count our blessings, things could be much worse. My parents grew up in Europe during the Second World War. You can walk down the street whenever you want and not be shot or bombed. You can go to the store and get food, clothing, toys, furniture, you name it. We’re not starving to death, there are no food rations. So you have to wear a mask, big deal, that is not something to riot over or complain about. So you can’t meet a friend for a latte, or throw a party. We have technology to reach and see/talk to people. We have hospitals and seasoned doctors with modern medicine to help us, when in 1919 they weren’t as fortunate. We’ve had it very easy. Be thankful. You still have many freedoms and luxuries.

 #1000gifts #beingthankfulindifficulttimes

His name was Wilbur, but I called him Stinky. He wasn’t really that stinky, but he was a rat, so I thought it was an apt name.

My mother was a bookkeeper at a Montessori school and she brought him home over the summer because there was no one to take care of him. I volunteered to take on the task and put the cage in my bedroom. I think was around 13 or 14 years old at the time.

I kept his cage clean because if I let it go for one day, he’d start to eat his poop. The first time I saw him do that I was mortified and was worried he’d die. The cage was orange and rectangular plastic with metal bars. I proudly wrote in blue marker “Wilbur” on the outside of it. But the name Stinky still stuck.

I gave him baths, let him crawl around my room, and even brought him downstairs on my shoulder to greet my family. One time I came down and put him on my brother’s girlfriend’s shoulder, and she shrieked loudly and had tears in her eyes. I didn’t think Stinky was that scary. Maybe it was his pink tail. He was white with large black and brown spots. I thought he was rather cute.

We had my brother’s best friend boarding with us while he went to university. His room was right across the hall from mine, and was always a mess, with dirty cups filled with cold, mouldy coffee, dust bunnies scattered across the floor, and clothes, papers, and books flung all about. We were always teasing him to clean it up, so one day, while he was in the bathroom, I secretly put Stinky in his room and closed the door. The boarder went back in his room to resume studying, and I waited. After a few minutes, I heard scuffling, banging and “What the ??!!” He came out of his room holding Stinky, standing in my doorway, smiling angrily.

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

“Oh just to have some fun with you and maybe scare you into cleaning your room!” I said smugly.

He smirked, gave me the rat, and returned to his room. That wasn’t the only prank I played on him.

During this time, I had been begging my parents for a kitten. We finally got one, a calico female, named Josephine. I thought the kitten and rat might not get along, so it was time to upgrade to cat only status. I promised my parents I would take full care of the kitten and keep her in my room, litter box and all.

I didn’t know what to do with Stinky. My brother then offered to take Stinky and take care of him in his room in the basement. I was thrilled and gave him the cage, but he got Stinky another black-topped, smaller, round, metal cage.

My brother placed the rat-in-cage on the freezer in the basement, which was right beside his room. I was relieved of rat duty.

Months passed. The freezer was also beside the bathroom the whole household used for showering. Every morning I greeted Stinky, noticing a foul smell, dirty shavings, and poop everywhere. I asked my brother to clean the cage out, and he said he would, but never, or rarely, did.

The stench grew fouler, and poop piles larger, and Stinky’s health started to decline. Large tumours grew on his neck. I begged my brother to clean the cage, and even offered to do it for him, but he said, no, he’d do it. I think I just broke down and cleaned the cage a few times, and I don’t think he even noticed.

I have to admit, I don’t know why I just didn’t take the rat back. He was in a cage, and the cat wouldn’t have gotten to him, and even if he did, they could have been trained to be friends. I was young and ignorant, and a little intimidated by my older brother.

Then my brother decided to end Stinky’s life because he was suffering with the tumours. He said he was going to smash him against a brick wall and bury him. I watched him do it one summer’s evening at the side of the house. I was fascinated. I felt sad. I felt guilty. My brother asked me what kind of girl watches her brother kill a rat and bury it. I didn’t know what kind of girl I was.

I don’t know how to express myself right now. I want to say so many things in a short paragraph that will connect with you and proclaim a powerful message. People judge based on archaic ways of doing things that caused permanent damage. They judge from their own pain and inability to control that pain. They want to control you and inflict their own methods on you because they feel so out of control with themselves. And most of the time they suffer in silence, the only expression comes out in negativity and words that hurt. I just want to say, do what’s best for you and don’t listen to those who say otherwise. I do things differently and that’s okay as long as no one is getting hurt. Just as they won’t budge from their opinions, neither do you on what you believe. Be that rock to stand strong and inspire others to think outside the regular norms. Don’t be the sound of silence.

I knew where I was but I was lost.  It was the dead of night on a city, residential street. The cheerful, brick houses that normally burst with families and sunny gardens were now darkened and hollow. Ominous, ghostly voices beckoned me to enter. I started to run, but with each house I passed, the voices grew louder and closer, gradually turning into screams. I wasn’t sure if they were mine or someone else’s.

I awoke with a gasp, grateful to be in the safety of my bed. I stared at the shadowy ceiling and laid there, not moving. My gaze fell to the foot of my bed.

I froze.

A black figure hovered just behind and above the bedpost. It didn’t look like a person but rather an odd, elongated diamond, blacker than the blackness of my room.  The bedroom door was open, the playpen where my 2-year-old nephew had slept earlier in the evening was empty, meaning my sister had come during the night to pick him up and take him home. I stared at this figure, wondering, was it a jacket hanging on the hinge of the antique wardrobe that stood at the opposite end of the room? Was it a shadow, a fan?  Fear clasped my mouth shut with ice-cold hands as I realized it wasn’t any of those things. I turned over and faced the wall beside me.

I heard a deep sigh.

I yelled, “DAD!”

“DAD!”

“DAD!”

At twelve years of age, I wasn’t too old to call for him in the middle of the night.

“DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!”

A door opened down the hallway, footsteps pattered, and the light flashed on as my Dad entered the room. I swung around, and looked. The figure had vanished. The alarm clock on my nightstand read 3:15 am.

I told my Dad what I saw, and he immediately placed his hands on the door frame and started to pray. A deeply religious man who studied the Bible daily, he didn’t know what else to do. I heard him every morning through the heating vents, praying loudly from the depths of the basement for God to protect him from evil spirits, rebuking them in the name of Jesus. He was using this supposed power to chase away this iniquity from my presence.

He then sat on the bed beside me and prayed some more, asking for the blood of Jesus to be put around the room for protection. The image of blood dripping down the walls scared me more than the nightmare and figure.

I don’t know how I slept through the rest of that night. The following night, I slept in my parents’ room. They told me if I saw anything like that again, to tell it to go away in the name of Jesus.

A few months prior, I remembered my brother-in-law telling me stories of his and my sister’s house being haunted, how they heard voices, footsteps in the middle of the night, how he heard a man laughing upstairs one day. He ran upstairs to where his son was crying in his crib, and said he found a claw scratch on his son’s back. He also said my sister was in the basement, and she heard the back door of the house open and footsteps come down the stairs towards her. No one was there, and a box that was securely stored on a shelf above her head fell all by itself onto the floor. They then called a pastor who came to the house, and as he prayed, daylight penetrated the pitch black rooms.

I had recently converted to Christianity. My dad took me and my two brothers to a Friday night youth service where they showed a movie about the end of the world. In this movie, the rapture had just happened and people were left behind. They were forced to get the Mark of the Beast tattooed on their wrist or forehead, and those who refused were executed or killed by the Beast, who had somehow manifested itself on earth. I was so frightened, I ran to the front of the room during the altar call, begging for Jesus to save me from this future plight.

My father told me that Satan was out to get me now, and that this figure came to frighten me back to my former, heathen ways. He told me to hold strong and that the devil would keep trying to scare me using these kinds of tactics. He said this was spiritual warfare, not something to take lightly.

Nightmares plagued me for weeks and months. Legions of demons chased me, witches sat in my closet, and haunting faces loomed at me from just outside my window. I cried often, terrified of the battles that lay ahead of me. I practiced the phrase, “Go away, in the name of JESUS!”, over and over again.

Years later, I don’t believe in any of this. I am not a religious person and don’t call myself a Christian. After much self-examination and thought, I realized it was just fear itself that plagued me and caused sleep paralysis and hallucinations. I also found out my now ex-brother-in-law had completely fabricated his stories.

I have come to realize a lot of Christians and organizations use fear as a tactic to convert. As a tender pre-teen, this traumatized me for years before I came to the above revelations. Even though I don’t believe they exist, I still have nightmares about demons and wake up yelling at them to get out. At fifty years of age, the damage is still there. My father still believes in what he did back then, but doesn’t shove it in my face as I have expressed my de-conversion many times to him in heated arguments.

I won’t go into my belief system now because I don’t really have one. That’s not what this post is about. It’s about an experience that used fear to manipulate and control which is not something I believe in. And if any of you have experienced something similar to this, please share and discuss.

“Shame dies when stories are told in safe places” – Ann Voskamp