I’m in a strange boat. My bio mom was young when she got pregnant so I was put up for adoption. My adoptive mother was a cold, cruel woman who was emotionally and physically abusive; adoptive dad just ignored it and told me to not upset her. She did things like withhold medical attention to extract confessions about things I’d done she didn’t know about, destroyed personal objects like toys/clothes/cds, told me she didn’t love me but was legally obligated to take care of me, left me on the side of the road when I was 6 so the coyotes would eat me, stoked fears of a werewolf under my bed so I wouldn’t get out of it after she put me in it (needless to say, I pissed the bed well into elementary school because of that, which I got beaten for).

I had a lot of rage as a youth, though almost exclusively self-harm. Found punk in my teens and channeled the rage for my mother into rage at authority in general, and eventually found productive means of achieving that rather than mindless violence at whatever I think oppresses me. Still, 30yrs later, I love to thrash and be thrashed in a pit and the measure of a good night is “am I bruised and bleeding”.

But, I found my calling in dog rescue and training, a career where cruelty, heavy-handedness, and force are ill-serving. It’s a field a lot of men struggle in (unless they just beat a dog into submission) because the mannerisms and bravado the define how western society tells men they should act will make a scared, under-socialized, untrusting dog reject them. The terrified, the deaf, blind, wheelchair bound dogs are my specialty because I have an inner gentleness the, by social standards, would be called effeminate. I’ve helped hundreds over the years and it is one of the proudest achievements of my life.

I found my birth mother well into adulthood. She’s a hospice nurse and cat rescuer whom I share an uncanny amount of personal quirks with despite zero association aside from genetics. We’ve become wonderful friends and I have integrated into my bio-family after 20yrs of no contact with my adoptive one. I did get one boon in my childhood though. One set of grandparents were the kindest, gentlest, most loving grandparents anyone could hope for and quite likely the reason I didn’t end up a total sociopath or suicide.