She escaped... in Raised by a monster.(1)

I will never forget August first 2001.
My mother left us that day.
I don’t remember the events clearly so much as I remember knowing she wasn’t going to come back for me. She left on a lot of “Business trips” and this one was painted to be the same. What really got me was that her snake was leaving this time.
My mother didn’t have many possessions, my father had control of everything despite the fact that my mother was the one with a job, but she did own a snake, a five year old albino burmese python…her name was Ginger. My mother loved this snake, but she never took her on business trips. My clearest memory of this day is of baby-sitting Ginger while my mother packed her cage, I had never been bitten by this snake, and I had been exposed to her since the day she hatched 5 years ago, but something was off about her today. I was handling her as slowly as usual when I realized she was about to strike at me. I closed my eyes and held my breath knowing that if I didn’t fight it, she would realize it was a mistake. She got my hand pretty good, but recoiled immediately.
I remember crying at the sudden spurt of blood and trying to hide it from my mother. She came in and got Ginger to pack her away in the car. She slipped her into her pillowcase and tied it in a knot before telling me I should be more careful around the snake…no emotion, no anger, just “be careful with the snake.” It almost felt as if she might call me stupid. She loaded Ginger up into the passengers seat and started off down our long gravel driveway, I watched her leave and I remember a sudden pressure on my shoulder as my father squeezed it hard. He was drunk. I looked up at him as he used me to balance and without thinking I said “She isn’t coming back is she?” He looked at me for a few seconds before drunkenly saying “Your mother is what we like to call ‘a bitch’” and he stumbled back off into the house.
I have only a handful of memories where my father was genuinely sad drunk that never became angry drunk, this would be one of them.
I stood outside until night fell on that hot, dusty, AWFUL august day…terrified to walk into what was now a completely broken home, one I was probably not welcome in, and yet…it was the only place I could go.
I didn’t see my mother again for over a month, and by the time she got around to seeing me again…I had come to hate her.
In the time my father had had alone with me he had made absolutely sure that even though I couldn’t trust him, I felt I could trust him more than everyone else in the world.
He convinced me his twisted methods of punishment were healthy for a woman to experience, and once I agreed with him…the punishments were relaxed…and the faster I agreed to be punished, and the quieter I was during rape…the easier it was to live. I could trust him, I could trust him to punish me when I didn’t do what he wanted, and if I endured abuse well, there was often no further punishment, it was easy to understand. As long as he could keep me convinced I deserved and needed pain, I would stay subservient to him.
This screwed up how I saw healthy parenting. I saw it as a complex, needlessly tedious, and confusing. I found myself angry with kids that would talk about ordinary punishments at home and think “Well they’re not going to grow up to be tough like me, their parents don’t even hit them, they’ll grow up soft.” but I always had an internal warning to stop me from mentioning things like that. I would often be so wrapped up arguing with this voice that the moment to bring anything up would pass and I would feel like I couldn’t say what I had wanted to. These tiny dissociative sessions made me, at what little school I did attend, a magnet for bullying.

I’ll end here, I will probably pick up again with something that details what “Punishment” means.
I’d like to warn anyone reading that HAS NOT read accounts of child abuse before…punishments are often times very…creative. When an abuser has the ability to use all of their surroundings freely for said abuse, it tends to get weirder than it otherwise would be. When physically tormenting someone just doesn’t cut it anymore (Children adapt and learn to cope with situations very quickly) psychological torment is usually brought into play.

IDK if anyone needs this warning, I’m tired and a wee bit ill so I seem to think it’s a grand idea.

I’ll cover the bullying later, it gets bad around 4th-6th grade.