4. A Blessing and a Curse

4.

I became a vegetarian the day my father finally left the house for good.

My mother told me I had always rejected meat, even as a baby. The smell, the texture, the idea of it made me sick. I don’t mean metaphorically—I mean I would gag. Vomit. Shake. My body knew something my voice couldn’t yet say. But he didn’t care. He would force me to sit at the table for hours until I ate it. And if I tried and vomited? He’d wipe it in my face like a punishment.

He was a hunter. He brought home animals and made me look at them like it was supposed to teach me something—discipline, detachment, disgust. Once, someone left a kitten in his car as a joke—because he was known to be so indifferent to animals. He told me he was going to drown it in the morning. I don’t think he meant it. But I didn’t care. I couldn’t take the risk. I snatched the kitten and barricaded myself in my room. My mother left food at the door for me and the kitten. She knew I wouldn’t come out until he was gone.

We had a cistern in the basement that filled with rainwater—the same basement he’d beat the dog in when he came home drunk and decided the dog had somehow transgressed. One of my cats fell in once. It was making a terrible, panicked sound—yowling like it was being torn apart. My father stood there, watching, pretending to debate whether to help. I was hysterical. He only moved when it was clear I was going in myself. And even then, he moved slowly. I was 7 years old.

Before he left, I became a specialist in avoidance. I’d hide meat in napkins, slip food to the dog under the table, wash the chili beans in the sink to shake off the ground beef. Anything to avoid putting it in my mouth. When he left, my mother was as relieved as I was to let me skip the meat. She didn’t like me vomiting at the table any more than I did.

I was 11 years old, in a small town in the late ’70s, and a vegetarian. That made me even more of an oddity than I already was. Adults mocked me and told me it was a phase. Some tried to sneak meat into my food like they were doing me a favor. Kids picked on me for it—one more reason to call me weird.

But I didn’t care. The conviction ran deeper than defiance. It wasn’t just about food—it was about harm, about control, about saying no when everything in your environment is telling you to comply. The idea that I should accept suffering—someone else's or my own—for the sake of ease has always sat wrong with me.

Looking back, it was a kind of foreshadowing. A signal that I would often find myself in rooms where I refused to bend just to be allowed to stay. It’s a blessing and a curse.