Even though the abuse I suffered growing up wasn't particularly extreme or horrifying, it was still pretty fucked up. It was so fucked up that it spawned what appears to an outsider to be a sweet and affectionate familial gift-giving tradition.
My dad has always given my mom wooden spoons for Christmas. She enjoys cooking, so on the surface it just looks like a man giving his wife a simple but thoughtful gift based on something she likes doing.
The reality is that my dad is just replacing the wooden spoons that were broken over the course of the year from being used to hit me. A wooden spoon is hardly an unbreakable object but it still requires a lot of violent force to break one. That kind of violence was used against me often enough that my dad felt compelled to replace all the spoons that were broken on me.
It's pretty fucking twisted that hitting a kid with enough force to break a wooden spoon spawned a tradition in my house.
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