Child Labor of Love!

One of the many recurring themes that you're going to end up hearing throughout these documented facts of my life is how shit poor I was as a child in the harsh tundra known as Priest Lake, Idaho. My Father worked tirelessly as a Police Officer, my Mother had an endless string of odd jobs as well as ran a day care, and to top it all off my parents both enforced rudimentary child-slave labor on me.

That's right, slave labor. Now I don't mean whiny bitch slave labor, as in "my mom made me do dishes and now I have prune hands" kind of labor, oh no. I mean true blue hard-core slave labor, where it almost qualified to have been sweat shop work. Actually the only thing missing was an hourly wage of five cents. The one thing I have to blame for all of this, aside from my parents and their social standing, is Huckleberries.

For those of you who don't know what the hell a Huckleberry is, it is a berry that grows in the Pacific Northwest region of America, it tastes like a sour blueberry injected with rubbing alcohol, and the mere mention of it gets most tourists absolutely wet with excitement.

My Mother saw the possibility for some capital gain in this cursed fruit, and decided to take a risk by starting a Huckleberry Chocolate business. It would end up staying around for some years and apparently be able to provide for frivolous things for our family like clothes and food.

Do you know how? With my sweat!

That's right, for days on end I was shackled to our kitchen counter, forced to wrap chocolate, after chocolate into purple tin wrappers, slicing my hands to hapless ribbons. Hours of mindless wrapping went by, piles of chocolates mounding up so that they could be put into little wooden boxes to be sold to unsuspecting tourists and afficiondos. But those boxes don't build themselves, do they? After nearly passing out from chocolate fumes it was then time to move on to the next station and create the boxes.

On to the next station I moved, where my delicate little child hands were forced to perform the duties of men. Tiny hands holding tinier nails, pounding constantly to create hideous boxes for disgusting chocolates. And when my hands were trembling with numbness from the hours of hammering it was still not over; the lids had to be made. The evil overlords that were my parents threw shards of wood in my face, along with a hot glue gun, with the only encouraging words being "work". More time passed, and the only way to gauge it was by the amount of blisters I got on my fingertips from the hot glue that poured out of the gun to make the lids for these chocolate coffins.

When that was all through all I could do was pass out on the floor, exhausted from days of work with no rest and the only food to eat being huckleberries, but it was still not over. The only real rest came when one of the two parents strode up and pointed at all of the completed boxes and said "Wrap". From there I had to take cellophane wrapper and an iron and wrap those bastard creations until they were all complete. This is the only point where I got any true rest, I could work half asleep here: ironing plastic in a daze.

After that it's pretty much a haze. I would just wake up in my room all of a sudden, my hands bandaged up, and a bowl of warm water for dinner waiting for me on the floor. There would be a note next to the bowl with a date letting me know how much time had passed while I was working. For years that was how I spent my summer. I really can't complain THAT much though, apparently it's the only way that I got new clothes for the school year, and fresh glue sticks to burn my hands with each week.

I bring these memories up to my parents on a regular basis, always pointing out how horrible it was to spend the vast majority of my summers with my hands covered in slivers and glue blisters. Summers that could have been spent creating happy memories instead, things like dry humping young women on the beach, which probably would have happened so nobody burst my bubble. Instead they always try to say it was never that bad, that I never went through all of those horrible ordeals, and that we had both cold and warm running water. No matter how hard they try they can never deny the child-slave labor that was enforced upon me, since I have my brother and sister to back my story up. My parents forced them to watch me work, yelling at them the whole time telling them that this is what happens when you don't behave. When these facts are forced into their face all they can say is "It paid for your school clothes".

So it's a Fact: Not only was I put through the basics of slavery as a child, but I also paid for my own school clothes.