"A Child Called 'It'" by Dave Pelzer

I had heard about this book a long time ago, maybe in college. It is the first of 3 short books (I'm not sure how long, but only 153 pages on the eBook I had) about a man's childhood, and how he survived it.

His childhood had the most horrific abuse. For whatever reason (maybe it will be discussed further in the next 2 books), his mother decided that he was not worthy of human affection. From the age of 4 on he was abused and degraded. He had brothers and they were treated well, but he took the brunt of her abuse. She would make him wash the dishes every night, usually without dinner, gave him horrible punishments like being locked in a non ventilated bathroom with ammonia and Clorox mixed in a bucket, made him vomit anything he ate at school and then eat it, etc etc etc. It was hard to read. At school, teachers and the other kids thought he was just a "bad kid" because he would steal food, smelled terrible, wore old clothes, and didn't do well in school. At one point his mom didn't feed him for 10 days straight. Finally, someone spoke up. They KNEW things were not as they appeared, and called the police. (This was in the first part of the book, before it went back to his earlier years. You don't see him get taken out of his home during this book.) He was 12 at this point, which means he endured all of this during such a tender age.

It seems mind boggling that someone wouldn't have called the police earlier. Someone DID call Child Services, but the mom caught a whiff of it and treated him well for the 3 days before they came, so when the social worker asked if he was treated well he would answer yes. When he said she punished him when he was bad she beat him when the woman left.

As a mother, I don't understand how you can turn your back on a child like that. Child abuse is the most abhorrent thing I can imagine. Even his own brothers started to see him as a "bad kid", and would rat him out. And the DAD. The dad is almost as infuriating as the mom because he just stood by and didn't do anything! How can you watch your kid get beaten, starved, even stabbed at one point, and do... nothing? Wouldn't it be better to call CPS on your own wife than let him endure anything else?

I am intrigued to finish the books, just to see how he survives this. It ends with him saying the Lord's Prayer, and when he said "Deliver us from evil" I got actual goosebumps. This man has a spirit like nothing else I can imagine.