The Childhood Scapegoat Story: The Cat Lady and the Making of a Demon Child

There’s a moment in every misunderstood child’s life where innocence collides with adult pain, and the child ends up holding the blame. Mine didn’t come from a single argument or a single misunderstanding. It came from a rule ... one that started when I was four years old and quietly followed me all the way through adolescence.

It began with the woman who lived behind us, the one the neighborhood quietly called “the cat lady.” Her house was a world completely different from mine, cluttered, chaotic, lived-in. Cats on counters, dishes piled high, toys scattered like confetti. To my four-year-old eyes, it looked magical. Wild. Free. A place where the rules bent a little.

I walked over one day looking for her youngest son, the little boy who was one year younger than me. The front door was open. The house was its usual chaos, but she wasn’t.

She was standing in the middle of the kitchen, crying.

I didn’t know her husband drank.

I didn’t know she was drowning.

I didn’t know the exhaustion of a woman holding up a collapsing world by herself.

I only knew how to do what a four-year-old does: try to help.

I asked where her son was.

She snapped.

I asked if she was okay.

She snapped again.

So I offered the only “solution” the purity-culture adults in my life had ever given me:

“Maybe if you go to church, you’ll feel better.”

I said it with innocence.

She heard it with shame.

And the consequences of that moment would shape my entire childhood.

She yelled.

I ran home confused.

And before I got through the door, my mother was already furious, not because I’d been unkind, but because I’d embarrassed her.

From that day on, I was banned from that backyard.

Not for a week.

Not for a season.

Not until things cooled off.

For years.

Years.

And because purity culture works like a hive, every other child followed the unspoken rule.

The woman’s daughter, the queen bee of the block, made sure of it.

They didn’t just exclude me.

They excluded me in full view of my own yard.

Kids played where I could see them, but not join.

They yelled my name, only to laugh when I turned.

They made sure I knew the rule still stood.

Exile wasn’t a punishment.

It was a performance.

It didn’t stop when I grew.

At twelve years old, long after the incident, long after I’d forgotten the details, I walked over one afternoon to talk to her son, who I assumed remembered me kindly.

She stepped outside, looked me dead in the eye, and said:

“Why are you here?”

Then she told me to leave.

Twelve.

Middle school.

Still banned.

The rule had become a story about me, a story the neighborhood children carried into school. And in small towns, anything carried into school becomes law.

I was the weird one.

The outsider.

The girl who wasn’t allowed in places.

The girl the “good families” avoided.

The girl with a reputation she didn’t understand and couldn’t escape.

And the worst part?

I was four when it started.

Four.

My adult self looks at that now, looks at my children, my grandchildren, and it breaks something open that I didn’t have access to back then.

Because now I know:

A four-year-old trying to comfort a crying adult should never be punished.

A twelve-year-old should never have a childhood rule held over her head.

A child should never be exiled by a community for the sake of an adult’s shame.

I wasn’t the demon child.

I was the scapegoat.

Looking back now, I can see exactly how I became the childhood scapegoat in a system built on shame and performance.

Not because I did anything wrong.

Because I happened to be the easiest person to project discomfort onto.

And purity culture always needs someone to cast out.

Slice of Humble Pie

Step Four asks us to look honestly at the roles we were forced into long before we had the chance to become ourselves. Sometimes the first identity assigned to us was never ours to carry.

Reflection Prompt

Where did your “outsider” identity begin? Can you trace the moment when you were cast into a role that had nothing to do with your character, and everything to do with someone else’s pain?

Affirmation

I was never the demon.

I was the child who noticed too much in a community built on denial.

I free myself from the stories created by other people’s shame.