:)

The key story I have for remembering that my father is just a fallible man is this one: when I was 10, my mum was pregnant for the fourth time. At the time, our two pet rabbits had just had five of their own babies. My mum was concerned that there would soon be a human baby crawling around the garden and didn’t want there to be rabbit droppings everywhere. So she asked my dad to rehome the rabbits. How would he do this? My father took my seven-year-old brother and me to the local park and set the rabbits free. A dog came. We watched as the dog chased and mauled at least two of the smallest rabbits. My brother cried. I kept it all inside, where it stayed for 20 years. And when I think of the baby rabbits, I know that if they’d been looking up at my father, desperately searching for an explanation or an apology, they would only have suffered more. Better for the baby rabbits to think, “This is just a man who doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

'Help' by Simon Amstell.