The title of motherhood died sometime between my ninth and eleventh birthday.
She was still walking around, of course. Still breathing, still bitching. But she was dead. The real her, the one who was supposed to be there, had packed her bags in the middle of some forgotten Tuesday night and left without a sound. The divorce papers years later? That was just for a ghost. The body had been cold for a long, long time.
She was playing a role she wasn’t tooled for. Performing as “Mom” in the great, American “Leave It to Beaver” television show she thought she wanted. She was young, not even thirty, and thought she was a modern woman who had escaped the old-world, domesticated bullshit of her own mother.
But she learned fast.
She learned that a clean, suburban cage with a two-car garage and a neatly trimmed lawn is still a goddamn cage. And the bars are just as cold, even if they’re painted white.
And then the world, in its infinite, cruel wisdom, handed her—and all the women just like her—a goddamn escape hatch. Two of them, really.
The tampon and the birth control pill.
One to plug the leak, the other to stop the seed. Suddenly, they weren’t chained to the messy, bloody, inconvenient business of biology anymore. They could control the whole damn operation from start to finish.
They called it “empowerment.” That was the word they sold on the news, in the magazines. And yeah, it empowered them, alright. It empowered them to untie the knot, to walk away from the kitchen sink, to tell the man of the house that his dinner was in the goddamn freezer because she had a life to live now, too.
Empowered them to do what?
Burn their bras? Yeah, that was the big show for the cameras, the easy headline. But it was always more than that. It was the start of a quiet war, an anti-family campaign they dress up in pretty words now and call “feminism.”
It was a permission slip, printed up by science and handed out by society, that said the old contract was null and void. A permission slip that said you could just walk out on the whole damn show—the husband coming home from the factory, the kids with their scraped knees, the goddamn pot roast burning in the oven.
And why? For what grand, noble principle?
Because it wasn’t making you happy. Because your personal satisfaction suddenly became more important than your goddamn duty. That was the great trade. And some of us are still paying the price for it.
My mother? Hell, she was just an early adopter of the new religion. One of the first in line to cash in her ticket for the great escape. She jumped the train and left the rest of us standing on the platform like a bunch of dumb animals, blinking in the dust, wondering what the hell had just happened.
By thirteen, I was just another one of ’em—another kid from a broken home in a neighborhood full of broken homes. When I plotted my escape, I realized I had nothing to pack. No goddamn toys, no cherished memories. Your suitcase was already full.
Full of the lingering echo of slammed doors. Full of the acidic film her voice left on every surface in that house. Full of the permanent, greasy layer of her cigarette smoke and her bottomless, howling rage.
That soft, sweet spot a boy is supposed to have for his mother? It was gone by then. Burned out, stomped into a cinder, and replaced by a cold contempt.
All that was left was that dull, heavy stone in the pit of your gut. The one they call survival.
By thirteen, you learn to recognize your own kind. You see it in the other kids from the broken houses in that neighborhood—a certain deadness in the eyes, a quiet understanding. You’re part of a tribe you never asked to join.
When you’d think about running away, you’d picture packing a bag, but there was nothing to put in it. Your childhood was an empty room. The only furniture was the echo of a door slamming shut, the bitter taste her voice left in the air, the greasy film of cigarette smoke and rage that coated everything.
That thing a son is supposed to feel for his mother, that soft, sweet spot? It was a cinder by then. It didn’t just fade away; it was choked out, smothered, replaced by a cold, hard contempt.
And what’s left when you burn away all that softness? You’re left with a knot in the pit of your stomach. A dull, heavy, stone-cold thing that doesn’t feel love or hate anymore. It only feels the need to keep going. You learn to call it survival, and you carry that goddamn stone around for the rest of your life.
I used to dream of her death.
Then one day, I was in the bathroom, reading the side of a can of her hairspray—the cheap shit she used to freeze her hair into a helmet. And there it was. A warning label, in tiny print. Said the product could cause cancer.
And in my kid’s brain, a dark, ugly little idea flickered to life.
So I started a new religion. Every day, I’d sneak in there and coat the bristles of her toothbrush with a thick, sticky layer of that chemical poison. And I’d wait. Just hoping for some lumps to start forming under her arms one day. Hoping the poison would do its slow, quiet work.
During that time, my little brother, Ryan, spent his days in a cage with wooden bars they called a crib. He’d just lie there on his back, staring at a ceiling he couldn’t understand.
He’d cry, sure. But the room service of motherly love never arrived. The cries just hit the walls and died there, alone.
And after enough days and nights of that, the back of his head started to go flat from the pressure. So flat that it began to push his ears forward, bending them out of shape. That’s what neglect looks like. It’s not just a feeling; it’s goddamn architecture. You can see it on a person’s skull.
About a year after the divorce, my mother just decided she was done with my brother Nick. Erased him from the picture. Just like that.
But every week, we’d still get shipped off to my stepdad’s house. And those weekends… they were like a drowning man breaking the surface of the water. Just one desperate, glorious gasp of clean air before the next goddamn wave of her shit came crashing down on your head when you had to return.
With her weekends suddenly free and all the new “advancements” of womanhood at her disposal, she failed at the one job she’d signed up for. She failed to meet the title of motherhood. And I refuse to lower the bar, not like society does these days, handing out trophies just for participating.
So, I started calling her “Bonnie.”
I did it in the most “respectful” way, of course. The kind of cold, quiet respect you give a stranger you’re forced to share a room with. When we were out, if someone asked about my “mother,” I’d just look at them, deadpan, and say, “You mean Bonnie?”
Then I’d add, just to make it clear, “Just because you can have a baby doesn’t make you a mother.”
It’s a title you have to earn. She never did.
I was a latchkey kid by definition. Women’s equality, they called it. Drove them from the so-called “slavery” of marriage straight into the slavery of the workplace. All it meant for me was that the house was always empty. I learned early that no one was coming home before dark, that a locked door is just a puzzle for a bored kid with too much time on his hands, and that the most valuable skill a boy could have was a hard, deep silence. The hum of an empty house became my lullaby. My diet was a rotation of cold despair: leftover tuna casserole, frozen chicken pot pies, and macaroni and cheese from a box.
And when she was home, she’d bring men with her. Strays, always the strays. She’d feed them a little affection from a saucer, let them curl up for a night or two in the spectacular chaos of her life.
None of them ever stayed long. They’d sober up or wise up, and they’d finally realize what a dirty lay she was. Her personal hygiene was a goddamn horror show. She had this… female smell that followed her around, clung to the furniture. The kind of thing that could sober a man up real quick.
You’d see the realization dawn in their eyes one morning over stale coffee: this wasn’t a home; it was a goddamn trap.
And then they’d run.
But it wasn’t all a loss, that time in hell. I learned the most valuable lesson of my life in that shithole: whatever you do, in any situation, just ask yourself what my mother would do, and then do the complete goddamn opposite. It’s the best lesson I ever learned, and in some sick, twisted way, I’m still grateful to her for providing it.
But there’s a price for that kind of education. There’s always a price.
And the price for me was abandoning my little brother. Leaving him there. Knowing what he would have to endure now that he was the only kid left in that house of abuse. I remember asking my organic father if Ryan could come along, asking it casually, like he was some side pet I didn’t want to leave behind.
That thought, that one selfish, cowardly moment, has haunted my whole damn life. But it was worse for him. It dug a trench between us that we’ve never been able to cross. The kind of divide that never really heals.
Sometimes, when I’m out there in the dating meat-market, sitting across from some of these women—the prideful single mothers, the ones who wear their independence like a shield—I can still hear her voice. I can hear her in their rationalizations.
The same old story, just a different mouth telling it. Justifying hiring a stranger to raise their kids. Bragging about using a four-year degree to land some shitty, hourly social worker job. Beating their chests about their glorious freedom from marriage number one, or two, or three.
And in those moments, sometimes, that rotten fish smell, that ghost from my childhood, will come drifting across my memory.
And it all triggers that same, old thought. The one I can’t shake. I wonder if, in some fucked-up, twisted way, I owe my whole goddamn life to her.
Don’t ever think I’m grateful.
Not thanks. Never that. And not forgiveness. Forgiveness is for saints and suckers, and it implies the war is over. This war is never over; it just moves inside.
No, what I have for her is just the cold, hard bookkeeper’s acknowledgment. The recognition that without the perfect, sprawling, undeniable blueprint of her failure, I would have had no goddamn idea how to build my success. She showed me every wrong turn, every dead end, every cheap excuse, all marked in bright, bleeding red. She taught me how to navigate hell by leaving me in the middle of it.
I built my life in the empty space where a mother was supposed to be. Where there should have been warmth, I learned to generate my own. Where there should have been guidance, I learned to read the map of her mistakes upside down. That empty space she left behind? It wasn’t a void. It was a construction site.
And I built a good life. A clean life.
A life where the bills get paid, where promises are kept, where a slammed door is just the wind and not the start of another battle. A life she never got her fingerprints on. A life she could never, ever stain with her sadness or her rage.
And that, right there, is the only victory that ever really mattered.
Author’s Note:
My thoughts are this: what you’ve got there isn’t just a collection of sad stories anymore. It’s a closing argument. It’s the final, bitter summation in a trial you’ve been running inside your own head for fifty years.
You’ve taken your mother and turned her from a person into a force of nature—a hurricane, a disease, a blueprint for everything you had to run from. She’s not just a shitty mom in this story; she’s the architect of your entire goddamn life, a life built entirely out of the wreckage she left behind.
And you? You’re the survivor. The one who learned to navigate the ruins. But it’s more than that. You’re arguing that her poison was also your medicine. That her absolute failure was the only reason you could ever succeed. It’s a sick and twisted kind of gratitude, the coldest I’ve ever seen.
But it’s not a clean victory, is it? It never is. That guilt over abandoning your brother, that’s the piece of shrapnel you can’t dig out. You escaped the fire, but you had to leave another man behind to burn. That’s a ghost that follows you, no matter how successful you get, no matter how clean the new house is.
So yeah, my thoughts are this: You’ve written the story of how to build a life out of pure, uncut spite and the will to survive. You’ve laid out the case, acted as judge, jury, and prosecutor, and you’ve found her guilty on all counts.
And you’ve sentenced yourself to a lifetime of having to remember it all, just to make sure you never, ever go back. It’s a hell of a story. And a hell of a life sentence.
