We lived in a ranch house that was rotting from the inside out. The second bathroom, the one closest to our rooms, was broken. It served as a monument, holding a single, giant, fossilized turd in the toilet bowl. The door was always kept shut, not out of shame, but to keep the smell from taking over the rest of the house. The bathtub was a storage unit, filled with dirty clothes.
My mother taught us her version of how to clean a room: you grab everything—all your clothes, your toys, your garbage—and you shove it into the closet. Then you close the door, and pray to God no one ever opens it. Our house smelled of this secret filth. My room smelled of piss from the nightly bed-wetting. My mother’s room had that sharp, cloying scent of female hygiene products and stale perfume. My brother’s room smelled the same as mine. It was odd, because we had a washer and dryer that worked just fine. But doing laundry required time and energy, a hundred-step journey to the back of the house that no one ever felt like making.
The kitchen was filthy. We never used the stovetop. We had a single, electric skillet that was the altar we cooked on. My mother was proud that she brought home meat. We ate steak and pork chops almost every day. She’d drop a slab of meat into this skillet, which was coated in a white, glossy film of last week’s grease and seasonings. You’d turn the knob to high, and the old grease would melt into a glistening, bubbling pit. Then you’d throw the pork chop on. I swear to God, that pork chop tasted just like the steak from the night before, and the steak tasted just like the pork chop. Who knows what else got cooked in there. It was like our own little La Brea Tar Pits; a bug would fly in and sink to the bottom, and we’d be none the wiser.
After the divorce, my mother had to get a job. I was instructed to keep the house clean. I’d get home from school around two or three, watch the clock, and at 4:45, I’d begin the ritual. A frantic, fifteen-minute race through the house, grabbing junk, shoving it into closets. Dirty dishes? They went under the sink. A quick dab with a wet rag here, a quick swipe there. It worked ninety-nine percent of the time. It wasn’t cleaning; it was just moving the filth from one field to another. The one percent of the time she caught me, all hell would break loose. But it probably wasn’t even about the mess. It was just a woman, pissed off at the bad choices that had put her in this spot, looking for someone to blame, and we were the only ones there to take the heat.
My grandpa Nick, he was my supplier. He’d come across old toy soldiers at the dump—sometimes plastic, sometimes old steel ones. He’d bring me tanks, armored vehicles. I had over 900 soldiers of different types. After the divorce, when the supply from Grandpa dried up, I remember going to the local grocery store and stealing those cheap plastic soldiers, shoving them down my pants. Got caught eventually. My mom wasn’t even mad, just disappointed.
My soldiers were my sanctuary. On a rainy day, I’d rough up the blankets on my bed until they looked like a mountain range. I’d set up a fortress, conduct elaborate defenses and offenses. It would take hours. I had an old, whiny record player, and I’d play “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” over and over. I had old encyclopedias I couldn’t really read, but I’d stare at the pictures of military history for hours. My stepdad, Jim, had given me my first box of soldiers. It just grew from there.
Everything was special to me. I kept them clean, sorted. Each one had its own little carrier case I’d made. Not like my little brother, who just piled his into a box.
Then, one day, my mother, frustrated with life, mad at some little thing, came into my room to vent, to crush something, to feel in control. And she saw my world. My soldiers, all set up, my artillery lined up on the high ground, Patton ready to get ambushed coming through the pass. She came into that room, and she just started kicking. Kicked the tanks, stomped on the soldiers, broke this, broke that. Anything I held precious, she came in and broke it right in front of me, with a cold, dead look in her eyes. My prize. My joy. If it wasn’t the soldiers, it was one of my models I’d spent weeks on. The woman was bent on destruction.
But here’s the thing I thought she was truly skilled at: thirty minutes after that explosion of rage, she’d act like nothing ever happened. It was done. No apologies, no “how are you doing?” Once your tears dried up, the event was erased from history. It’s an amazing, terrifying skill to have. My ex-wife had it too. As a child, trying to understand it, I couldn’t put words to it. But I knew it was wrong. There’s a reason my room smelled like piss until I was thirteen.
Of course, we weren’t the greatest kids. We wrote on the walls, we took the screens off the doors. The backyard was trashed. We were feral, in every sense of the word. I’d be outside with my BB gun, shooting and killing anything that flew or walked by the house. We tortured every dog we ever had until it ran away. My mom got some cockatiels once. Their wings weren’t clipped. My brother and I would open the cage, let them out in the house, and chase them with towels, swatting them out of mid-air. We thought it was hilarious. Then one day, out of pure, stupid curiosity, I thought it would be interesting to use a racquetball racket. I hit one. It never recovered. I picked up its broken little body, put it back in the cage, and acted like it had died of natural causes. Yeah, I got my ass beaten for that one. I didn’t admit to it, but she knew.
We never acted like this with our dad, Jim. Hell, he would have beat the hell out of us, but his reasons were always clear. With our mother, it was different. She made shit up to beat us. She didn’t punish us for the right reasons. And because of that, we didn’t respect her. We rebelled. We stole anything she left lying around. We broke anything left unattended. We did our chores with a grumble, half-assed. We were dirty, we smelled. I used cologne to cover up the piss smell because I hated taking showers. We were little bastards, spray-painting shit, putting stuff in her toothpaste, trying to poison her. There was nothing she could bring into that house that we wouldn’t eventually destroy, and that included any new man she brought around. We were two feral kids, the hallmark of how to scare a man away from a woman who is desperately searching for a new partner.
Could we have been better sons? That’s the question, right? Should we have felt some kind of shame for our daily actions? Me, killing every stray cat in the neighborhood with my BB gun. Us, chasing away any new creature she brought into that house, be it a cockatiel or another dog named Bear.
Should we have been more appreciative? More grateful? For what? For the stolen steak every night? For a new man’s pocket to dig into for a week’s worth of video game quarters?
They tell you to honor your mother. Society programs you with this bullshit idea that a mother’s love is the only unconditional thing you’ll ever get. That’s why Mother’s Day is the second biggest holiday in this country—it’s a national celebration of a beautiful, powerful lie.
But yeah, whatever.
We were just along for the ride. We were passengers, forced onto a train wreck that she was conducting. She was the one driving, the one laying the crooked track, the one shoveling chaos into the engine every single day.
You don’t grant respect to the person who’s driving you off a cliff. No respect granted. Not then. Not now.
Author’s Note:
You look back on a time like that, a whole era of grime and petty cruelties, and you try to find a simple villain. You try to pin it on her. But the truth is dirtier than that.
We weren’t a family in that house; we were a pack of animals trapped in the same cage, each of us chewing on the other just to feel alive. She had her rages, her neglect. And we had ours. We learned her language. We learned that to survive in her world, you had to be just as destructive, just as feral as she was.
Her destroying my toy soldiers… that wasn’t just a temper tantrum. That was her reminding me who the general was in our shithole army. And us, me and my brother, scaring off every new man she dragged home? That was our way of making sure she never got any goddamn reinforcements. It was a perfect, unspoken war of mutually assured destruction.
So the final thought on that whole damn mess? You don’t come out of a house like that clean. You come out knowing how to fight dirty. You learn that love and hate can look so much alike they might as well be twins. And you learn that sometimes, the only way to feel like you have any control over your own miserable life is to help burn it all to the goddamn ground.
