We had a rough morning. Mom's still mad that I cleaned up in the kitchen. She's still mad that I am interfering with her TV viewing because I want to sleep. I think she proposed to Jack that she box everything in the bedroom up, probably asking him to buy her more large plastic bins, and put it downstairs so I could have a place to sleep, and she could watch TV late into the night. She pulled him outside for this conversation, but bits of it came up in the ensuing fight the three of us got into.
I lost my patience. I kept the yelling and swearing to a minimum, but I said some mean things. Except, they weren't mean so much as true. She said she hated how Jack and I "gang up on her." Jack, ever diplomatic tried to reassure her that he and I were not a team. "Fuck that," I responded. "We are a team. We want the same thing - a comfortable and presentable house for everyone that lives here. Maybe you won't stand up for yourself, but I will. It's your house and I hate seeing her fill it with shit." Ok, maybe it wasn't necessary for me to stand up for a grown man; he can stand up for himself if he wants.
She left to tutor. Later in the day I pulled down the photo albums of my childhood. All these photos were in a box at the old house. Many years after we had abandoned it, I got the idea to dig them out and put them in an album for my mom for mother's day. I was in college then. I took the bus back to our old house and snuck in the bathroom window. I was shocked by what I saw. The entire bathroom floor had sunken in in our absence. There were mushrooms growing around the toilet. I walked around the little paths of the house for a few minutes, freshly overwhelmed by it all. I saw mouse droppings, but thankfully didn't encounter a mouse (there were no mice when we lived there - lots of bugs, but nothing bigger). I found the box of photos and got out as quick as I could. I took the risk of leaving through the front door and being spotted because I was scared to cross the bathroom floor again.
Looking at those photos now is such a mix of emotions. There's a relatively clean house in the background of them, but I never remember it looking like this. Apart from a collection of school portraits, the photos end when I'm three or four. There's family in our living room for birthdays, laughing and eating cake. There's me taking a bath in the kitchen sink, and you can see the counters. There's my mom and I, happy and smiling, like any other parent and child. Where did it all go so wrong? Why couldn't anybody stop it before it got out of control? Why can't we get back there? She was clearly happier then; why won't she even try to get back there?
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