Now it is just me and Mom, alone together in this house. Charlie went away to live with Dad’s relatives, and he might be going to live with Dad in Toronto soon. Bonnie went away to work for the summer and start college in the fall. Keanan went away to work in Thunder Bay, he’s got a girlfriend there; he was thinking about college, but got sidetracked as usual.
I am fifteen years old and living alone with my mother.
Thankfully, she has taken another job as a supervisor at the local women’s shelter. She still works four days a week at Harold & Sharla’s shop, but on many weekends she works one or two shifts at the shelter overnight and I’m left to my own devices. Which I don’t mind at all.
Two years ago, I was a member of a six-person family, isn’t it funny how that works? At church and in the Bible, they are always talking about how you have a plan and we are supposed to trust in your plan, even if we don’t understand it. I just don’t know if I believe that, sorry! I mean, it doesn’t feel like much of a grand plan that my family is broken into so many pieces and Mom has no husband after all those years of counselling.
If I’m really honest, this seems like people-doing to me. Not that I think every one of your plans has to feel good, but it does need to make a little sense. This one doesn’t make too much sense at all. I remember when Mr. McGillicutty told me that everyone’s got hold of their own wheel and gets to decide where their car goes. Now, I can’t say I fully believe that, as I do think you get to have some influence. But he does have a point, that free will exists and we ourselves do much of the directing of our life’s path. I mean, that’s where all the fun is, right? You should know.
Maybe I’m just grumpy because I’m now forced to be the centre of Mom’s character attacks – thanks a lot, by the way! Is it your plan that I get corralled every day by her ideas of perfection, submission, spirituality and morality? That I get lassoed by her rope of words till they tighten around my neck, choking me? Words of caution, words of warning, words of insult, words of control . . . Everything I say, do and feel is subject to my mother’s words.
She is the one who is a Mawmouth, not me!
On her work days, she arrives home around dinner time and begins berating me while she cooks; if I escape that, then I get it while we’re eating at the table.
You don’t care about anyone but yourself,
you’re lazy,
you have a bad character,
you’re selfish,
you don’t realize how lucky you are,
you’re insolent and rude,
you eat like a sloppy pig,
you want to have boys’ dicks in your mouth,
you want to let boys masturbate you,
you have an inappropriate closeness with Yourname,
you need more autonomy,
you think everything’s so easy because you get straight As,
you take everything for granted,
you always want things to be easy,
you always want to be happy,
you are unconcerned about anyone else’s pain,
you make me jealous with your fifteen-year-old slender body,
you don’t help out enough,
you need to pray, pray that God will change you and make you whole, make you pure, you’re not whole, not pure, you’re sinful, you have resentment and evil in you,
you need forgiveness . . .
And so on.
From dinner until bedtime, it goes on and on and on, inescapable. When I finally ease away from her and head to my room, she finds a way to knock on my door again.
“You know, I was thinking about what we were talking about at dinner time -” HA! We – “and I just really think you need to do some serious reflection about your selfishness. The world does not revolve around you . . .”
And so on . . .
Till it’s time to go to sleep, and I’m crying by then, praying and asking you to change me so that I’m better. But you never do. I always stay the same.
In the morning she starts lecturing me again, and I’m often late for school because she is still talking and talking about what a bad person I am when it’s time for me to head out. If I try to leave in the middle, she says she needs to finish this one point she’s making, but it’s never finished. On her days off, she is waiting when I finally get home from school,
I just need to say one more thing about what we were talking about this morning . . .
And so on.
I know there are things wrong with me, and I know they can be changed eventually with prayer. But I wish Mom would realize there are things about her that need to change, too. I am doing my work; I pray to you every day and night, asking you to make me different. I ask you to help me stop talking so much, help me become less selfish, more helpful, more thoughtful. I ask you to help me stay a virgin until I’m married.
But it’s definitely true, sometimes I don’t want your help. When Mom goes off to her night shift and I’m free to be myself, I don’t worry about you or things much at all. I dance and dance in the living room. Myname brings over her video camera and we drink ten pots of coffee and sing and dance all night together.
Sometimes she runs the bath and climbs in with me, end to end, and we shave each other’s legs. I like the feeling of her hand running up and down my smooth leg. I kissed her toes once when they were in my face. Then, we go lie down and spoon with our wet heads on the pillow.
I do have boyfriends most weeks, but Myname is the one I’m most in love with. I don’t dare tell her that, it’s too special and she could think I’m really screwed up and tell the whole school I’m a lesbian. Which I’m not. Lesbians are like the head lifeguard at the pool and the maintenance person at the public library.
My mom always wrinkles her nose with disgust at those mannish women and says, “LESBIAN! THERE’S ONE OF THE LESBIANS” if we ever see them in town. She has a built-in lesbian alert system. I wonder what lesbians do, what makes them lesbians, but the things me and Myname do are not that. I’ve never touched her in between the legs and never even thought of it. I’ve never had a guy touch me there either, but I do touch myself and I don’t feel guilty at all. It feels really good, so good that I can’t imagine you don’t mean for us to touch ourselves. That’s why you gave us fingers & orgasms. An orgasm is the best, most holy God-feeling in the world, and you made it up to help us know you. That’s what I think.
But I don’t talk about any of this with my mother, of course. Sometimes I think she wants to be right inside my mind, controlling everything I think and feel, and it angers her that she can’t. It angers me that she wants to. In fact, she doesn’t even know a tiny sliver of a fraction of my real mind and my experiences. I have to keep her out of everything that is true about me because she’ll attack it with her words and lectures. My mom just never shuts up. She says I don’t ever shut up, but actually I can never get a word in edgewise with her. Now I know what it must have been like for Dad to live with her.
He moved to Toronto awhile ago with his new wife, Iris. I haven’t met her yet. He invited me to the wedding, but I was like Yeah Right! As if I was going to go watch my Dad marry another woman, when Mom is still bawling on the couch about how he left her high and dry. I haven’t even visited him there, but Charlie has. He says they live in a row house with an upper floor (it’s all bungalows here) nearby a mall (no malls here) with two cats (we only have a dog). He says Iris is quiet, and nice. Of course Dad picked a lady who wasn’t a Mawmouth to be his new life partner! It makes sense. Mom knew he wouldn’t last long without a woman. She said, he needs someone to make him feel good all the time and to do his laundry. But Charlie said that Dad and Iris laugh together a lot, go to movies, and eat super healthy food all the time. He says Dad never gets mad, in his new life.
The last time I saw Dad was before Christmas. He looked thinner and greyer than ever before, and I barely recognized him. Again he leaned in for a kiss on the lips and I gave him my cheek. This time, he said “O ho-ho, you don’t want to kiss me on the lips?”
And I said, “It’s gross at my age,” so he apologized.
He came bearing gifts, which I never mind. He likes to dole them all out and get pleasure from watching us open them. I received a Walkman, one of the expensive sporty kind. I’d been saving up for one, still working for Harold and Sharla on Saturdays.
“You’re working now?” asked Dad in surprise.
“For like two years,” I responded scornfully, thinking that if he tried calling me more than once every six months he might know something about my life.
“Good for you,” he said.
I realized even if he did call more often, I wouldn’t have much to say to him anyway.
Well, I had been saving up for the Walkman, but now that money is gone. Easy come, easy go, I guess. Mom was on one of her night shifts and Myname came over with a bottle of white wine. Normally the most she can muster is a couple beers, so we end up drinking coffee all night long. But now we were living in style.
“Where did you get that?” I asked with glee, although I wasn’t sure whether I liked the taste of wine.
“I just grabbed it from the counter,” she said triumphantly. She was smiling.
“Isn’t your mom going to notice it’s missing?”
“There were four bottles on the counter. And they were already pretty drunk by the time I left.”
I wondered what it would be like to see my parents drunk. There is never any alcohol in our house, since Dad is an ex-alcoholic. I guess Mom never got back in the habit of drinking, after he left. (Now she just feeds on a steady diet of criticism toward me.)
Anyway, we drank the whole bottle that night – it wasn’t much, just three glasses of wine each. I didn’t like the first glass, which tasted a bit like mouldy bread or fermented grape jelly that’s lingered too long at the bottom of the jar. The second glass was better, sweeter. By then we were giggling a lot, and our cheeks got really warm. We stood outside the front door hollering at midnight. We danced in front of the video camera, but when we watched it later I thought I looked really fat and got a lump in my throat from hating my body.
Myname has the most beautiful body, long and slender with narrow hips, and long strong fingers and toes. Her skin is golden. Her hair is golden brown. Her eyes are button-brown. Her mouth is small and smiley with a little quirk to the edge of it.
That night when she held me from behind, she nuzzled her face down into the crook of my neck. I really liked it, and the feeling went all the way down my legs and you-know-where, which I suppose is a sin — but it’s not like we touched each other. Because I was a little tipsy from the wine, I turned my head to her face, liking her smell, and she kissed me on my mouth. But that was all.
I did want more, but that was all.
Everything was fine for three days. Then Myname’s mom started hollering at us about the missing wine. We came into her kitchen after school and she met us at the door:
“WHERE IS IT!”
“Where’s what?” said Myname. All smooth.
I gulped. I knew right away we were in trouble. If it was my mother, I would already be dead.
“Where’s my wine? I know you stole it, there were four bottles and after you left there were three! Don’t think you can pull one over on me!”
I was amazed. This mother was not concerned about her child’s teenage drinking. She just wanted her wine back, that was the problem.
“Fine . . . We drank it last weekend,” admitted Myname in a sullen voice.
“YOU OWE ME! Plus a bootlegging fee,” responded her mother.
“How much?”
“Forty bucks for the wine and fifty for my trouble! Let’s round it off to one hundred for fair game,” hollered Myname’s mom, taking a drag off her smoke.
Myname’s eyes went round. “A hundred dollars, Mom? Give me a break.”
“No, you give me a break! I’m not being your bootlegger for free!”
Myname stomped upstairs to her room and I followed meekly, chewing on my tongue with anxiety. Fifty bucks was a lot for me – it would definitely clear out my savings. But as long as my own mother didn’t find out, I was okay.
Getting home later that day, however, I found out it wasn’t going to be that easy. Mom was just putting down the telephone. “Apparently you & Yourname have developed a taste for wine. Her mother is calling herself your bootlegger, raving about the fees you owe her.”
I stood still. My cells shrank in their cases. I became cold and my skin pores pinched shut, as if trying to push out anything from the outside. I felt myself flinch and grow rigid with the expectation of verbal assault. The core of me found a hiding place inside where it could observe and be quiet. This is it, I kept thinking, I’m done for.
And I was right.
After uttering that statement, as coolly as could be, Mom reared back like she was drawing a horse whip. Then:
YOU LITTLE SHIT.
YOU LITTLE SHIT!!!
I won’t go into everything she said. You were there. She repeated that statement a lot, with a note of surprise. She was terribly surprised that I’d defy her like that; the injury was less about my alcohol consumption, and more about the fact that she didn’t have complete control over me.
All night she paced back and forth on the kitchen floor, berating me. You little shit. How dare you do this behind my back. I don’t trust you, I suppose I never should have. You’re grounded, by the way. You can tell Yourname she’ll never be sleeping over here on my night shifts again.
I sat at the dinner table, withdrawn and settled into the rocking chair in my brain. I didn’t hear most of what she said after the first hour, and I didn’t really eat anything. Every time I lifted the fork to my mouth, Mom said something like, “Look at you, just eating and eating like you don’t even care that all my trust in you is gone. Broken. You don’t even care.”
So I would put the fork down and look at my plate. A couple times I stood up to go to the bathroom. She yelled, “YOU LITTLE SHIT. You do not get to do ANYTHING ever again without asking me first. DO YOU UNDERSTAND.”
“Can I go to the bathroom?”
“NO, no you can’t right now. Do you know why? Because I don’t trust you. How do I know you’re not going to be in there drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes or imagining some boy masturbating you?”
Finally, late at night around eleven o’clock, she got tired. She finished by sitting on my bed next to me, telling me I was grounded indefinitely, in a sort of cold comforting voice, likely for the whole rest of the year.
I just laid there numb to the core, still remembering the whole evening with Myname and the dancing and music and fun-making, letting that wine-soaked memory wash over me for all it was worth.
And it was worth every minute of my mother’s harsh vitriolic tirade. I would never take it back, I still relish in it now. Anyway, it was just a couple glasses of wine! Myname’s mother is all about the money, and mine is all about I would dare to disobey her will . . . The thing me & Myname did is not actually the problem at all.
And I am still a fine person, in the end. I really don’t feel like you hate me or think I’m awful for doing it. If anything, you just always keep me company in my life, here in the prison of my home, in the fluctuations of my heart, in my experiments and dabblings. I feel less judged by you, than accompanied. And for that I am thankful. Sometimes I have a glowing in my chest, it heats up my face, and there’s an absolute security and joy in this feeling. Then I’m sure I am in communication with Something. At least I have that, even if I never get to leave this house again. Already, I’m trying to figure out how I can still kiss boys under this grounding. I’m going to have to strategize while she’s working or in school hours.
I am like Rapunzel in the tower, and Mom is the witch who keeps me hostage. You know, Rapunzel is a fighter, and so will I be. I’m growing my hair down to the ground and even though she might cut it off, I will fight to escape. I’ll fight through deserts and blindness, I’ll throw myself from the tower. I’ll find myself a rescuer. My mother calls the tower her love for me, but I think it is built from her fear and loathing, which can only last so long before I find my way out.