My Mother is a Toxic Person: Part 1

My mother is a very raw and emotional subject for me. She is the source of most of my problems in my life, but I feel like if I am going to be honest about everything, it had better be here.

It started before I was even born with a nicotine addiction she just could not break and a baby she never wanted. My mom was 19 when she got pregnant with me, just starting college and working at a Blockbuster—a business now as extinct as her love for me. This was where everything fell apart. I took her life away from her.

The ultrasound with my little figure was my father's pride and joy and my mother's turning point in her life. And she refused to put the cigarettes down. She wanted to abort me, but after weeks of argument my father convinced her not to. She had lots of problems, and they were far too young to have a child. They were not ready.

I was born at 33 weeks along weighing in at only four pounds with a hole in my heart that I still bear today. Due to lack of prenatal care, I was a very sick baby. I was colicky and had jaundice. My father tells me all the time how he took me in his arms when I was born and I fit just between his elbow and palm perfectly. My father adored me endlessly.

My mother, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with me. She absolutely refused to breastfeed—not that there's anything wrong with women who don't, she just didn't want the intimacy in any way—and she barely touched me in the hospital. It made my dad angry. A week later she was out and about with her friends every night while my dad was home with me. They could barely pay bills. They lived in a sublet bedroom in my aunt's apartment. I spent the first three months of my life there.

My father and I have always been close. He is my hero. One of the things I am most proud of is that I look like him and our minds are wired the same. I look nothing like my mother. My mother, in some sick, twisted way, was always jealous of our bond, even though she wanted nothing to do with me.

My sister was born two years and three months after I was. I remember walking down the hall with my aunt and sitting in a red plastic chair in the waiting room. I remember my mother crying a lot. We lived in a big enough house for all of us, but my mother didn't want another child.

I remember that house, and how I won a blanket with fish on it at my mother's work party, and how my dad painted my walls blue with fish and my mother painted the door black.

I remember when we had to move out because we were too poor to live in a house anymore.

We moved into the first apartment when I was three years old. This is where my memory really starts to come into play. My parents were at war with each other. It was not hard to see that my mother was unhappy. My father wanted so badly to make things work between them.

I remember one night they had an especially bad fight and the next morning they came out of their room and told me that they were waiting for a piece of paper that said that they weren't married anymore.

I didn't know what stress was then, but it manifested itself in me. I would sleepwalk and wet the bed far more often than I should have. I threw tantrums and had hallucinations during the days because my world was falling apart. I remember this surreal feeling. At the time I had no idea what it was.

At some point my father moved out. I don't remember exactly when. I remember him coming over to the house and using the shower after long days working construction. He would hang out with us and then we would all get in the car and my mother would drive my father home to a place that was not with us. I tore pages out of books and screamed at the walls. I had no idea what I was feeling or why, only that it hurt. I lived with my mom, who didn't love me. I just didn't know that then.

We got a cat to replace my father. Her name was Princess, and she was pregnant. We didn't know that when we bought her. She had a litter of six kittens, but we were not allowed to have cats at our apartments. We had to hide her during our yearly inspection.

One of the kittens died because he crawled into a sock and suffocated. One of them was tabby, so my sister and I gave him a bath in milk and ketchup because he was orange. My mom was furious. A few weeks later I took the kittens down to see the apartment manager's daughter. I didn't have kittens anymore after that.

One day we were playing hide and seek at the playground, and instead of hiding, my then three-year-old sister walked to my grandma's house that was just a couple blocks away. We panicked, and my mom blamed it on me because I should have been watching her, as if I at five years old was her mother. I was busy digging for clay in the sandbox with children who I thought were my friends.

One of the girls, the girl whose apartment was across from me, taught me how to French kiss in the parking lot behind our apartments where our parents couldn't see. I would eat toast and otter pops at her house if my mom didn't feed me.

The kids at the playground told me that nipples were called chicken pecks and when I told my mom that, she told me I was stupid and that I shouldn't listen to the things the kids on the playground said.

Then one day my mom told us she had a boyfriend.