Wrong Side of Thirty

Today, my mom told me she used to think I was the sane one of the family until I moved in her and now she sees how untrue that is. I’m smart, though, she’ll give me that. I’m really not sure what any of that means, since I’ve been the same externally as I’ve always been. She says a few other things after that, each one stings a bit more than the last. I’m on the wrong side of thirty living with my mother. I coddle my children. My goals of moving back out of her house are lofty. How much she’s helped me in the past and how it just wasn’t enough. She’s mourning her independence. I smile at that one. She’s run away at parental responsibility my whole life, it doesn’t surprise me she feels that way.

I give her the benefit of the doubt. I’m not the only problem here and we both know it. It’s been a month since I moved back home, but it’s been a solid six months at least of her telling me I’d just have to admit defeat and move back home and at least six months of me telling her I’m determined to make it on my own and Las Vegas is the last place I’d ever move back to. She knows I’ve got PTSD, but she also knows it’s her fault, so she prefers to minimize it. “You and that ‘PTSD’” she says to me in the kitchen after I tell her how helpful it’s been to reconnect with Sharon, my childhood BFF, because Sharon reminds me my childhood wasn’t all bad.

Me and that PTSD. I signed up for therapy a week after landing in what I now refer to as The Scene of the Crime. I was afraid of the flashes of images, disjointed memories, and sensations in my body that pulled me back to the past. The other night, we picked up dinner from Texas Roadhouse and when I got out of the car, I noticed the large landscape rocks along the curb. You don’t see those in Florida. But then instantly I remembered another place in Vegas I saw them: Dan’s mom’s house. Dan was a man my mom dated when I was about nine. He was better than Jereamy, my brother’s dad who beat her, but Dan came in between Jereamy’s jail sentences and Jereamy would eventually be back. He never stayed gone. Dan lived with his mother in a trailer park, but I have to carefully rephrase. He lived *at* his mother’s. He actually lived in his El Camino, that was parked at his mother’s, which was much cleaner and had less roaches than the trailer.

I was nine and had no toys. Everything I once owned was either pawned, stolen, or lost to the life of parental drug addiction, homelessness, and domestic violence. Dan used to dumpster dive and one day he brought home a computer keyboard and gave it to me. Before the keyboard, there were landscape rocks. They filled his mother’s trailer yard. Big and smooth rocks that soaked up the heat from the sun. They were fun to wash and they were big enough to cradle like a baby, which is what they became in my nine year old imagination. Rock baby dolls.

I wasn’t in 1995, though. I was in 2023 at a Texas Roadhouse, with my now-clean and sober mother and two of my 3 kids in the back seat. My youngest child is the age of little me with the landscape rocks. I look at him, with my same face, and think about every toy I’ve ever bought him, every goodnight hug, every meal I’ve made him, every little way I’ve “coddled” him, and I feel angry at my mother in ways I know are not appropriate in this moment, a time I’m in need of a fresh start. Instead I listen to her tell me how she feels I’m interfering with her independence, how I’ve failed despite her help, how I’m not the most sane person in the family, and how I coddle my children.

I take a bath later and cry about it. Not because I expected anything better from my mother and not because I care what she thinks, but for that little girl who washed rocks and stifled her mother’s independence even then. I cry for her because she has no room here and she isn’t welcome now anymore than she was welcome then. I think about all I saw as a child. I went through a lot before my 10th birthday. I score a 9 out of 10 on the Adverse Childhood Experience Scale. I deal with autoimmune issues, anxiety, ADHD, POTS, and chronic fatigue. I’ve been in the same room while my mother had sex with my brother’s dad. I’ve also been in the same room when he choked and punched her. I’ve lived on the streets, in garages, slept on pool furniture, and gone to sleep in a shopping cart and woken up in a stranger’s house without my mother or any idea when she’d be back. I’ve been on the couch during a drug bust, gone to school hungry, and been molested in my sleep by another child’s parent. I’ve lived with a schizophrenic who wouldn’t let me in to his room to use the only phone in the house when my mother was getting beat and I know what it’s like to run as fast as I could to the neighbors when he was after me, praying my mother behind me could keep up and he wouldn’t get to her before we reached the door. It’s the stuff of literal nightmares, where your legs are stuck in sand, except I never got to wake up. Looking back, it’s all a dissociated dream.

Yet here I am, in Las Vegas all these years later, wondering why I can’t snap out of it, trying not to talk too much about it or make anyone feel uncomfortable, because if there’s one thing I learned as a child, it’s how to let monster sleep. I look at my amazing brother, who looks more like his dad than his own aging dad does at this point, and I have to look away at times because my body won’t unclench and it’s not his fault. I try to tell myself that this was the same guy who, as a baby, was on my hip everywhere I went while my mom and his dad locked themselves in the bathroom to get high for hours. This was the child I protected, the one my mom jokes to his new girlfriend on Sunday Dinner “Yeah, she raised him!” As if trying to tell myself or remind myself of this is any better than letting my muscles prepare for another run to the neighbors. The truth of the matter is, I am legitimately traumatized. Just because I can function, doesn’t mean I don’t suffer. “That’s what it is” my mom says, “You’re extremely high functioning, but you aren’t right” No, I most certainly am not. I'm on the wrong side of 30, living with my mother, after all.