I had just gotten out of fourth grade, it had been the last day of school. My mom picked my twin brother and I up with our bags packed, zipped tightly. She told us that our dad wasn’t safe and that we needed to go to a safe place to live. Before I knew it we sat in the back seat of my moms rusty old blue car. On the way past the bakery our dad saw us and began to follow us as fast as he could. The wheels to my moms car didn’t seem to spin fast enough. She kept telling us that he was going to shoot us and kill us; we could only believe her. My brother and I sat in the back seat having a conversation through our stuffed animals. He had an orange dinosaur and I had a blue teddybear. The colors of the squishy animals seemed to blur together as we pretended they too had the same problems we did. We filled them with the fear we held within ourselves. Little giggles filled the back seat as we didn't truly understand the situation that was about to unfold.

Along the way, my mom somehow managed to get a police officer’s attention. The police talked to my mom and asked her what was going on. She explained that my dad was trying to kill us and that we were going to a safe place to stay. Next they talked to my dad; for about a month I didn’t see or hear from him because he had no way to contact us. Finally, when my mom decided it was time to go back we arrived at the empty white house with two letters, some purple flowers, and a gold wedding ring sitting on the counter. The letters were from my dad about my parents relationship and how it was time for my parents to go separate ways. I didn’t understand what the letters meant but I knew my dad was leaving. We all sat at the kitchen table and cried. My mom called my dad and told him to come back, and like a fool he did.

My dad walked back into the house a few hours later. His shirt was stained and dirty and his bags looked heavy. As time went on things escalated, turning our house into a whole new battle zone. Tears were shed more often and the yelling only got louder. Nights were sleepless and empty.

“I’m just the maid!” My mom was sleeping in the basement of our house and never ate. The silence of the night became filled with the sound of my mother banging her head against the wall. My mother had built a treehouse in the backyard, but this became a place for her to stash her beer and drugs in. I would often come home, unable to find my mom, until my dad would find her in the bathroom slouched over the toilet, dry heaving the tasteless alcohol from her stomach. My mother did things that were much worse than this.

The cops would find my mother in the corn fields sitting in her car. The debris of the corn stalks left a noticeable trail of insanity behind her. Late at night, the cops would knock on the door to inform us that my mother left my dad’s Jeep at some motel and that she had been last seen with another man, both on some kind of substance. Eventually, all of this landed my mother a spot in the mental institute.

We pulled up to a brick building in my dad’s Jeep. The feeling of being anxious and nervous filled my stomach as butterflies fluttered inside me. We entered into the lobby of the building where the smell of being unglued filled the air. As you walked down the barren hallway you could hear the screams of others. I saw a girl with deep gashes covering her arms, neck, legs, and probably more. At the time, I had no idea that there was anything wrong with her. Until the day I stumbled across the sick form of self harm; I came to the realization that I too would have the same war zone mapped across my body, but in a much smaller scale. I sat in the metallic room, sitting on a chair that seemed to sink into the ground, just like the souls that inhabited this hospital. I realized that my mother was not okay and that not every mother was like her.

Once I came to the realization that my mother was not like any of my friend’s moms, I knew that my life would be much different from theirs. It was a constant heartache to know that. The nights always seemed to get longer as my cries became pure sorrow and pain. I never knew when the breaking point was going to come until the day the battle became warfare with heavy hearts and shredded photographs.

It was not much longer; only a matter of a few months. My mom, I could only blame her for the shattered wall and plastered hugs that left a cold embrace. I tried to gather a sense of being okay but the day had finally come and the smell of stale, hollow air filled my lungs.As salty water spilled from my eyes, I felt as if the ocean had swallowed me whole. I watched as the the film poured from my parents wedding tape like a bad movie ending and the pictures of my family made piles of shredded memories on the floor of my parents bedroom. My mother sat crouched on the floor near the closet. She was capable of tearing apart the past, and so she did. Her white cotton shirt made a pile of loneliness across her lap.

I watched her scream and yell, trying to remove the past from her aching mind. Sirens echoed in the distance, almost replicating the sounds of my mother's screams. My brother and I stood in the cool summer breeze, shaking, answering questions that would be asked for the rest of our lives. We had been avoiding this new chapter of our lives for so long but now we had to face the reality of a world that was crashing down.

Inside, my mother’s light brown hair curled to embrace her bonie, lifelessly drained face. Her skeleton fingers shook as rivers made streams across her cheeks. My father’s pastel white hair and jutting belly seemed to be saying, “ I'm in charge.” My mother fought with him as he was giving her the choice to leave. He suggested that my brother and I go with him to a hotel so she could stay at the house, but she didn’t want that. Her hair zig-zagged, as she shook her head to tell him she was leaving. My Dad only wished for the best for my brother and I; he removed us from the shattering glass we called a family.

*****

Somehow, because of my Dad,protecting my brother and I, I was removed from all of it. I liked to think that maybe nothing could be hidden from me, but a majority of it was. Little did I know that it all began when I was two years old. My mother laid on the floor caressing the cold porcelain toilet, drunk with the fact that she couldn’t take care of her twin children. She locked herself away in the bathroom only to avoid responsibility. From then on, I was put into daycare.

Things only progressed from there when we moved to Wisconsin from Montana; I was three. “Where is Mom?” A frequently asked question, but rarely answered. For months, my Mom was in the hospital when my brother had surgeries on his club feet. She stayed there to care for him while my Dad stayed home to take care of me.

My mom and brother had come home from the hospital. My brother had a tube running out of his arm and a wheelchair. His legs were encased in an orange plastered mold. My mom had gotten on a new prescription. This prescription made her hallucinate. With everything else she had wrong; Depression, Anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, Anorexia, Multiple Sclerosis, alcohol and drug abuse; none of it seemed to help. Her bonie body sat slumped over at the kitchen table surrounded by the crooked floorboards and plastered walls.

“There are bugs in the pasta.” She sat scattered across her chair, digging for the worms.
“Bugs on the walls.” She began to hit the wall with her fist. She was trying to kill the insects that crawled up and down the cream colored enclosure. Her face, petrified, twisting like she had seen a ghost.

Hallucination had gotten the best of my mom, and she wasn’t its only guest. Nightmares danced in my head of the 100 year old house that had been coated in bugs. The stained railing to the stairs became sheathed in nightcrawlers, earthworms, and beetles the size of a human head.The deck swarmed with bees, wasps, and ladybugs. With each step, the floor began to fill with blood and guts from the now crushed insects. I woke up in a stir. My mom had these hallucinations until the day she fell and broke four of her ribs; trying to kill one of the imaginary bugs. They took her off the prescription, in order to avoid another accident.

**********

I walked back inside the house to see my mom packing a bag, frantically, she had a stream of tears dripping onto the bed. A pile of film surrounded her. That was the day my mom left. Her frail body limped out the door with a suitcase full of burdens. I didn’t hear from my mom for months. Finally, one day she showed up to show us her new house. I visited her at the safehouse. While I was away, my dad and brother packed up my mother’s belongings and stacked them into piles in the garage, creating a city of boxes. Soon all of my mom’s belongings were gone and she was too. Court date after court date my dad fought to keep my brother and I.

After many years of a broken plastered family I repaired my weary soul. To this day, my mom isn’t doing any better. It only seems to get worse each day. My mom was in the nursing home for two months, and would’ve been better off if she stayed their. If none of the fighting, the craziness, the long, sleepless nights; would have ever happened, I would not be the same person at all. I would not be as kind as I am, I would not know what true pain and horror and fear feel and look like. I would be selfish and unforgiving to others. Through this all I have become a better person. I have forgiven my mother for what she caused. The emotional torment, I’ve since let go. It’s hard to see my mom in a wheelchair with her even more lifeless, dull skeleton. The sound of heads banging against a wall still echo in my mind. Through it all my mother is still my mom and I have to love her for it.

If my mother would have never gone into the mental hospital, I would have never known what it looks like to want to die. If my mom didn’t do the crazy things she did; like drugs, driving through corn fields, banging her head on walls, and seeing bugs; I would never known that I don’t have to follow in someone else’s footsteps. My mom taught me right from wrong in the most twisted sense. She showed me that you need to care, love, and accept others who are different from you. The world is a cold place and you need to warm it up with compassion for those who hurt you. My mother taught me to be a stronger person.

I still visit my mom from time to time. I hate going to her house because the dust lays in piles, thicker than a book. She repeats herself a lot, never really knowing what’s going on. If you’re hungry you have to heat up a leftover T.V dinner. Gospel music fills the house in the mornings. It doesn’t matter what season it is, plastic covers the windows. In the Summer the house is hot; in the Winter, the house is cold. The worst part is the dirty floors and my mom’s droopy face. She always looks sad.

I hate hugs because they remind me of plaster. The reason for this is because my mother gives me plastered hugs. The day she left she gave me a plastered hug that will forever be imprinted to my skin. My mom is made of bones and two bags full of medication. I was built up from pain and courage.

********

“Where’s mom?” I asked the plastered walls of the musty bedroom in my mom’s house. I never expect an answer because I knew I would be asking this question for the rest of my life, and somehow I always knew she wasn’t there.