Chaos

·The ride home was okay while my mom and brother asked about my day, but when we got home it was a different story.

Currently I am sitting on one of those paisley chairs tying my Nike shoes so I can leave until my mom calms down. As soon as we walked in the house she started screaming about how we never help her out around the house. Which, is actually a valid argument, but then she started insulting me and comparing me to some of my old friends that are at better colleges and thinner than me. Now she’s standing above me practically spitting in my face while she screams about who knows what. I made up an excuse to put on tennis shoes like ‘Oh my oother shoes were hurting my feet’ when actually I’m pretty sure I’ll be running around to get away for a while.

I finally have a chance to escape and run out of the house, narrowly avoiding a hanger that smashes against the door next to me. Before I’m completely outside the patio gate I turn back and yell, “I would help you if you wouldn’t just scream at me for hours!”

She then runs outside, while I push away the vines covering the outer gate and scramble away, and yells back, “You were never going to help me! And now you’re just running away from your responsibilities, like usual! I WANT YOU TO MOVE OUT!!”

I scream back from the sidewalk, not caring what the neighbors think anymore, “Fine! Bye forever!”

She slams the creaky door and I run until I see my brother sitting in a patch of grass nearby munching on Doritos and reading a book. “Lets go, quick.”
He looks up and replies while marking his page and shutting the book, “Okay, but you better have money because I’m pretty sure that store knows that I steal from them. Oh, should I put my book back at home?”

I shake my head while walking down the winding sidewalk toward the stores, “Let’s get food somewhere else, and unless you’re planning on staying home and doing your homework- which you actually should be doing- then you don’t want to go back inside.” I keep walking with my hands open behind me while he pours chips in them. He stuffs the small book in his pocket and runs to catch up with me.

The whole way to the store we make jokes and talk about movies, I think we do that to forget about the bad things happening around us. I guess when someone has had to deal with many different dramatic experiences, fights, and people screaming at them, or being overly emotional around them, they just cut off. I know that I sometimes will just stand there with a blank face when someone is screaming and crying in front of me. It’s like I just don’t know what to do, I can yell, I can get angry, but responding to someone who is sad is not one of my abilities. I pretty much make a joke out of everything, or make it sarcastic, and my brother grew up with me so he’s pretty much become that way too. If my mom is screaming about ‘how much of a failure I am’ at the top of her lungs I can just sit there and turn to my brother and make a joke about how many earplugs I need to not lose my hearing.

I also have a weirdly high pain tolerance, or more like I just don’t really show that I’m in pain. Recently I had a fight with my brother, and he picked up a small wooden table and threw it at me. It hit right above my knee and broke the skin making it bleed everywhere. As soon as I hit him back I calmly limped to my mom, who was sitting nonchalantly in the other room telling her friend on the phone that her children were having a huge fight, and told her I needed a large bandaid and some ice. She screamed when she saw the blood pouring down my leg while my brother ran and hid, as usual. Its almost like I feel the emotions inside, pain, fear, sadness, happiness, but it doesn’t register on my face or in my voice. What made me that way? Why do I do that? I don’t know, maybe subconsciously I just want to seem tough when really every single fucked up thing that happens to me leaves a lasting impression in my memory, no matter how small.

But hey, I feel like I’m painting a very negative image of my mom. She’s not actually that bad, some of the time. I had a pretty great overall childhood, to this day she still will take me and my brother to go hiking or get ice cream on the weekends, and she will spend hours just talking to me about my goals and friends and just life. I think everyone has a bad side and a good side, some just lean a lot towards one or the other. I don’t really tend to classify people as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ people until I truly know them. Sometimes I dislike people just because I’ve seen them do something shady and I just end of blocking out the ‘good’ side of them because of what I’ve seen. I think my mother overall is a pretty good person, she just sometimes gets caught up in her own ideas for how she wants my life to be. Although, I can’t deny a lot of the time I resent her, am annoyed by her, and we have a pretty negative relationship. But, one thing I can say for her is that she’s always been there for me even when times are hard, and even she has had no one to help, I can always go to her. I shake my head at the ground as I walk along, pretending to listen to my brother ramble on about Nerf guns, I really can’t believe I’m defending my mom after she just insulted me for over two hours!

After we are stocked with candy bars and other junk food we return to the house to sneak in, hoping my mom is asleep by now. All the lights are on so we hide the food in pockets and my purse and decide to go inside anyway.

I know I said I was moving out, but who am I kidding? I’m have no money, no job, and no place to go. I’m pretty sure I’m living here for a while no matter how exhausting it is.

I push the door open to find her crying on the phone- nothing new there-, which I ignore because she is still insulting me to her friend, and grab my brother as I somberly walk into my bedroom. We drop onto the rug and lay out our stolen goods while we hear my mother complaining into the phone from the other room, “They finally decide to show up at eleven at night, yea, god I can’t wait till they move out,” and to us, “YOU TWO BETTER BE GOING TO BED BECAUSE I’M WAKING YOU UP EARLY TO CLEAN!”

“Yea whatever!” I yell back and continue eating and talking with my brother, until she decides to check on us. Honestly, this isn’t even one of my worst family days, more like pretty uneventful.

Notes