The Hard Stuff

As a child, I never realized what went on behind closed doors, especially after I fell asleep or was sent to bed. I always thought my parents were the made for each other, soul mate kind of love. I found out just how wrong I was when I approached the last year of middle school.

I was about to turn 14 when everything went to crap. Early in the year, my mother needed a surgery on her leg. She had a lot of pain in recent months, and quite a few falls, and it was deemed necessary to fix her leg so she could be pain-free and back to working in no time. She had a career going as a CNA, and big dreams, she later told me, of owning her own nursing home on a reservation and caring for our Native American people.

We weren’t a very traditional family, but we had a lot of dream catchers and my mother smudged anytime she sensed negative energy. At least, she used to. After the surgery, during my mom’s recovery, I would help her around the house as a good young girl should. While I was away at school, she had a seizure. She had two more that next week.

After many tests at the hospital and referrals to a neurologist, they diagnosed the type of seizure she was having. “Grand mal seizures,” they said. They didn’t know why they were occurring, they just offered a half-assed explanation that it could have been a side effect from the anesthesia she was given during surgery. She was also handed a lot of medication to start taking daily and it took a toll on her pride.

I wasn’t witness to a seizure until almost a month later, nearing my birthday. We were shopping since mom received her tax refund, and we convinced her to buy a new computer. We hadn’t had one in a while, and the one we had was one of those boxy e-Machine models from about eight years prior that didn’t turn on anymore. When we got home, she was feeling guilty about spending so much money on an electronic device, my brother and I gently consoled her and told her it was needed. She would be able to communicate with her work and it would provide entertainment for us.

“Please, mom, it’s okay,” I pleaded in a childish voice.

She sighed and sat down on our couch, put a hand on her head and said, “Oh, I’m feeling a headache coming on.”

Not even half of a minute had passed when I saw her eyes roll in the back of her head and she slumped over. She fell off the couch and started convulsing violently. My aunt, who had gone shopping with us as well, rushed over along with my brother. My hand was covering my mouth and I let out a scream that was more like a hoarse whisper, “Mom!”

I couldn’t watch. I wish I could say that I was the golden child and dove to her rescue, sat beside her and talked her through it. I bolted down our hallway and hid in our bathroom, door locked and curled up with my knees to my chest. I started crying in that awful, full body wracking way, feeling my heart hurt.

My mother was a strong woman who had an even stronger sense of pride. Feeling herself deteriorate into that vulnerable, can’t-do-anything state was a hard blow on her ego. She had always been the bread-winner in our family, working hard as a CNA for almost 25 years. That meant long days and nights where we as little kids almost never saw her, and when we did, that time was precious. As such, I didn’t like seeing her that way, so I hid and pretended everything was okay.

Eventually, my brother came knocking on the bathroom door. “Carmen? Everything’s okay. She’s fine now.”

“Okay,” I whispered. It took me another five or so minutes before I came back out to the living room.

What broke my heart the most was when I entered the room and my mom immediately looked at me with sadness in her eyes. It wasn’t because I ran away, it was because she felt she made me run away. “I’m sorry, my girl.” my mom consoled me. I started crying again and ran to her arms.

These are the things I started realizing as I got older. Everything my mom did, she did for us, for me. Maybe I was coddled too much as a kid, but I think that she wanted me to grow up a little after that. Still, every time afterwards, she seemed to have a seizure when I wasn’t around or she hid it from me. The medicine finally started working a couple months later and seizures became a thing of the past.

Before that started working though, she lost her driver’s license temporarily, and then her job, permanently. She was labeled as disabled, can’t work alone, needs accommodations. A liability. That took the biggest hit. It was then that she stopped caring and started a path of self-destruction. She stopped being mom and became a monster I never knew she had inside her.

The night before my 14^th birthday, I awoke to a loud noise. I turned over in my bed and saw my parents’ light on next to my room. I heard yelling, which turned into drunken shouting, and then banging around, like something heavy was being thrown. My parents and my aunt and her boyfriend had all been drinking. My aunt started screaming, “Sister! Sister, calm down! What the hell? We were just having fun!”

Another loud noise and I heard my mom shriek. “Did you just hit me?”

“Yeah, I did!” my dad said in a weak scoff.

If anyone knew my dad, they would also know that as much as he was a big guy, with a pot belly and huge bear mitts for hands, he was also the sweetest dad around. He was very pacified, despite being someone that had fought numerous fights in his past and had also been part of the military. He had never hit my mother before and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I managed to sneak a glance at the time on my phone; 4:58 A.M. I had school in three hours.

I laid there, pulling my blankets up to my chin and curling further within myself. Normally, I would have opened my window and hopped out, running to my favorite hide away place where I could calm down and dream of better things before when my parents fought. This type of screaming match was something that had began a few years before this, but never was drinking involved. At this time, that is what I believed, but I found out later that wasn’t the case. I was just a very naive child.

I heard a faint smacking sound, and then a loud groan which I assumed was my father. There was some more banging and crashing noises, and all of a sudden, my door bent inwards with a loud crack! I must have emitted an audible cry, because I watched the door go somewhat back to normal and heard my dad say, “Baby? Baby girl? I’m sorry, honey, I’m sorry.” He sounded very drunk and was pawing at my door when he said this.

Just then, I heard the other hallway door open and the sound of my brother. “What the hell are you guys doing? It’s five o’clock and we’re trying to sleep for school!” He was using his big man shouting voice now that it had developed after his puberty.

“Hey, now, James, just go back to sleep. C’mon, go back in your room.” I heard our aunt’s scared voice trying to coax him back, trying to placate the situation.

“No! I’m tired of just sitting in my room while this is going on. Don’t you guys know what you’re doing? Don’t you have any god-damn clue what this is doing to Carmen?” He was getting more heated, my dear brother, who had always tried to protect me.

“Excuse me?” My mother’s shrill voice sounded from right outside my door, making me flinch deeper into my cocoon. “Do you kids even know what I do for you? The sacrifices I made for you guys? And all of you don’t have a single ounce of respect for me! I don’t hear any ‘thank you mom’s or ‘we appreciate you mom’s on any other day of the year except when I get my money.”

My mom was a loud walker any other day, but that day it sounded like her steps would go right through the floor and into the ground underneath our house. She was storming toward my brother, the fire inside her burning at extremely dangerous levels.

Whenever my mother drank after this, you could tell when it went from a happy little camp fire to a burning inferno of anger and hatred deep inside. You didn’t want to be around to become a target for that release, which is why I often ran away for a few hours and returned home quietly. My brother usually took the brunt of it, his own fire inside flaring like a challenge. His was of protection, love, and rebellion, and it burned just as bright as my mother’s.

My aunt prevented anything more damaging from happening this time, calming my mother and pulling her to the living room to settle down, where I heard mom sobbing later in the hour. My dad had left the house on a walk, probably to his friend’s, and the house quieted. I had cried myself to sleep and woke up with a headache and left for school.

At school that day, I received a few happy birthdays. A boy in my science class who sat next to me said it as well, and I smiled drearily. He was the only one to ask me what was wrong, but I only responded with, “I had a bad time sleeping last night.”

“Oh, are you having a party? Nervous energy for that?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him what really went on. After all, he was vastly different from my complicated life, with his designer clothes and bright blond hair and blue eyes. How could he ever handle this pain and anguish inside my heart? “Yeah,” I lied, “something like that.”

After this significant turning point, lying about my situation was something I did often. I tried to put on a face at school, but nine times out of ten, I walked around without a smile and looking like I hated everybody. Which, at the time, I probably did. I was still an evolving adolescent and all these feelings ate at me, all the horrible things I heard my parents say to each other, drunken nights spent screaming until their voices were all but gone… These were things I was convinced only I was going through, and that some higher power deemed me pathetic and lowly enough to cast it upon.

In my later years of high school, I had teachers who realized what was happening. They never tried to remedy the situation, since I sugar-coated most of the problems, but I trusted and loved them with my whole heart. They were my sounding boards and showed me empathy where I received none. I turned towards writing and drawing as coping mechanisms, along with other methods that weren’t as healthy, but I was able to stop those eventually.

My dad faded into the background and retreated into his room, only coming out to make food and try to talk to us. My mother had several other surgeries and needed a hospital bed that was placed in the living room, so I ended up hiding in my room more as well. The years went by with several of the same-level, and even worse, fights as the one on the morning of my birthday. I found out later that day that my dad had only pushed my mother away with the knuckles of his fist, while she had broken his nose and given him two black eyes after he did that. They were never the same.

I tried my hardest to return to my mom’s side as her little girl, someone she could be proud of, someone I could show my creations to and receive endless praise. Most of the time, I was pushed away as she had a headache or wasn’t feeling well, or she was too busy chatting with internet friends to pay attention to me. My grades slipped, so did my attitude. I stopped caring about trying to be the good child, stopped caring about school all together.

Every attempt I made at gaining my mother’s attention failed. I did great in school, I received awards and was even lettered, and she did nothing. I had horrible grades and failed classes and started skipping school, and she would direct cruel words at me instead of trying to figure out what the problem was. I even blatantly told her our relationship was ruined because of the alcohol and she just shrugged it off. We had fewer and fewer days as best friends, and months where we were just strangers under the same roof. Years of threatening to vanish because of her behavior, my mom called my dad’s bluff, and then he actually did leave.

My mother was a fire, burning bright and desirable, leading the way for her family to a better future. Within a few short months, that fire became wild and unruly, burning everything in sight. A few years later, that same inferno, the one I had admired and wrote about in essays, consumed her as well. There was nothing anyone, not even myself, could do to quell it. Even with all the pain and misery she had caused between us, when that last little flame went out, a light in me burned out, too.