Me> part four

High School- private and family life, behind closed doors

It was my step dad that really started to stress out my mom, you could say. Although her history didn’t help any.

Her mom is kind of crazy~ she’s a compulsive taker. Whenever she comes over she tries to take something. Pictures. Frames. Anything she might like she tries to take.

I remember there was one time that my grandma and my mom were going through old pictures that my mom has. There were ones of my grandmas ex-husband, a man that raised my mom. My grandma said they were her pictures, but they were my moms. What would she want with pictures of her ex anyways? So, she suddenly came into the house and told my aunt (who was there with her baby granddaughter), that they had to go. Right then. Leave immediately. So my mom knew that she had taken something. Turns out she had taken those pictures. Put them in a bag in the passenger side and locked the door. But not the drivers door. My mom crawled in through the drivers side and took the bag. It ended up that my grandma, a five foot tall chubby lady (who had cancer and is missing two fingers), chased my mom down the driveway and around a bunch of trees we have a couple times. They were swearing at each other the whole time. It was very entertaining to watch and listen to.

That was our entertainment, mostly.

But back to what I was saying.

My step-dad would yell at us for stupid reasons, and blamed me for almost everything, even stuff I couldn’t control. Needless to say he controlled my mom in many ways, making her take out a second mortgage on the house to try and keep the restaurant going. The restaurant ended up over 600,000 in debt. There was a time, the winter of my junior year.. that it got bad.

My mom had been taking anti-depressants. And you know you’re not supposed to drink with those. But by this time, over the past couple years, she had developed a habit of drinking a bottle of wine almost every night. That didn’t go good with medication.

I remember that I would randomly hear banging at night, then my mom and step dad arguing, then silence. I didn’t know what it was. I got in the habit of putting a pillow over my head every night, to drown out the arguing and crying.

Then I found out what the banging was one night.. when my mom was in the kitchen. She had been drinking and I was in the room next to the kitchen with my younger brother. I heard glass crashing and ran into the kitchen. To see that she had broken the window with her head. Just slammed her head into it. Turns out the banging had been her pounding her head into the wall many nights, like it would help her.

That night I had to physically restrain her from going back to the broken window and using the glass to harm herself. I had her down on the floor, pinned, with her struggling under me. Eventually I got her outside. It was winter. We had no socks on. No jacket. The ground was frozen. There was snow on the ground. And it was below zero. But the only way to calm her down was to take her out to the barn. Our neighbors could probably hear her screaming. I made my younger brother clean up the glass while he stayed in the house. I didn’t want him to have to deal with her, and it was a school night. He needed sleep.

But it was about eleven pm when I had he rout in the barn, covered in a horse blanket. It took about half an hour for me to reach our family friend, a woman, who came over. She called my step dad because I had to go inside before I got frost bite and so I could go to school. The last thing I heard was my mom screaming from the barn to not bring my step dad there. “Not him, not him.”

After that she purposefully threw herself down the stairs, and I heard her crying to my step dad that she should just end it. That we would be better off without her. Sometimes it feels that way, but then I remember that she is my mother, and it can’t be true. We wouldn’t be better.

We ended up staying with our dad for a week. He drove us 40 miles to school and 40 miles from school every day. Part of the agreement of us going back to her house was that she stopped drinking so much. I asked her if I had permission to take away the wine, if I saw it. Her words were that I was a “child”, therefore I have no authority to do anything like that. At this point I had taken care of her, fended for myself, grew up faster than I should’ve, and was a junior in high school. Her saying this was not logical. But I knew, with this, that at least she was sober. Those were things she said even before she started drinking, and after, so I knew that she was herself at least then.

I swear, the scariest thing is seeing your parent almost going crazy in front of you. Like they were someone else entirely. It’s not something that can be described, only felt.

And now, even when I’m in my worst moods and people worry about them, I tell them I will never resort to killing myself. Never resort to going crazy, never give in.

This is why. Now you can believe me. Trust me. I will always be me, I promise that.

And that's all for tonight. I'll see you all later. Goodnight.