The First Time My Dad Gave Me the Silent Treatment

When I was about ten, give or take a couple of years, my mother and I got home from back-to-school clothes shopping.  It was the one time per year I got to go shopping as a kid.  My dad told me cheerily to put on a fashion show for him so he could see everything we'd bought, something I had previously been happy to do.  But this year I didn't want to.  I told my dad I was tired and didn't feel like doing a fashion show.  He stopped being cheery and said something along the lines of, "Tough shit.  Those are my clothes paid for with my money.  If I want to see what they look like on, you have to show me." 

I replied -- and this is going to be pretty close to verbatim because the fallout burned it into my brain -- "I will give you all the money I have never to speak to me again."

Was it hyperbolic?  A bit.  Was it mean?  Absolutely.  Was it unfair?  Not really from where I'm sitting.  My dad threw around his ownership of us and our belongings pretty regularly.  It was his house, his food, his toys, all bought with his money from his disability checks.  Two of the monthly social security checks came specifically for care of Dante and me, with our names printed on them, but I didn't know that at the time.  Or maybe I did and it didn't matter.  I remember the time my mother told me they had gotten extra government money when they adopted Dante but that they had gotten nothing for me.  Dante's check simply got cut in half when I was born.  Poor Dante.  Freeloading me.  I can't remember when I learned about social security.  I also can't remember a time I didn't know I cost my family money and brought in nothing.  I was worthless in the most literal sense of the word.

My dad got upset and decided to respond by giving me exactly what I'd requested -- he stopped speaking to me or even acknowledging my existence.

The really scary part was when I let slip something that might normally upset him.  I don't remember what I said.  It wasn't anything big or intentionally offensive -- it was probably a lame joke, knowing me -- but it didn't take much to set him off.  Both my parents tended to freak out at things I never would have anticipated.  We were in the living room and I said something to my mother or Dante or someone else who did still speak to me, immediately followed by the realization that I'd said something that might upset my dad.  My entire body went tense, as it often did.  I paused and didn't move or speak or breathe, waiting to see if he'd erupt.  Imagine the Jurassic Park kids trying to hide from the T-Rex.  I would freeze like that.  But he didn't erupt.  He didn't acknowledge that I'd spoken at all.  That was when I first realized that he could actually control his rages and tantrums.  He simply hadn't bothered to control himself before.

Before that time, I had seen him more as a wounded wild animal -- dangerous and scary, but not willfully violent or cruel.  When I realized his screaming outbursts -- a several time per day occurrence -- were at least partly within his control, he got a whole lot scarier.  I knew now that he had been mistreating us and scaring us on purpose.  He wasn't weak and broken and completely out of control like I'd always assumed.  He was uncaring.  I had always assumed he was the one who cared for me the most, but if his behavior clearly hurt me and he could in fact control his behavior, he must not care if he hurt me.  That realization felt like a punch in the gut. 

As much as my dad's refusal to rage at me should have been a welcome relief, much like my mother's glee at getting high for the first time, I found it creepy and disconcerting.  It was like being stuck in a nightmare that shouldn't even qualify as a nightmare because nothing is happening, but it's too quiet and something just seems off and I keep waiting for a monster to jump out and assault me.

Within a matter of days, I came to my dad sobbing, begging for forgiveness, begging him to speak to me again.  I couldn't handle the silent treatment from the ruler of our house.  I couldn't handle knowing he was constantly displeased with me but always nearby at the same time.  I felt disgusting and ashamed for crying to him and begging him to speak to me when I knew how he judged me for crying and I didn't particularly like hearing from him anyway, but I was a perfectionist and a people pleaser and I had to keep him happy with me.  It was too scary for me when he wasn't happy with me.  After all, everything I owned was his.  If I didn't stay on his good side, I wouldn't have a home or food or clothes or toys.  What would become of me?  I was just a child, as my parents liked to remind me.  I had nothing.

My dad deigned to speak to me again, shutting off the silent treatment and anger toward me like flipping a switch.  I had learned my lesson.  We treated this spat the way we treated every other unpleasantness in our family -- we pretended none of it had ever happened.  I cannot remember a time I ever confronted him with my anger again.

Laundry in the Hoard

The washing machine at my parents' house broke when I was in elementary school.  The laundry room was a yellow, walk-in closet-sized room off of the kitchen that held the washer and dryer, a sink, and a counter my mother referred to as "the breakfast nook."  I remember the room being clean once for I'm not sure how long -- I remember excitedly eating cereal at that breakfast nook when I was maybe seven years old, give or take -- but by the time the washing machine broke, the room was basically inaccessible.  There was an approximately five foot high mountain of laundry from the back wall to within a foot of the doorway, where it sloped abruptly downward.  The washer could only be reached by standing on some of the clothes, followed by strategic leaning.  I recall a beautiful pink sundress I had never worn being relegated to that pile because it had wrinkled in the dryer.  My mother didn't believe in ironing, and that was years before she bought Dante and me each our own iron and ironing board for Christmas (I was genuinely thrilled, and I think Dante was too -- she had previously thrown away or piled up anything that wrinkled, which severely limited our wardrobe options).  I don't remember what made up the rest of the mound.

After the washing machine broke, my mother started doing the laundry at the laundromat.  She said the house was too messy to let someone in to fix the washer yet.  She had to get the laundry room cleared out.  Years passed.  As I got older, I started helping her.  Once or twice a month she would load up all the household laundry into large garbage bags, I would haul them to the car where they took up the entirety of the trunk and backseat, and -- because I had either school or work pretty much any given weekday of the year -- we would spend Saturday at the laundromat. 

She started yelling at me for putting my clothes in the hamper after only wearing them once, as I had always been taught to do.  She yelled at me for only using towels once too, though there was nowhere to hang them except over the shower, where they got extra wet the next time someone used it.  That's where we kept them though.  We could only ever tell which towels were our own because my mother always bought brightly colored beach towels instead of normal bath towels, and none of them looked identical.  You just had to remember which one you'd used and hope everyone else did the same.

I remember asking in my teens why we didn't just clear out the laundry room and get the washer fixed.  My mother frequently complained about how little money we had, and I saw how much we spent in quarters every trip.  My mother brought large Centrum vitamin bottles filled with quarters, and they each held multiple rolls.  She insisted it would cost even more in water bills if we did the laundry at home.  She said she would also be expected to do laundry every day if we had a working washing machine at home, and she refused to do that. 

When I got to college, the laundry room in my dorm was made up of the little machines designed for home use.  It was ironically my first experience using a classic washing machine with a lid and an agitator, like the one we'd had in my house all my life.  I was used to the high-capacity, industrial-grade machines we used at the laundromat, and I needed help the first time I used the dorm's equipment.  "You didn't do your own laundry at home?  God, you're spoiled," a dormmate informed me.  I didn't correct him.  After all, I didn't do my own laundry at home.  And at one of the most expensive private universities in the country, "spoiled" seemed like a significantly more flattering image than the one people would associate with me if they knew the details.

My mother finally replaced the washer and dryer in one of her spending sprees after I graduated from college.  According to the paperwork from my parents' divorce, they cost $5000 when she bought them a decade ago.  I don't know if anyone other than Dante has ever used them.  I've had my own personal washer and dryer since my husband and I bought our house.  Laundry is my favorite chore because it feels like I'm getting something done while a machine literally does the work for me, and I don't have to leave my house.  I can sleep on fresh bedsheets every week and have my favorite clothes ready to wear with less than a day's notice.  I've had to have someone come over to fix the machines and even replace them at one point, and I have to say -- it is still easier than going to the laundromat.  Then again, I've never had to scale a Matterhorn of wrinkled laundry to use them either.

Mother Takes Her Cut

At the end of my sophomore year of college, I applied for and accepted a campus job as a Resident Assistant.  My payment was a rent-free studio efficiency apartment that would normally cost a little over $10k for the school year.  In order to accept the job, I had to quit my mail room job I had worked since freshman year.  It had been my sole source of income during the school year.

Because my RA apartment didn't come with a meal plan, I had no way to pay for food.  I also had no way to pay for the phone line the school required me to have, or clothes or anything else.  My social security checks were still being kept by my mother to pay for my books and tuition.  My parents kicked in a lot toward tuition, and I paid for the rest with a hefty academic scholarship and student loans.

After my explanation of the situation -- that she wouldn't have to pay for my housing and could redirect funds toward the things I'd previously paid for with my mail room job -- my mother agreed to give me a monthly allowance so I could buy food and necessities.  I believe it was $150 per month, if I recall correctly.  I know the budget I worked out allowed me to spend $20 per week on food, so I had to stop buying whole grain healthy stuff and eat a lot more ramen.  Unfortunately, that was the same year I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, so I had a lot of doctors bills, and I had to pay bus fare three times per week to get to the hospital for my initial follow-up appointments and some related blood tests.

I called my mother and told her I needed more money to pay hospital bills, and she screamed at me for daring to pay any of them in full.  ALWAYS put them on a payment plan, she told me.  NEVER pay hospital bills in full!  I hadn't known.  I asked for payment plans going forward, but I still needed more money.  I was barely getting by, and my boss got mad whenever I argued that I didn't have money to eat restaurant food with the other RAs.  My boss expected me to pitch in an equal amount whether I ate their food or not.  My mother eventually gave me a little more money and purchased me a small supplemental meal plan through the school so that I could eat larger, healthier meals occasionally.  Then she spent somewhere in neighborhood of $70 -- more than three weeks' worth of grocery money in my world -- to send me a Hershey's Chocolate Tower of Treats made up almost exclusively of foods my doctors had told me to avoid, such as nuts and popcorn.  I had even told her about the diet restrictions before she sent it.

After graduation, after my mother went off the deep end, my dad mentioned the monthly allowance I had lived off of for those last two years of college, except the figure he quoted to me was more than double what I had received.  "She told me you hated me," he said.  "She said I had to give the money to her because you would never accept it if it came from me directly because you hated me so much."  And then she had taken a more than 50% cut for herself.  Every single month.  I'll let slide the fact that she told my dad I hated him because parental alienation was old hat with her and shouldn't have come as a surprise.  But knowing I was struggling, hearing me cry over the phone that I couldn't afford anything and was embarrassing myself in front of my boss, she made the repeated decision to take her cut.  Every.  Single.  Month. 

My dad didn't even control their money.  He only ever bothered controlling his own comparatively tiny social security checks, which were about 10% of their total monthly income.  The rest was all hers.  About $9k per month, all hers, at least $6k of which should have been disposable income.  I guess she wanted more.

[Edited:  I forgot to factor in my tuition and their various car payments -- I don't even remember how many cars they would have been paying off at that time -- when I said they had $6k in monthly disposable income.  I was going on what their finances looked like when I took them over a couple years later.  I think their mortgage payments were less back then, before the refinance, but I don't know by how much.  They might have had as little as $4k disposable income per month. Of course that number also factors in if my mother had paid both the home equity line of credit payment and my tuition rather than paying the HELOC payment every month and then immediately borrowing against it again to pay my tuition, which is what she said she did (in one of her "you are why we're poor" rants).  Actually, she said she paid for at least one car with the HELOC too, so that payment wouldn't have been extra.  Never mind.  I can't even picture what finances looked like when my mother was in charge of them.  I've tried before, and that way madness lies.]

The Swamp of Sadness

When I was a child, the most secret, most off-limits part of our house was the master bedroom where my dad slept.  My mother hadn't slept in that room since before I was born -- she sometimes slept in the lower bunk bed of Dante's room, but she usually set up camp on the living room couch -- and her instinct seemed to be to hoard up Dad's areas first.  My dad's room was large and had two twin beds pushed together, one in which he slept and an adjacent one full of his self-care-related medical supplies, such as gauze and catheters and chux disposable underpads, the smaller items stored in tackle boxes and the rest simply strewn about the bed.

The master bedroom was large, with one wall taken up entirely by closet and another wall hosting a heavy armoire, stuffed to bursting with old clothes no one had worn in my lifetime.  The bedroom had French doors leading out to the backyard patio, but I cannot remember ever seeing those French doors in use.  Aside from a wheelchair-width stretch of floor that led from the bed to the door to the bathroom, the rest of the room was covered in four to five feet deep of gym mats, cardboard boxes, and random detritus.  My dad had dubbed it "The Swamp of Sadness" in homage to that miserable quicksandy place where the horse sank in "The Neverending Story."  It probably started out as a joke, but for as long as I can remember, that was it's real name.  I didn't even know it was a movie reference.  We called that part of the house "The Swamp of Sadness" like normal people might refer to "Dad's office" or "the den."  

I remember getting into trouble once when, as a young child, I had asked a visiting friend, "Wanna see something crazy?" and cracked the door to let her peer into my dad's bedroom.  My mother had caught me to our mutual horror, but if there was a punishment, it was a forgettable one, probably because she was too embarrassed to do much about it.  In hindsight, I don't know why she wasn't more embarrassed of the entire house.  None of the rooms were "visitor ready" in the strictest sense of the term.

I remember once or twice in my childhood, when I was feeling particularly daring, going on a Frodo-and-Sam-style adventure with Dante over the Swamp.  He moved the gym mats and egg mattresses to the top layer to make it like mountain climbing, and we stepped across them precariously, nearly touching the ceiling, never knowing when a cardboard box would collapse beneath us or a sinkhole would form and claim us for the hoard.  I remember making a tragic misstep and sinking into the mess and Dante having to lift me out to safety.  It was scary but thrilling at the same time.  Our mother got mad whenever she caught us playing near the Swamp of Sadness, but she got mad at lots of things.  It also seemed it wasn't such a big deal as long as Dante had been doing it too.

My dad eventually cleaned out the contents of the Swamp in the late '90s to make room for his new electric wheelchair.  It was the second time I realized his paraplegia didn't actually prevent him from cleaning up; he had just always opted not to bother.

The Clothes My Mother Bought Me When I Was Eight Don't Fit Yet

When my mother bought me clothes, they were over-sized.  When I was a child, she said it was so I could grow into them.  When I was an adolescent, she said the bagginess was slimming.  "I'm not saying you're fat," she sometimes said when I bought my own clothes, "But those clothes make you look fat."  A few times when I came home from high school she showed me baggy, knee-length sweatshirts she had bought for me, enthusiastically explaining how, when she lost just a little more weight, she'd be able to wear them too.  She outweighed me by approximately 100 lbs at the time.

The last time I stayed in my parents' home, I went through some of my old clothes.  I tried on a set of velour sweats I remember my mother buying me when I was eight.  I had been a plump-but-not-technically-overweight child.  I was a healthy-but-not-particularly-skinny adult woman.  I could still pull the waistband of the pants up past my breasts, just as I could when I was eight.  Worn properly, the crotch of the pants hung at my knees, just as it had when I'd worn them to elementary school.  I would never grow into those velour sweats -- or the almost identical set she'd bought in another color -- and that felt encouraging. 

One of the last times I saw my grandmother, she said it was a good thing I'd had so many clothes I didn't wear or else she'd be naked.  She gesticulated towards the shirt and pants she was wearing.  They looked similar to the clothes my mother used to buy for me in both size and style, but they weren't familiar.  They hadn't been mine.  I presume my mother bought them for her and said they'd been mine, for whatever reason.  Or quite possibly she'd bought them, loaded them into my childhood bedroom with many of the shopping bags and unopened HSN boxes she'd filled the room with since I'd left, and given them to my grandmother when she ran across them later, genuinely assuming they'd been mine.  She sometimes confused the things I'd owned and left behind with the things she'd bought and forgotten. 

The last time I wore something she bought me, it was a cheap, black, acrylic sweater she'd bought in every color available -- about nine in total -- when I was in high school.  I liked it because it could survive the dryer.  It was good grocery-shopping, errand-running attire, or so I liked to think.  It also worked years later as extreme maternity wear, flowing comfortably until the day I gave birth, after which point I forced myself to give it up.  I had a nightmare that it was so threadbare it was see-through, but I hadn't noticed until I wore it for a photograph.  I was afraid that might happen in real life.  I didn't want to be a person who could wear threadbare, see-through clothes without even realizing it. 

I took my last knee-length sweatshirt she'd bought me -- a men's XL from my college bookstore -- and let my husband keep it.  He likes it, and it's only a little too big on him.