I know my mother well.
I know that when she liked a person, she introduced herself as Jane. I also know that if she did not like a person, they called her Janet. I know when she had had too much to drink and that if her lips were pulled too tight, her smile was fake.
Most of the time it was.
I also know that I didn’t like my mother very much.
I remember that she had a knack for insulting people behind their backs even if they knew her by Jane and if she were sad, everyone around her was inevitably miserable as well. Needless to say, aside from her party girl alter ego, my mother was a very sad soul.
My mother was not a good mother, either.
At the age of seven I was always kept at my daycare an hour later due to my mother’s tardiness and I appeared to be the only one embarrassed by this. The employees didn’t seem to mind watching me, but I could detect their discomfort when my mother stumbled in, conjuring up yet another lie to ease some tension that always seemed to be there. And most of the time, she reeked of alcohol. And all of the time, no one ever said anything. And it kind of stayed that way.
That is, however, until our neighbor moved in next door.
My mother introduced herself as Janet the day this neighbor found herself at our doorway offering sweets of some sort - I could smell them. I never actually tasted them. “No, these aren’t for you.” Being a seven year old I fidgeted as my stomach twisted and my mouth watered, but I managed to sit quietly, sipping a glass of tap water from a cup that shown its fair share of stains.
This new neighbor had completely swooned at the sight of me. She then went to explain she and her husband’s incapabilities to conceive a child of their own - adding that she’d be happy to watch over me if my mother were ever busy.
To no surprise, this was the only part my mother caught. And strangely enough, I could tell that I’d grow to like this woman.
Afterward, I found myself next door a lot more often than my own home and I would accidentally refer to the neighbor with strawberry blond curls and soft eyes as Mommy. Once I was home I found it increasingly more difficult to talk to my mother, let alone call her Mom.
And one day, my mother had stopped picking me up from school. I didn’t see her for months after that day.
I grew accustomed to the smell of vanilla and the glow of porcelain skin. So 4 months later when I begged to see Janet, I was disappointed.
I wasn’t sure what I expected to see. Maybe this woman who had given birth to me to cry, sobbing because she missed me and wanted me home. I knew it was wishful thinking, and as much as I’d hate to admit it, it was saddening to come home witnessing the crunchy, dull brown waves of my mother and the tightness of her chapped lips and the bags under her eyes dark - her eyes themselves even darker. I’m sure my features showed my feelings well enough because she looked at me, expressionless.
Then, after moments of nothingness, she stretched her lips into her infamous tight smile, the cracks in her bottom lip widening. “I don’t recall wanting you to be here.”
I don’t think I stopped crying that night.
Long days passed and I watched strange men shuffle in and out of my house at odd hours of the day. When I saw my mother, I was looking down at her in our tiny backyard through a window framed with sunflowers and she was motionless, placid, lips connected to an amber bottle of beer.
Soon after my crying subsided, I discovered I cried so much I couldn’t cry at all.
The woman I called Mommy thought it would be best if I were to not see Janet at all anymore. I said nothing to this.
Papers were filed, things were planned. But before my mother could sign a single paper,
she had committed suicide.
I was eight and my mother had committed suicide.
My mother had killed herself.
My mother had ******* killed herself.
There was no funeral. No one but myself seemed distraught over this and even so, I refused to allow myself to shed a single tear. It didn’t feel right to cry. It didn’t feel right to care when she hadn’t. But I did care. And I hated that I cared because it made her death all the more painful.
I visited my former house before it was cleared out. Her scratchy furniture held no value - or value I cared for, anyway. And aside from scattered beer bottles and her clothing, the house had nothing. So I dug into drawers for the only thing I believed held value - words.
I shred though every kitchen drawer and nightstand and shoe box until I was left with a stack of papers. Some were as important as certificates and others as useless as her scrawled handwriting of untitled phone numbers and receipts for gum. But in my eyes, they were all equally important.
The last place I found myself in was her room and I’m not sure what I was looking for, but I searched through each inch of it. I found nothing. I moved onto my old bedroom.
At my windowsill was an old composition notebook with creases and frayed edges and liquid stains that reeked of ***** and orange juice.
After picking it up, I left.
From then on I had always caught myself looking through the stack of haphazard papers and never the notebook. It terrified me.
No one moved into Janet’s house. The tension of sleeping beside the abandoned memory of my childhood had never shattered, either. It absorbed tragedy and nothing could change that. Everyone sensed it. Even at the age of fifteen I looked out of the sunflower framed windows and expected to see a woman sobbing with a bottle of beer.
Every morning I decided it was time to open up the notebook, the small part that had been haunting me.
Every morning I decided to open it another day.
Three years later, I realized that I had made it. I was normal, I had friends, I had typical high school memories. I was ready to leave for college, I was ready to keep going. So, I’ve decided, I was ready to opened it.
It was a diary, almost. Filled with endless pages of my Janet.
Misery.
Misery.
So much ******* misery.
I couldn’t put the book down.
But the most miserable part?
The last line.
“I love you and I’m sorry.” I read this over and over until my eyes burned.
I didn’t know Janet as well as I thought.
Her dried blood dotted the darkened pages.
This is the story of when I woke up in tears and shakes to the slam of the house’s front door.
Janet had stumbled her way inside of the kitchen, intoxicated.
I sat there, staring at the distorted insides of the walls that wrapped around my vision - the chipped, brick, misery infused memory of my childhood.
I immediately bolted up from the couch and sprinted outside of the the front door despite Janet’s shrieking of demands of where I’m running off to. My heart was hammering too hard to be possible.
I fell to my knees.
The lot beside us was empty.
I was 7 again.
I turned and looked at Janet, my eyes filling with tears of horror and relief.
She scowled at me. “God, what the hell compelled me to have you?”
-Mars S.
dear mind, what is this illusion you insist upon torturing me with?