She cut me more than surface level with that dig about my mother, especially because she wasn’t wrong. I didn’t know love from my mother, at least not since my father passed. He was the glue that kept us all together, the one who encouraged me in life and brought joy to my mother. He was the man of the house in the most traditional sense possible, straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. My father was the sole breadwinner and was the only thing keeping our little nucleus rotating smoothly. But that came to a screeching halt. We lost everything with one unfair act. A father, a husband, a provider, a protector, the only person who pushed me to be more and kept me engaged with life, and the only person keeping my mother from nose-diving off her plateau of happiness and into a sea of depression.

When he was gone, we had nothing: no money, no income, no spark of life. My mother couldn’t hold a job because she was so depressed that she slept all day and rarely ate or spoke. In my eyes, she merely saw the reflection of the woman she used to be. Where I once was a collective joy for her and my father, I was now only a symbol of pain and loss. I resented her for this. Not just that though. True, she abandoned me emotionally when I needed her the most, but she also showed weakness in ways that I no longer could feel sympathy for but rather anger and embarrassment. Whenever my mother did speak, it always devolved into a fight.

“Just get out of my house! I can’t stand to look at you.”

“Your house? Your house!? This isn’t your house, it’s Dad’s. You’ve never worked a day in your life. You were so pathetically reliant on one man that you now have nothing and know how to do nothing. You are weak and pathetic, and you can’t even keep it together for the two of us. You’re supposed to be the adult here, not me!”

“How fucking dare you! You have no fucking idea what it’s like…”

Scenes like this played out over and over but with less and less frequency as my mother became more and more nocturnal and made fewer and fewer appearances outside her cave of sorrow. I assumed something nefarious was afoot when the refrigerator started becoming less and less full, and past due notices began arriving in the mail.