When I was eight, my mom came home with a bunch of fuzzy ...

When I was eight, my mom came home with a bunch of fuzzy cheetah-print fabric. I think she bought it at AC Moore. She spent the next two days ripping all the wallpaper down in her room and she covered the walls in this fuzzy craft store fur instead.

I think I was ten when she decided she would paint all the windows with images from Beauty and the Beast. They looked okay. But she still decided she hated them a few months later. She scraped the paint off most of the windows. But the ones in the back of the house, she just painted over them with black paint.

She bought a canopy bed when I was in 4th grade and she hung a bunch of feathered boas from it.

She would get into her mind out of nowhere that she needed something up in the attic. She’d pull the stepladder down and tell me to go up and find whatever it was. I’d spend hours crawling around in the dust with her getting increasingly irritated that I hadn’t yet found whatever trinket or piece of costume jewelry in the piles and piles of nonsense.

She had a cardboard cutout of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. She kept it in her bedroom next to the computer.

She also had a bar light with Elvira on it. She’d gotten it from an actual bar, because that’s just the sort of person she is. She walked into a bar in Seaside Heights New Jersey, saw a neon bar light she liked and talked her way into taking it home. She also talked herself into being an extra in a music video once. She has no fear and just does and says whatever she wants.

People like her. She’s interesting and chaotic and people gravitate to her.

When she chaperoned my school field trip when I was ten, she had purple and black hair. She wore Black jeans and Harley Davidson boots and a belt with chains on it. Her black t-shirt had a big white pentagram on it. All the kids wanted to be in my group. Weirdly, they all listened to her. It was a really easy, fun day.

She loves Cher and Tina Turner. She would have moods when she put Cher or Tina Turner on and come find me and dance me around the house. But I always felt very tense and on edge when she did that. I really didn’t like when she was happy.

It felt so awful when she was happy, because I had to be so so careful not to mess it up. I always did. Always did something to set her off. I could never ever keep her happy.

She would get angry over things I’d never imagined could be a problem. I was always trying to guess what the rules were and the rules were always changing.

And everybody loved her. She laughs a lot and smiles a lot and she’s incredibly spontaneous.

She also screams a lot and cries a lot and breaks things a lot and, back then, used to berate me a lot. Used to get my younger sisters to berate me too. And I know there were times when she got me to berate them and I did it because I was glad it wasn’t me for once. I just don’t remember those moments as vividly.

She liked to watch old silent movies and sometimes I would watch them with her. I was always tense and I would tell myself in my head, “Don’t mess this up. Don’t say anything stupid. Don’t say anything wrong.”

I usually did though. It was impossible to predict what might be the wrong thing to say on any particular day.

I’m only sad because I know nothing will ever be fixed when it comes to my family, and I can’t just shut up and get over it. Other people get to be attached to their pasts. It’s like I’m not supposed to be. Like I’m supposed to forget the first 18 years I existed.

So many bad things happened and I have to think, at some point, this was still salvageable. At some point, we could have all moved past it.

I could forgive so many things. I’m not really a forgiving person, but I am with her. I could forgive all the times she yelled, told me she hated me, woke me up in the middle of the night to clean the house, threw me into walls, dragged me around by my hair, hit me in the face, kicked me, all of that I could forgive.

I really just can’t forgive that she, and everyone else in my family, keeps telling me I’m crazy. I’m not crazy, I’m traumatized. I just don’t think anybody who grew up like that would be emotionally stable and I think for everything I carry around in my head all the time, I actually do pretty well.

How do you raise somebody like that and then constantly make them feel bad that they aren’t the most emotionally stable?

It’s really really hurtful.

I can only control me and I can’t keep fixating on stuff I can’t change.

But I guess if I could change things; I’d just wnt everyone in my family to forget the past and treat each other well moving forward. So that we could all talk again. So we could see each other for holidays and be around each other.

That’s never going to happen though.

And it just makes me feel like nothing means anything. If family doesn’t mean anything and we all just never talk now, like what DOES mean anything? If that was nothing, then it seems like everything is nothing.

I haven’t talked to my younger sisters in years. And earlier this year I talked to my mom, but it was just like when I was kid, just sitting there tense, waiting to do something to set her off.

Everything feels very fake and awful. Everyone smiles when everything is terrible. That’s how it feels right now.