Home

First was the house on the hill
with it's two giant elms on the top
and the rooms upstairs that gave some solace
because she was too lazy to climb the stairs

Everything was argument and fight
everything was on the edge of collapse
all the time
unending crisis after crisis
as she drank her way insane

I was trained to fight about everything
all the time
by a ruthless wordslinger
who backed it up with a wooden shoe
or a slap
or by kicking me in gut as I lay on the floor
trying to curl around her leg so she could not draw it back.

She tolerated being a mother until the day her daughter went away to college
and then she got rid of me.
First, she loaded me like a gun and shot me at my father
telling me that she might take me back if he said I had to go
but never just because I asked to come home.
And nothing in the world prepared him for what she had made me
and he was begging her to take me back in less than three months.
and I got what she told me I wanted: Her.

But if not a good mother, she was an excellent teacher
and she found that she was not winning the arguments,
not crushing me with her words,
then revelling in the impotence with which a child returns taunts.
She had sharpened me, and now I was starting to cut
and as her words could no longer beat me
it was hands, or sticks, or belts
and she knew I had to go before my patience for it ended

So off I went from the house on the hill
and she threw me out of the car at the private school
with a garbage bag full of clothes that had not fit in a year
a hundred dollars with which to buy textbooks
and an admonition to find somewhere else to stay for summer.

and it is, from this distance, my most shameful moment,
that as she drove off, I was weeping and begging to be allowed back.
I was 13

From the house on the hill to the castle on the hill
where nobody wanted to hurt me, fight me, beat me.
Everything changed, and I became insignificant
and I could not but hate insignificance
so I did the only thing I had ever been taught competently to do.
I fought.

I am 42. I have been married for half that time.
I do not hit, nor do I brutalize, and I do not drink.
But I have not managed to stop fighting for a single second.
I have managed to make rules that I follow:
I do not let myself win fights that I know I should lose
but it is not always easy to tell when I am right from when I am wrong.
And I can't manage to stop fighting, even while deciding.

There is a voice in my head that tells me that if I ever stop fighting
I can never again go home again.
But that is true no matter what I do.
that home is gone
the elm trees are long since cut for fuel
SO why fight?

Why fight, when the only person I really want to beat
has been insane, stupid and dying for years?
I seem to know nothing else.