A Brand of Home

There is something I have needed to write about for some time. I have felt its presence in me, pressing to be formed. It is something my father told me many years ago, very late in his life and very late in mine. This thing my father told me has grown gigantic in my mind. I have wrapped myself around it and made it home.

This thing my father told me late in both our lives is that when I was an infant he walked into my room, with the pretty pink rose wallpaper and little lambs blanket, and saw my mother hoisting me high above her head, shaking me and shrieking as she thrust me up and down with all the rage and power all who knew her knew.

I knew too, of course. It happened most days. But I never thought before it might have happened as a baby. I think I’ve wrapped around this for its power to explain, explain the inexplicable of the pain in which I live, the pain in which I have lived all of my life. When you are a baby and your mother screams at you, it puts a brand of pain in you that takes on its own life. It becomes life. It becomes home.

When pain like this is put in you so early in your life, are you doomed to have it the rest of your life? Does it infuse into your being and become who you are? Do you wrap yourself around it and make it your first love?

There was another brand of pain though, a brand, I think, more deep, a second brand of pain that my mother held for me. It was when I came to realize in a place beyond escape that the mother I knew hated me also did not love me.

I came to this as truth in the years before the end, when the lumps grew everywhere and her skin went yellow, and she knew for years there was no chance she would survive, and she not once said goodbye to me nor thought to leave a note. She not once did one thing that showed she thought of me at all. In this my mother showed me I meant exactly nothing to her, and then my mother left me, then my mother died.

This is a wound that does not heal. This is a wound that brands. When the fear she did