Too weird, don’t read (cont.)
This draft was called HOW I LET HER LIVE LIKE THAT.
As in, How could you let your mother live like that? As in, How could anybody let their mother live like that? Because if it was my mother, I tell you what I’d do, I’d drive up to her house with a van, and I’d toss her inside, and I’d hose her down from head to toe, and then I’d get her to a hospital so they could stabilize her health. And in the meantime, I’d have the house condemned and the cats treated by a vet and her fifth husband, a schizophrenic cat-hoarding load of literal shit, beaten and thrown in a river.
You have the time. You have the money. You’re a bad bitch, you’re canny, you’re ballsy, you’re willing to do what it takes. You know how to word a formal complaint, how to credibly threaten a lawsuit, how to forge relationships with people who can help — Agent Davies from the ASPCA, Dr. Adelfio. You can’t tell a waiter that you need more salad dressing, please, but you can stand on a street corner and yell at a guy who harassed another woman in your presence. More than one person has publicly called you a cunt, yourself among them.
You, who always has an answer for other people and gets enraged if they don’t take it. You, the expert, the success, the know-it-all. The most fabulously intuitive empathic manipulative pseudo-analytic first-friend-responder person, with your hundreds of thousands of dollars of therapy. You: no children, a full-time writer, basking in leisure, with your despicable sneakers. If anybody can keep their mother from living like that, it’s you.
So it’s not HOW did you let your mother live like that. It’s WHY did you let your mother live like that? When there was strength in your body and money in the bank, how could you give up? How could you not succeed? It’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, as annotated by David Foster Wallace; other people can fail, but not me. I’m perfect or I’m worthless.
There is no question that I could do whatever I set my mind to, and the only reason I am not the most fully productive realized version of myself is because I am a lazy shameful self-soother who wants to fail so I can stay stuck in my comfortable disgusting cycle.
If I had worked harder, smoked less, taken care of things sooner. Time spent crying and yelling at episodes of Hoarders could have been spent on solutions. Yelling at episodes of Hoarders was not helping, it made things worse, it made me more upset, or it made me as upset as I felt I needed to be, considering the circumstances.
If people could walk around with t-shirts that said things like I FOUND OUT THREE WEEKS AGO THAT MY HUSBAND OF 12 YEARS HAS BEEN CHEATING ON ME FOR THE PAST FIVE.
Or MY SISTER NEGLECTED HER SYMPTOMS FOR YEARS AND LAST MONTH SHE DIED PAINFULLY OF CANCER AND I COULDN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT.
Or MY PORN ADDICTION CONSUMES EVERY WAKING MOMENT AND I AM TRAPPED IN A SELF-HATING HELL PRISON OF MY OWN MAKING.
Then I could wear one that said THE PARAMEDICS REFUSED TO COLLECT MY MOTHER’S BODY WITHOUT HAZMAT SUITS.
And on the back it could say “FLYING MAGGOTS ARE JUST FLIES.” As like an uplifting message.
The flies could be embroidered, dispersing gracefully from the right shoulder, going off to sow hope on someone else’s fecal matter.
