My House of Pain: My Greatest Crime As a Young Non-Human

None of you will like me after you read this.....

Memory is a knife that cuts both ways - sometimes swift and merciful, other times slow and jagged, leaving wounds that never quite heal right. The story of my Mousie isn't just a memory; it's an open wound that weeps whenever I dare to look at it too closely, a testament to the ways family can become both sanctuary and battlefield in the space of a single breath. She was the mother of my father, the most delicate of women, perhaps even as delicate as Helen.

They called her Mousie - a nickname that should have been soft, should have carried the gentle weight of family intimacy. Instead, it became a word I couldn't say without tasting bile in the back of my throat — caustically choking me, without feeling my throat close around it like a fist. The name haunts me still, whispered in the dark corners of my mind where regret breeds like bacteria in an open sore. I was a teenager still in that time, when the call came, still wearing the invisible bruises of my mother's "discipline and hatred,” still learning to navigate the minefield of her moods. Dull my body to her fists. Flatten my emotions to avoid the pain. My father's family had been excised from my life like a tumor - clean, clinical, complete. A surgeon could not have done a better job to me. Or so I thought, until Mousie found a way to reach across the void, the endless empty time that existed between us, driven by the imminent death of her sister, my great aunt. The news of this dying woman should have moved me, should have stirred something deep and familial in my blood. Instead, it only triggered the pavlovian response of fear - fear of my mother's reaction, fear of the consequences of feeling anything at all. It was on her that she was to beg me to break my silence, and talk with her. It was her sister’s dying wish to hear my voice one more time. One time that she might try to end my silence to the family, and break the curse that I was standing under.

The day of the call, I remember the weather - a harsh, bright afternoon that seemed to mock the darkness brewing inside our house. My mother, moved through our home like a storm front, her presence changing the atmospheric pressure of every room she entered. I could feel her coming before I saw her, the way prey animals sense an approaching predator. That hatred was so thick you could taste it. So heavy you could barely carry it. So Her hand, when it closed around my arm, was hot enough to brand, her fingers leaving crescents of white pressure on my skin as she dragged me to the main area of the house.

The main room of our house had always been her stage, the place where she performed her favorite role: the martyred mother, the righteous disciplinarian. And the great table that sat at the center. Convictions were given at this time. Crimes were punished at this table. Sitting at this table meant life or death. Often in the guise of better intentions. The phone sat on its cradle like evidence at a crime scene, and her voice, when she announced Mousie was waiting to speak to me, carried the same satisfaction as a judge pronouncing sentence. I can still see her eyes - O great mother, those eyes. People talk about eyes being windows to the soul, but my mother's eyes were more like mirrors, reflecting back all the darkness she carried inside, multiplying it, amplifying it until it filled the room. A heat with searing pain that eats you from the inside out and leaves you empty, used, and exhausted with her own sick disgust inside of you. .

"You have a choice," she said, but choice was just another weapon in her arsenal, another way to make me complicit in my own destruction, and a destruction that she reveled in and loved. "And you know what I will do to you if you don't do it." The threat hung in the air like smoke, acrid and choking. The evidence before the court was clear, as I knew exactly what she would do - had memorized the encyclopedia of her cruelties, hatred, anger, and abuse, had cataloged every punishment, every "lesson" she'd ever taught me. The scars on my psyche ran deeper than any physical mark she'd ever left. Just another scar. Just another bodily mark. Just another brief suffering. I could deal with it.

The phone receiver felt impossibly heavy in my hand, like lifting a corpse. A dead cold corpse. No - heavier than that. Like lifting the accumulated weight of every beating I'd ever taken, every bruise I'd hidden, every scream I'd swallowed. Mousie's voice floated through it, a ghost's whisper: my name, over and over, each repetition another nail in the coffin of what might have been. Her voice crackled with static, or maybe that was just the sound of reality fraying at the edges. The way she said my name - mother of the earth, please, the way she always said it - like a prayer, like salvation, like I was worth saving. That's what breaks me even now, decades later, when I wake up at 3 AM with the taste of those unspoken words still bitter on my tongue. The sound of her hope - that's what haunts me most. The raw, unvarnished belief that love could bridge any gap, heal any wound, tear down any wall. How fucking naive we both were, thinking that emotions alone could overcome the gravity of fear, the terminal velocity of falling apart. The Bane of my suffering standing there , breathing deeply and effortlessly with its harsh tone, like a bad wind through a grove of dead trees. Her hope was a knife twisting in my gut, serrated with every childhood memory we shared: Everything. The word echoes like a joke now, like a curse.

I sat there, trembling, while possibilities bloomed and died in my mind like time-lapse flowers. Time slowed down to an immeasurable pace. Each potential future unfurled its petals only to wither in the acid rain of reality. I could tell her everything - about the nights spent locked in my room, counting ceiling cracks like rosary beads, every beating seared into the back of my body, every strike thrown upon me with hatred, each one a meditation to the mother of the earth for morning. About the carefully placed bruises, strategically hidden under long sleeves and longer lies, a map of pain drawn in purple and yellow across my skin. About the psychological warfare that had become as natural as breathing: the gaslighting, the mind games, the slow erosion of self until I wasn't sure where the abuse ended and I began. I could beg her to send my father, to rescue me from this hateful prison where the bars were made of fear and obligation rather than steel. Where pain was normal, and happiness and joy were just distant afterthoughts that never happened. Where every crystal vase and Persian rug screamed wealth while I suffocated in silence, begging for the release that would save me. Where my bedroom door's lock clicked with the finality of a judge's gavel, and my mother's footsteps on the stairs sounded like a countdown to extinction. The words rose in my throat like vomit, burning with the acid of too many silent years: "Please, Mousie, help me. Please tell Dad I need him. Please save me before there's nothing left to save. Please. Just come and get me. PLEASE!!! I’M BEGGING YOU!!!! PLEASE!!!"