Leaving Home

(I write this as bernie sits licking an empty McDouble wrapper)

Everyone leaves home at some point in their lives. It is said that you can never go back home, and I don't dispute the truth of this, but that is only because that sort of home is a state of mind based on expectations and relations.

I'm sitting at home, bernies finishing up some dog food cause he thinks he's not getting a McDouble today, (josh has some leftovers still sitting on the table from last night, and my black coffee is keeping me from the distractions of all the clutter). In this way I've hardly ever left home: there's an uncomfortable, yet powerful consistancy in the clutter at my parents house. I have no reservations at sleeping outside, no fear of dirty dishes or dust or overflowing trashcans--if anything it makes me a versatile traveler and comfortable in trailer houses and poor communities. The negative is that it makes me impulsively stuck up to those who grew up with money, that their experiences must not be as full as mine or tempestuous (which may be true, but love many people who have suffered to grow up rich). I think these experiences, the ones that made me more full, is the home that I cannot go back to.

When I was really little, everyone of us four children, except josh (he would pretend though--we would tell him what to do) had a club. Summer started it with a kitty cat club. There were neighborhood kids that came over and the boys would be the puppy dog club. We were perpetually at war. I don't remember what we did, but I just remember being thrown around, hiding with summer leading the battles. Then when it was over, summer would sneak out with her friends; not from her parents, but from Abbey and I so we wouldn't follow her around town and she could have fun being cool without us. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes we caught her and went along. I remember a few rock piles in the back yard and they were our mountains. Summer and abbey and josh had big mountains and I had one rock. It was a small piece of concrete but it worked. It was about the right size to sit on, and I would sit on it until I got tired of being on my rock and went running after the dogs.

That experience was about at the time when my mother went through her "one bite" or "just pick up five things" phase. This was most devastating phase of my domestic life. We'd be sitting upstairs with clothes everywhere and all the legos all over the floor and barbies and jewelry all around and my mom would come up and tell us we had to clean up. We would tell her we were on our way outside to go behind the school and play. She would then say, "ok, well pick up ten things before you go." Of course I would just pick up legos and dust bunnies. She said she didn't make us clean so much because she wanted us to have a fun childhood. Well we did, but you can imagine how devastating it was when she finally said, "clean your room." I never knew such pain before then.

My dad was the opposite. When he had a chore for us to do, it was huge and epic and sometimes I ran away, or pretended to run away, and just cried behind a tree for a little while until I gave up thinking that they were sad that I was gone. When he had a project for us to work on, it didn't matter how old we were, we had to help. Like the time he put a roof over the basement and abbey wouldn't help and so she got spanked, but I don't think she even helped after that (shes always been the most stubborn) or when a dog would get hit by a car, which was quite often (we were the unofficial stray dog sanctuary of the neighborhood) because we lived on a busy street, he would make us dig the hole. I remember holding a shovel that I couldn't even dig with because when I stood on the top of the shovel, I didn't weigh enough to get it to even go down into the dirt. Of course I started crying.

My dad wasn't an evil dictator though, he just wanted us to work and my mother obviously wasn't accomplishing that. We had a strong fear of work, though not of work that was fun, like washing cars, planting flowers, or making tree houses; we just had a fear of work that was unending, like the clutter of a house. Or unsatisfying, I should say.

My dad didn't make us work that much anyway either, but I think he wasn't really made to work as a child either when he lived on his grandparents farm in oklahoma. He was the youngest and the baby and I think his brothers may have resented him being spoiled for a while, because back then, I'm sure work wasn't just a skill to teach your children so they will be competent when they grow older, but a necessity.

Work... This brings me to myself right now. I have to give mr. bernie another bath and head out of town to hit knoxville this evening. I could write about home for the rest of my life. I wonder if it really was that good and crazy, or if it was just my child-mind.