who taught you to fear failure?

despite my best attempts, it seems I've failed you

content warning: mentions of suicide, self-harm, sexual assault, & drug abuse.

Recommended listening:

Different, a kind way to describe my grandmother. You always picture grandparents living in kitchy little homes, knitting and going to bed at 7:30. Quaint and quiet. Fragile and loving.

Not my grandmother.

In my earliest memories of her, she’s wild. Tattooed from head to toe with short spiky purple hair and a handbag shaped like a bird or a butterfly. She wore Hello Kitty earrings and costume rings. She spoke with a thick city accent and an unmistakable air of fuck it.

Her house wasn’t the outdated, but cozy little cottage of my other grandparents. Her’s was, quite literally, a zoo.

Peeling wallpaper discolored by years of cigarette smoke lined her living room, which was filled to the brim with urns containing former pets, stacks and stacks of newspapers, chachskis, figurines, stacked bags of cat litter and dog food, photos from her life, and just about anything else sold by QVC.

7 cats

2 dogs

1 duck

1 hedgehog

3 parrots

6 hampsters

4 bunnies

and I can’t even tell you how many birds.

for the version of you that wants to go deeper

2x monthly essays not available anywhere else

a space to talk, ask, and be seen

the full archive, from the very first word

65% off your first month

It smelled like smoke, animals, decay, and lemon squares thanks to the candle she always burned just for me. She’d have covered a chair with towels and plugged in her overworked air purifier near my chair. Even so, her precautions did nothing in the fight between her many animals and my allergies.

She’d never make me eat; we’d just sip her signature diet iced tea with half a lemon partially squeezed into the tall glasses.

And we’d talk.

Her stories were unfathomable to my impressionable, young, sheltered self.

She told me how she met my grandpa when she was 15, and they gave up their first child at 17. How her parents sent her to a nunnery to have the child, and then they pried it from her arms to never be seen or heard from again. They told their friends she was at a fat camp.

While she was there, her older sister and her 3-year-old nephew were killed while walking down the road in their neighborhood by a drunk driver. No one came to tell her; she didn’t get to go to the funeral.

I didn’t recognize it until later, but she became emotionally stuck at the age of 17. Certainly due to this trauma and the way it was handled by her family. She was bipolar before that would be recognized or diagnosed in a civilized, middle-class suburban community.

My grandpa was a gangster. Probably a relatively low-stakes one, but I’ve seen the house my dad grew up in. I’ve heard stories of him coming home to stacks of cash on the kitchen table and of the general don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy that ruled their family dynamics.

My dad was my grandmother’s raison d’être, her world. I have a theory about moms and their eldest sons. If you know any, consider it for a moment. There is something about that firstborn son that seems to do mothers, at least from this era, in. Obsessed and unhealthy devotion, molding them into the man they never experienced in their own youth. I suppose technically my dad wasn’t the eldest son, but it was the son she got to keep and raise (for lack of a more applicable term for her parenting style).

Being someone’s reason for living when they hate living isn’t exactly a point of pride. My grandmother lived purely to spite death. We used to joke that she had 9 lives like her many cats. How she lived to the age she did (nearly 80) without serious complications from her lifestyle was forever a mystery to us. How she survived multiple suicide attempts, 10 years as a crack addict in her 50s, alcohol dependency, a failed attempt at marrying a woman, an abusive ex-husband, and all with absolutely $0 to her name is still a mystery to me.

In my dad’s senior year of high school, the same high school I eventually came to call my own alma mater, my grandparents were separated, and my grandmother was in a relationship with my dad’s best friend. A mentally unstable, drug-abusing 18-year-old.

Right before graduation, he took his own life. And in the letter he wrote just before, addressed to my grandmother, he blamed it all on her.

She spiraled, doing lines of coke on her living room coffee table and in between each telling my dad it was all his fault that she was like this.

Then, she drove to the motel my grandfather was staying at in the aftermath of their separation, checked into the room right below his, and started shooting recklessly up into the ceiling.

When I was sick, the day before they checked me into my first in-patient facility, I was dropped at my grandmother’s door. She held me, told me she understood, and couldn’t believe they were taking me away, like they too had taken her away many times before. I guess that’s how I ended up there, my dad relating me to her, conflating us together as like things. Problems.

I went, and I wept, and I felt seen.

I think she liked me best this way, though, sick and stripped of my autonomy. Because I recovered in ways she never did, I started going to her house not to tell her of my hospital experiences but to tell her about how a bitchy girl at my school stole my dream college from me. How the first boy I was newly dating might be the one. You know, normal teenager things.

That’s when she turned on me.

Sitting in her living room, the last time I ever saw her, I had just graduated from college and was about to move to California. I was worried about my relationship surviving the move, and I was hitting a personal limit with my dad and his B.S.

“Oh you’re so spoiled.”

… Excuse me?

“You and your sister are such brats getting everything you want, and I can’t even afford to eat dinner.” (Not true, my dad financially sustained her and her cohort of animals).

Well, I am moving to California by myself without their help…

“Right, so you can ride off into the sunset and leave us all behind,” she says, cigarette between her aged, yellow teeth, “I know you’ve always hated us all.”

She went on to tell me I had never really been through anything because I’d never been raped by someone I cared about, and she hoped California would show me what the real world was like. Cruel and unforgiving, a thing to be hated and feared.

I had not found this conclusion as a result of my earlier traumas, and because of this, I had failed her.

Coward. The best adjective I can lend to my wayward excuse for a father. If you’ve read my open letter to him, you know most of our tale.

He was raised a cynic, a skeptic, a pessimist, a hater. He was raised to believe that he alone was both the messiah and the anti-Christ of this life. He alone could get away with murder, sabotage, cheating, and deception while remaining a being worthy of reverence and worship.

He knew he would have a throne in hell awaiting him upon death, and that made him untouchable in life.

My friends all thought he was in the mob, but he was too white and too lame for that. Spy perhaps? Still seemed cooler than he deserved. But he was a successful cheater, a card-counting gambler, a CEO, and a high-functioning alcoholic. He has businesses under various names, and I don’t think he’s paid his fair share of taxes in at least the last 25 years. He regularly needs access to public wifi which always reminded me of The Sopranos, his favorite show, and their regular use of pay phones.

And his dad was a gangster, so… who knows.

What I do know is that he would offer me $500 to get an A in math, knowing all too well I couldn’t do it. He wrote essays for me on the rise and fall of the Holy Roman Empire, not because I asked him to, but because it’s his favorite topic. He falls asleep to plane crash documentaries on YouTube, and his favorite movie is Halloween because he says he “can empathize with Mike Myers.”

I learned as a kid to relate to his darkness. It was the only thing that got him to pay attention. A sarcastic remark about how meaningless life is or a quip about how we are all just cogs in the government’s machine anyway.

He loved that I left for California. He missed his chance to escape his life at my age; I could tell he wanted that for me.

He came to visit me once before we stopped talking; we spent a weekend lounging poolside at an overpriced hotel. Got margaritas in the gay neighborhood of San Diego, and he complimented our waiter’s ass. We toured two open houses for condos on the coast, and I narrowly talked him into putting an offer on one of them. It was the best weekend I’ve ever spent with him.

Then I told him I didn’t want to hear about or talk to D, my step-monster, anymore. While being careful to avoid the language that constitutes an ultimatum, I effectively handed him one. Her or me.

He chose her.

When we finally reconnected years later, I was moving back from California to East Coast suburbia. I was engaged to be married. I was a manager at my job. I was trying to buy a house.

No pride found his eyes as I caught him up on all that he missed.

“Why would you ever want to come back here? You got out.”

because I was lonely.

“Better than being boring.”

He didn’t want anything to do with a wedding. It took him over a year to finally come see my house. He had nothing nice to say about it. Every time we talk, he tells me the weather in San Diego and asks if I miss it…

Guess I failed him, too.

Subtle. That’s my mom.

So subtle that in 15 years of therapy, I’ve never once brought her up. Until recently.

I was her eldest boy (gender notwithstanding). I was her savior. Born unto her in the midst of a failing, miserable marriage, I was her hope. She didn’t just want me, she needed me. She played her part in life as far as I knew. The daughter with bows in her hair, the young and eager wife, the devoted mother.

What I didn’t know was that to her mother, she was the spare. A pale second to her mother’s eldest son. The golden boy who could do no wrong. And my mom was the punching bag for the undiagnosed borderline personality disorder that dictated their home life.

Once we were watching Freaks and Geeks, and I asked my mom which one she was in high school. She hesitated, but she knew that I knew she was no geek.

“Freak,” she admitted.

NO WAY you were a back-alley, ditch class, pothead.

“Yup.”

That’s all I got.

Non-confrontational as anyone, my mom was easy for me to push around as a kid. The angst that roiled within me was taken out on her. Because she didn’t keep me from my dad’s house or my stepmother’s wrath. Because she didn’t intervene when my dad took me away from her at the height of my eating disorder in a move that nearly killed me. Because she didn’t listen when I spoke, my emotions were too big, too loud, too scary. Because she didn’t take care of me in the way I needed her to.

When I was sick with my eating disorder, I contemplated taking my life. She knew it, but we never talked about it. The hospital just took me away with no warning during a family therapy session. Neither parent looked me in the eye as I thrashed and screamed and was carried from the room.

Once she came home from a trip and spotted the new gold hoop in my nose, she kicked me out. Sent me packing to my dad’s house. Only talking to me again to let me know we were moving (again), and I needed to come back and pack up my belongings.

My senior year of high school, after a drunken night at one of my dad’s parties, I came home wearing a pretty bad hangover and some too-short shorts. They revealed the blood-stained bandages covering my self-harm scars. She stared in panicked silence before muttering, “If you stop now, I won’t tell anyone or bring it up ever again.”

True to her word, we never talked about it again.

I moved to California, and she made me believe I’d ripped her heart out. All she had done for me. All she had endured for me. And this is how I repay her.

And when it was time to leave California, I moved 2 miles from her. And yet, it’s still never enough.

Because now she sees me regularly, including after new tattoos adorn my body, a new set of colorful overalls joins my wardrobe, or whenever I stand up for myself at work and vent to her about it.

I let her down over and over again.

Savior turned failure.

Despite my best attempts, I fear I’ve let you down.

I tried. I really and truly tried.

I’ve shown up time and time again for you, and yet.

And yet.

So, I’m tapping out.

White flag waving.

Because the person I have failed most in my attempt to satisfy you

Is me.

I’ve let me down.

Cast myself aside.

Diminished my perspective.

Disregarded my needs.

And for what?

Now I find myself wondering if

Maybe

Just maybe

It was you who let me down

All along.

anyway, here it is…

-June

for words with nowhere else to go

unspoken thoughts, unfinished feelings, & everything in between

---

your next read →

---

art by the incomparable talent on Pinterest