sam

When we went home to bellingham we stayed with my mother in her big ferndale house. It's curious how an average house can feel enormous. Especially with the way my mother's house is, covered from floor to ceiling in antiques and vintage, with a frog collection, a monkey collection, a chalkboard collection, blue china, a chest of mt. baker high school cheerleading accoutrements, a chest of baby clothes for my future-maybe, a coca-cola collection, a wall of frames, a wall of lockets, a bathroom of vintage medical canisters & ointments, a telephone toilet-paper holder beside the toilet, a red high heel phone, a mannequin dressed as elvira, a shelf of childhood Goosebumps, tins, trolls, beads, earrings, a bathroom of pot paraphernalia, paintings, mirrors, plus Poops & Keey Keey, her two cats, plus the unnamed cockatiel she adopted on accident, plus the real frog, plus boxes of costco food purchased by her man, of about 800 pudding cups, soda, & chips. I come from a family who loooves deals. It's why I'm greatly depleting my savings. It's why I couldn't sleep last night, or for several. There's no way to make a deal with school debt. My mother offered to sell her engagement ring, or all the things in her house to help me pay for these loans. This is something I would never let happen. Something that feels the best having been offered it, only. This is how I learned words are important.

When we went home to bellingham I got to see samantha, my step-sister's nugget. I went to her second birthday party before I left, at Chuck e Cheese's, which made me never want to be a mother. But then after time, I understood that it was just that I didn't want to be that kind of parent, where an underage, greasy pre-teen with a microphone and a pot-belly could speak at me, asking me to please hurry & take my things so that the next party could use the table, $300 dollars please for mini pizzas and carrots! Samantha is refreshing. At my mother's house last, she played copycat with anders, mimicking his facial & body actions, mimicking his fake laugh, and then his real, and it seems so simple, but I can't think about the memory without feeling a sort of sadness. My mother says that I won't miss out, but I am & will. I can see the way it hurts to watch a child grow. I kind of understand my father's perpetual sadness. How it feels like I've left him on purpose.