My Mother, My Dictator: Living Conditions

This is one article I hate writing. I hate the memories I have of this part of my life.

In most third world countries run by dictators the living conditions are horrendous. No running water, no bathrooms, no place to cook or eat if you have any food.

My dictator not only controlled everything about my life that she could, she was a hoarder. The BBC tv show "How Clean is Your House" and TLC's Hoarding: Buried Alive are some examples of what I grew up in. On top of this my mother loved animals. So there we were living in a house of hoarding with cats that couldn't get to kitty litter boxes. Animals that really weren't legal to have as pets. We had an owl at one point, a de-scented skunk, and a raven. When I was smaller we had a pet turtle kept in a cardboard box behind my bedroom door. She bought an angora rabbit once and didn't have a cage for it, so it was kept in a cardboard box (closed so the cats couldn't get to it), for quite some time. We had button quail kept in a cage to tiny for them. Most of them broke their necks jumping in their tiny cage. We had sea horses. A dog we only ever fed was fenced in the back yard. The poor thing had mats in her hair for years.

As for the conditions for the humans in the house it wasn't any better. I took the sheets off my bed one day and asked my mother to wash them. She never did. I don't ever remember clean sheets on the beds except when I was younger. My sister and I were only allowed to bath once a week, in a bath tub that was never cleaned. And when I was taking a bath I would get in trouble for taking to long. You couldn't see the floor in most of the house because it was piled three inches thick with clothes and stuff. There were small path ways to get through the house. I could never have friends over and had to find a way to make excuses with out telling the truth because I would be in even more trouble if I had told any one. The kitchen was just as bad. I could be in my room and I could smell when my mother opened the fridge in the kitchen. One day it finally went out. We spent a summer with it broken and she only used an ice chest to keep food in. My father didn't even know! She didn't even clean out the food in it!

Shortly before I left my mother, I again attempted to clean. I found a dead mouse on my sister’s bed! It had been buried under a pile of clothes.

My mother did not bathe at all and she believed that deodorant could cause cancer. When she had thrown my dad out of the house, she made my sister and I sleep next to her.

I hope someone learns something from this. Anything. People who want power will do anything and everything they please. My mother would not allow me to properly clean because then I would have had some form of empowerment and an ability to care for my self. And at the same time she would not clean because she wanted to be waited on and served.