On the 15th Anniversary of 'Running Away from Home'

*trigger warning*

When most people picture a teenager running away from home, I'm sure they picture something similar to the scene in Ramona Quimby, where she packs her things into a suitcase and tries to lug it down the sidewalk, with it being oversized and heavy, and her being young and naive. In my case, there was no suitcase, and I was hardly a teenager anymore. Many people in my life already know this story, so if you're one of them, please excuse the repetition.

Two months before my 19th birthday, I woke up one morning beside the most beautiful face I'd ever seen. We'd been seeing each other for a month or so, and we were practically inseparable. I'd informed him almost from the first night we met that my best friend and I had been driving around looking at apartments to live in together, because neither one of us had a healthy relationship with our single mothers. The second he saw I was awake, he told me he wanted me to think about moving in with him instead, and told me he loved me for the first time. You may be thinking that at 19, of course I was going to believe it, but please believe me when I tell you that even to this day, I know that it was the first time I ever felt as though someone said those words to me and meant them.

My mother being my mother, she blew up my phone the entire weekend I was gone, even though I was a legal adult, and I had made sure regardless to tell her where I was going to be, when, and with whom. By the end of the weekend, she was screaming into my boyfriend's mom's phone that if I didn't come home, she was going to call the police and have him arrested. Even though there was literally no charge on which he would've been found guilty, we rode back to my mom's house in the back of my best friend's van so my mother could speak her peace. Within about an hour, when I tried to walk out calmly and rationally, she grabbed me by the wrist and attempted to physically restrain me from leaving the house. When I pulled myself free, her drunk alcoholic long-time boyfriend stumbled over and knocked me into a chair by hitting me hard in the center of my chest with the palm of his hand, effectively knocking the wind out of me. In a fraction of a second, my boyfriend had him pinned on the ground with his hand around the man's throat so I could get out of the house to safety.

Once I was outside, my grandfather drove up from their house down the street and tried to 'talk some sense into me.' About ten minutes later, after handing over the SIM card to my cell phone, since my mother paid for the service, I left my mother's house with 'nothing but the clothes on my back.' It was several months before I was able to come back and get any of my things.

If all of that seems unnecessarily dramatic, despite the two of us being the only two legal adults in the room who hadn't raised our voices the entire time, allow me to provide some context:

My room in that house was in the attic. This was by design, and vehemently against my mother's wishes, since there was a 'perfectly good bedroom on the second floor across from hers.' Regarding that bedroom: it was on the right side of the end of a 25-foot long hallway, with her bedroom door directly across from it. In order to get to that bedroom door, you had to open the door at the top of the stairs, walk past a kitchen and bathroom to the right, and the door to the attic on the left. The entire length of hallway carpet from the stairway door to the bedroom door was covered in a thick carpet of cat urine, cat hair, hairballs, and possibly even drunk boyfriend urine, as he was the sole occupant of 'my mom's bedroom,' with her sleeping on the couch in the living room more often than not. We moved into that house in 1997; I left in 2007.

15 years later, the smell of that house still lives inside some of my books. The reason for this scenario was the 6-13 (growing and shrinking over time until we had the female fixed) black cats that lived primarily in the unused kitchen, along with 2 self-feeding and self-watering bowls, and 3 self-scooping litter boxes that were never maintained. The linoleum floor in that kitchen matched the hall carpet, as did the countertops where the cats often slept. We ended up having to install a bolt on the bathroom door, because the cats were known to break in and urinate in the bathtub and sink, and we'd sometimes find them sleeping in there or in the linen cabinet between the two bedroom doors at the end of the hall.

The attic door, on the other hand, was directly behind the stairway door, so all I had to do was hold my breath for a couple of seconds until I could push my way through onto the other side. There was a small room that served as a kind of antechamber that mostly insulated the attic itself from the smell, and since there was a window on each end of the attic, I was able to keep them both open frequently to get fresh air as needed. Even though I had both a dresser and a closet, both were empty more often than not. The reason for this was because all of our laundry pretty much lived on the basement floor. Literally every inch of the floor of the roughly 13x13 room was piled about a foot high with the dirty laundry of the 3 people who had lived in that house the longest. At one point, some of it covered a hole (I'm guessing a sump pump at this point, but I may be wrong) that allowed water to drain out of the basement. We came down one morning to find over a foot of water filling the entire basement, and it wasn't until my exodus that my mother finally went through and washed or threw away everything that had been ruined; it all sat there for 6 months after the flood, easily.

In terms of the main floor of our house, it was nearly impossible to walk in the main door and across the living room without stepping on junk mail, empty Dr. Pepper or Caffeine Free Pepsi cans, or overflowing ashtrays. The kitchen was always riddled with dirty dishes and trash. At one point, my mother's boyfriend came home drunk, got mad that he couldn't reach something behind her dutch oven, took it out, and set it on top of the chest freezer on the other side of the room. When we finally found it a week or so later, the sight of the inside of it made us all sick to our stomachs.

15 years later, even though I was definitely taught better by my father, I still do live out of laundry baskets, but I also completely lose my shit if clothes get left wet in a machine or a basket. Dirty dishes and counters in my kitchen overload me faster than just about anything, as does the smell from the trash can. I'm only just now starting to think about some kind of feline rehabilitation so I might someday be able to own a cat again.

Over the years, I made several plans to leave, including at one point making a 30-foot long 'rope' of braided yarn I'd planned to tie around the leg of my bed so I could crawl out my window and disappear into the night. I told a handful of people at least what my life was like in that house, and almost all of them talked me into staying because of the high likelihood I'd end up in a much worse situation. Every time I even mentioned the possibility of changing something about the conditions, my mother and her boyfriend blamed them on me for being lazy and irresponsible.

My goal in life was always to grow up and have children of my own, so I could prove to the world how insanely wrong my life was, and show how children should be raised and treated. I'm definitely not perfect, but my children unquestionably live a far better life than I did. I don't doubt that at some point, one or the other will hit the point where they hate Mom and they want to leave, but I can assure you that if that day comes, they'll have a few dollars to their name, and they'll be welcome to take their things with them, and leave without fear of physical restraint. They've also never known a life where someone has verbally abused them for getting in the way of a drinking habit, or been told that part of their finances has to go toward someone else's cigarettes. I do have a short temper now that I've been working on getting under control since I was about 14 years old and started to see what my life was really like, and I make it clear to both children that if at any time they want a therapist of their own to help them work through anything, I'm happy to do whatever it takes to provide one.

I've had a lot of people tell me that I should give my mother another chance, since it's clear that she has trauma of her own, and nearly died from Crohn's disease a year or two before I left. The truth is, after she ended up losing the house for a fraction of the price my great grandfather paid for it, I did give her several more chances, and she let me down every time. Regardless of the life I led, when I learned that her (decade-long ex by that point) boyfriend passed away in 2016, I cried as though my own father had died, since even with all his faults, I spent more time around him than I did my own father. Even though he hated that I called him my stepfather, and told me once that he hadn't ever married my mother because I was a spoiled brat and didn't want to be responsible for me, he was a part of my life for 14 years, and considering what my mother got herself into afterward, was probably the most appropriate candidate for stepdad.

I woke up this morning running scenarios through my mind of ways I could've done things differently, and ended up where I am now sooner in life without having to learn the hard lessons I went through in between. I pictured myself being someone who was able to trust my school counselors; someone who could hold down a job and hide the money without giving myself away with my crappy poker face; someone who passed the driver's test the first time and bought a clunker to drive myself away in. Living my life undiagnosed and untreated was a big contributor to all of it, and is probably the thing that angers me the most. My parents were told by doctors the week after I was born that something may be wrong with my brain as I grew, and instead of nurturing me and nudging me toward independence, I felt as though I was being hidden away in shame. The only time my mother ever seemed proud of me was when she got her tax return every year.

I don't know what my goal was with writing this, considering I've written it all multiple times before. I'm not even sure what it says about me that I can picture and smell all of it to this day and I barely get choked up anymore. For what it's worth, I will always appreciate all the people who got me through the times that came after, regardless of whether or not we still speak. I'm thankful for those who weathered that storm with me and probably have their own scarring memories of visiting me in that hellhole. I can only apologize profusely for the person I was before I left.