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My mom and L sat across from one another, and I on the end of the 4-place wooden table. L as per usual was drunk and bleary-eyed as per usual. Smoke clouded the room as they both smoked their Camel cigarettes while L played with is new "toy", cocking and un-cocking, pulling the slide back, dropping the clip.
It was always a bit weird to be in their little weird world, pretending everything was "normal" because, well, it wasn't normal. Let's go back in time...
Mom started cleaning house for L when my parents were still together (I was 15ish); friends commented that they must be having an affair, but I wouldn't believe it. A year or so later, my mom moved out of state with me due to my dad's deteriorating mental state (hearing voices telling him to kill her as a result of his severe alcoholism). While we were traveling the country for that year she talked with L regularly, and sent him Harley Davidson swag from wherever we were...there was always money to buy him a shirt, or a leather vest, or a leather jacket, but there wasn't enough money for me to have school lunch. When we moved back to my home state L moved in...and I promptly moved out to be with my dad, and finish my last year of high school at my old high school. Long story very short, L made several innuendos about taking care of my virginity (which my mom pointed out often), and he broke several of my mom's bones. Some times L was a kind man to me; he bought me my own leather jacket (which I still own), he taught me how to ride, he took me to Sturgis with them...but I always knew I should never be alone with him, and I always expected him to kill my mother some day.
And back to our regularly scheduled program: We're at the table trying to act like a normal family, while L is preoccupied with his gun. Mom asks me to turn the fan on. The fan was just a little over arms length away, so stood up and took a step over to reach my hand to the back of the fan and BANG!, my ears were ringing, my breath frozen, and my heart hammering against my ribs.
It took a second for me to register that his pistol had gone off. Then a second to wade through the shock enough to ask myself, "Did he just shot mom right in front of me? Or himself? Did he shot me, and i was in such shock I didn't feel it yet?" In the shocked silence
After the shock started to fade we busied ourselves with tracking the bullet's path; through the wall, and wedged above the pull-out cutting board; a path that would have taken it straight through my heart had i not stood up seconds earlier. A path that left a worried pair of questions that still linger and one's I dared not ever speak aloud because he still had the pistol (and many more) and my mom would be alone with him when I left: Did he accidentally miss me, or did he accidentally almost shoot me?
Certainly I've looked at this little adventure, I've done some processing. I've looked at my relationship with my mother, and the lack of safety and security I've had in my life as a result of her actions and behaviors. I think there is something about scraping the burnt off the toast (scraping some of my mommy issues off the top) has allowed me to succinctly feel the trauma of narrowly missing taking a bullet in the chest, of just having a pistol go off a few feet from me at the fucking dining room table, just the trauma of that moment without it being anything about my mom's lack of being a mom.
For the last few weeks I've notice the ringing in my right ear, but I'm not here, I'm standing in front of that fan, heart beating out of my chest. I don't know what has triggered (no pun intended) this need to re-process, but it's here. Maybe it is just the fact that I can distance myself a little more from my mother, see the separation between us, and have my own experience that isn't about how traumatized she was, or my own resentment about her putting me and herself into those situations. For whatever reason, I'm back here again, and I'll untie the knots, and wash out the stains, and eventually come out a little lighter on the other end.
