Somewhere you can rest

The meaning of home

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There was shit all over the floor in my childhome. Dog shit. Piles of it in various states of aging, some of it fresh and some of it dried up and hardened. This was only in the basement, but the basement was where my brother, sister, and I had our bedrooms and spent most of our time. I don’t know why our two dogs, Blue and Bear, shit all over the floor. I was a child and didn’t know anything about house training dogs. Blue was adopted from a farm when he was a puppy. Bear was abandoned on the road and found her way to us with her tail between her legs, traumatized. I don’t know if both of them shit in the house or if it was just Bear, due to her history of trauma and her unkown past experiences. My parents never said anything about the dog shit. They didn’t clean it up and they didn’t instruct us to clean it up. It was just normal for there to be dog shit all over the floor. I do remember my father aggressively rubbing Bear’s nose in the wet spot when she had peed on the floor, screaming at her. As this seemed to be his strategy for house training it doesn’t surprise me that it wasn’t successful.

My father has poverty trauma. He grew up poor and never fully accepted or adjusted to the middle class professor life he and my mother created. He ranted about the bourgeoise and always chose the cheapest cans of tomato sauce. He compulsively bought much more bread than the family could eat, shoving it into the bread box with the stale uneaten bread from last week, and the green and molding uneaten bread from the week before. Sometimes I would open my lunch bag at school to find that he had made my peanut butter sandwich on bread green with mold. Sometimes he would scream at me and call me selfish and ungrateful for not wanting to eat mold. When it became clear that the stockpiled bread was beyond human consumption he would rip it up and throw it on the lawn “for the birds.” There it would sit, piles of gross moldy bread, getting soggy from the rain. Even the birds didn’t want to eat it.

My mother is a tenured professor and successful, published scholar with a PhD. My father was also a professor, but contract faculty, and he does not have a PhD. Still, we were decidedly middle class; we did not want for material things. My childhood home was bursting with books. My mother took us to see plays all throughout our childhood. We were exposed to culture and ideas. We lived in a beautiful home full of houseplants. Yes, the basement was full of dog shit and the lawn was covered with moldy bread, but my parents quit smoking when we were young, and I was distinguishable among my peers as one who came from a home that had money. We went to theme parks and on vacation. We spent summers swimming in lakes. We were absolutely spoiled on Christmas with a huge abundance of gifts. And yet — the dog shit and the moldy bread left their mark. Their incongruence with the life we had on paper made them harder to understand and integrate. When I was older and trying to make sense of the baggage I carry from childhood, the shit and the moldy bread were signposts letting me know that something was deeply wrong below the surface.