Raging Bitch Queen

 

 

It all started when…

 

I turned thirteen.  That’s when my mom started acting like a bitch.  It was the weirdest thing.  Like she just morphed overnight into something completely unrecognizable - possibly sub-human.  

 

It was the way she buttered her toast that tipped me off.  Deliberate, militant strokes, scraping the surface of the parched bread, pounding butter mercilessly into its flesh, insidiously thwack, thwack, thwacking it, until all you wanted to do was scream, “STOPPPP!” - which I did - at a decibel never before achieved inside my head, let alone inside our kitchen.  The windows shuddered then pulled back into themselves.  As did I.

 

It was then I noticed the vein.  Pumping blue, beating a bold path across the powder white landscape of my mother’s forehead.  I’d never seen it before.  Perhaps because it was never there.  Or perhaps because it just exploded as I screamed, or in that moment just afterward when the room compressed into a pea-sized cube and the air hung thick, pasty - hard to breathe.    

 

I watch it for a while-- blue and pulsing - unsure of what to do, what to say, or if I should just – you know – make like a tree and leave.  But in the end, I didn’t have to.  She did.  In a whirlwind of terry cloth, choice words and dust bunnies. 

                               

                                                Such the drama queen.

 

Looking back, the toast was a definite omen.  The first sign that things between Mom and me had begun unravelling.

 

                                                Or should I say, un-buttering.

 

It’s been a year almost to the day of the toast incident.  Last week-- ironically two days post fourteenth birthday pour moi --we were again standing in the kitchen.  Low fat yogurt, this time instead of toast, incessant stirring this time instead of scraping, you get the picture.  Only this time, when the infamous vein appeared and started pulsing, she started screamed like some kind of lunatic…I’VE HAD ENOUGH! 

 

Enough of what?  

                                    Her moods are completely out of control.

I’m telling you.  It’s bad. 

                                    Psycho meets Freddie Kruger kind of bad.

 

             Next thing you know, I’m Dorothy Gale, whisked off to see the Wizard, only my Wizard is a shrink.  A psychologist,according to my mother --hands raised, bending bunny-eared fingers around the word-- who’s comforted by the professionalism of his title and is convinced the neighbours will be too.

 

                                    What can I say, she’s always had an active imagination?

 

He’s a million years old, has a huge head, too big for his body, if you ask me, but no one ever does, jumbled teeth and one wonky eye.