What’s the Most Intense Full-Circle Moment You’ve Seen?

My mom kidnapped my husband after convincing everyone I was unstable, so I gathered evidence, exposed her lies, and served revenge ice-cold in front of the entire neighborhood. My first memory is when I was nine years old and stole a cookie from the cookie jar.

My mom got so mad that she not only dumped washing-up liquid down my throat but also made me vomit onto my bedsheets. These were the ones I wasn’t allowed to clean until black mold started growing on them.

When I got older, she had a change of mind. She shifted away from the borderline torture techniques and began to scream at me for not being perfect.

If she told me to tidy my room and I left a spot of dust, then she’d scream at me for being a filthy pig. If she saw a single grade of anything less than 105% on my report card because of extra credit, she would grab a match and light it right in front of me.

When this stopped making me cry, she would try to light my hair on fire with it for that extra pizzazz factor. But my favorite memory is when I moved out at sixteen to live with my dad.

He was a fat fucker who couldn’t do anything for himself. He couldn’t even shower without heaving like it was a marathon race, and he didn’t even bother cleaning under all his folds, so he walked around smelling like sour cream and onion flavored chips.

He was quite literally a 500-pound spectacle, probably because he was constantly eating all the food in the house while forcing me to eat just one meal every two days. Still, his house was practically a holiday home compared to my mother.

I helped with whatever he needed, did all the cleaning, cooking, and even learned how to do his taxes. He wasn’t an insane perfectionist, so it didn’t seem bad at all.

When I turned eighteen, he gave me the greatest gift of all: he committed self-unalive. I still remember the joy that ran through my body that day, knowing I’d get a whole house to myself.

I was in his will, so I received a sum of around $30,000. Paired with FAFSA, this was enough to fund my education.

Fast forward to six years later, I recently became a qualified paralegal with my first stable income and a Toyota Corolla. I felt like I was on top of the world.

By this point, I had heard my mom was living with her friend or something. I wasn’t sure of the details; I just knew she was out of my life, and that was enough for me.

When I was around twenty-six, she came knocking on my door. She was in tears, and all of her belongings were in black bin bags.

I just stared at her. Apparently, she really was living with her friend, but her friend had gotten so tired of her promising to be better and promising that she’d get a job.

The friend told her if she didn’t find a way to make money soon, she would kick my mom out. Instead of my mom making the decision to finally be a somewhat productive member of society, she downloaded an online gambling app and put the entirety of the rest of her savings on red.

Sigh. After that, her friend gave her a year to get her life together, and since she never did, now she needed somewhere to crash.

I looked her up and down. I was 5’4″ while she was 4’11”.

I looked into her beady evil eyes and remembered how scared of her I had once been. My inner child had craved love from her for almost my entire life before finally giving up.

I wanted to grab the AK-47 from my bedroom and gun her down. Instead, I smiled and told her she was more than welcome to stay with me and my husband under one condition.

Of course, she had to follow the house rules. She thanked me profusely, and I helped her move into the guest bedroom.

The next morning, I woke her up at 4:00 a.m. with a megaphone.

“Wake up! Wake up!”

She tried to wrap her pillow around her ears, but I threw it against the wall before beginning to recite the rules.

Rule one: the toilet seat must be sat on and heated for me at 6:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. If I find it cold, then she has to do her business in the front garden.

Rule two: wake-up time is 4:00 a.m., and sleep time is 7:00 p.m. If she’s found awake during those hours, I will take away all her clothing for the week.

Rule three: water is only allowed to be drunk every second day.

Rule four: all chores must be done from 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. before me and my husband wake up. If they are not completed, I will do my business in her bedroom for the entire week and she will have to clean it up every time.

Rule five: there must be two meals a day cooked to my liking. If it is not done quietly enough, then her meal will consist of the stale bread me and my husband don’t want.

Rule six: I will read all her mail, texts, and emails. There must be at least one message sent a day describing what an amazing and beautiful daughter I am.

Rule seven: she must remind me each day about how sorry she is for her treatment of me, how I deserved better, and she deserves nothing. Of course, if she doesn’t make herself scarce enough—aka, if I feel like I’m sick of looking at her—I will drop her off at O-Block with a packed lunch and water bottle wearing the skimpiest outfit I can find.

She said I was awful, that I was selfish, immature, and rude. I didn’t care.

You see, these were the exact rules my mother played my entire childhood with. For the first two days, she actually tried.

I was honestly somewhat impressed with her efforts until the third day came and my husband never came home from work. I stared at her while the weight of the deal I’d made began to sink in.

I called his cell phone repeatedly, each unanswered ring increasing my anxiety. I called his office, his friends, even the hospitals. Nothing.

When I finally confronted her, she was sitting in the living room calmly flipping through a magazine as if nothing was wrong. The overhead light cast harsh shadows across her face, making her features look sharp and predatory.

“You won’t get away with this,”

I said, my voice steadier than I felt. She laughed, the sound like glass breaking.

“I already have. Your husband was so easy to manipulate.”