Page 12 of Good Days Bad Days
There’s shame in his voice. I hear it. It’s the same shame I heard when he visited me in foster care and told me I couldn’t come home yet because the house “wasn’t ready.” I was placed at a small ranch house in Honey Lake. I’d been told my parents had been given six weeks and lots of support to help them clean the house. I could go home after some safety issues were addressed and resolved. When my dad finally pulled up to visitation in the family car, I had my garbage bag of belongings neatly packed. I was lucky, I know. My first placement was fine enough, but I was ready to leave the small, unfamiliar house and town and go home.
My father’s head hung low that day. As a parent, I know it couldn’t have been easy to look me in the eye and say, “It’s going to be a bit longer.”
But “a bit longer” turned into “a lot longer.” Soon, a spot opened at a teen group home in Allouez near Green Bay. It was lonely and had a lot of rules, but I was a rule follower. I finished high school there, and tuition waivers and scholarships helped pay for my college education. My father came to my high school graduation, making excuses for my mother, who stayed behind either from shame or anger that I’d “caused this whole mess,” but I didn’t invite him to my college graduation. By then, I’d been on my own for nearly seven years. It hurt a lot less to stop reaching out than to have my offers for connection rejected.
“Dad, you can’t live here. This is dangerous.”
“Oh, no. No. We store things up here. I’m fine. I have all I need,” he explains, but I don’t believe him.
“Where do you sleep?” I ask, dumbfounded.
“In the den. After a while, your mother wasn’t good with the stairs, so we moved down there.”
“Show me, please.”
“Yes, yes. This way.” He takes me through a narrow footpath, and I have to navigate carefully, as though I’m walking a high wire. At one time I knew this house like the back of my hand, but this landscape is new and confusing. The house was a disaster when I was a kid, but we still had living spaces, even if they were surrounded by invading clutter. In this new world—I’m lost. I follow my father like he’s a tour guide who knows the language and landmarks.
We pass the kitchen and I have to look away. No path even leads in there—it’s so full of garbage and packaging materials. Even with my mother’s acquiring, stacking, and storing when I lived here, the one room of the house she left clear was the kitchen. She made dinner every night, which used to be my reasoning for why things weren’t as bad as they could be. But as I spent more time in foster homes, group houses, and then my own home, the uncluttered kitchen of my youth became a sticking point for my bitterness. If she could keep that one room clean and organized, that meant she knew how, it meant all the rest of the mess was her choice. But now even that bastion of normalcy is sealed off in her cocoon.
Every few steps, I hear the thump of an object crashing to the ground. I flinch and fight the urge to cover my head. I should be wearing a hard hat like we do on set when working on potentially dangerous construction sites. But this isn’t a gutted house halfway through a total renovation—it’s where my parents have lived for decades.
When we reach the den, I hold in my horror. All four walls are blocked by stacks of boxes and collections of folders and papers that are at least a foot thick. Two layers of bookshelves filled with books, photo albums, and some kitchen supplies keep the potential avalanche dammed.
There is a walking path around three out of four sides of the bed. Half of the ornate antique wooden headboard is mostly covered withmy father’s shirts and slacks, the other half empty where my mother’s belongings must’ve recently hung. The bed is neatly made. A TV stands on one of the shelves facing the foot of the bed. There’s a small wood-and-wicker ceiling fan that has accumulated an inch of thick gray dust on its edges.
This room was clearly the core of their life before Mom was placed in the memory center. They lived in this suffocating small space carved out of a whole house, four bedrooms, a full basement, a two-car garage, a half acre out back sloping down to the lake, and a long dock that would leave any vacationer or real estate investor drooling. Alone. Without their daughter or grandchildren or friends of any kind.
I place my hand over my aching heart. My dad shuffles around to his side of the bed and tugs at the comforter like he’s trying to tidy the room for me. It’s sweet but sad to see him trying to make a dent in a home that’s taken thirty years to nearly destroy.
“Dad, this isn’t safe,” I say, assessing the bookshelves’ stability and contents. As far as I can tell, this is the only semilivable room in the whole house. I’m already itchy from all the dust from the decades’ worth of belongings. “And how do you eat or bathe or anything?”
“Oh, hon, it’s not all that bad. I’ve been making some headway with tidying up ...” He gestures to a bare shelf and a few less-dense spots in the room.
“Dad, this is way beyond tidying up. We need to hire a crew.”
“Do you really think?”
“I don’t think you see this clearly. This room alone would take at least a month to clean out on our own. You have a whole house—and the yard. And that’s just to get things cleared out. I’m sure there’s plenty of structural, plumbing, and mold issues we have to deal with.”
“Well, hon, I don’t know about all that. It seems like a bit much. I don’t know if your mother would like that.” The mention of my mother makes hot words burn on the tip of my tongue. The memory of the sweet old lady from the nursing home evaporates. Mother. How can he still worry about what she might say?
“To be honest, I don’t really care what she thinks. I care what you think, Dad. Can’t you see how bad things are in here—how dangerous they are?”
“Well, not ... not really. It always served me and your momma well.” His tone is infuriatingly calm.
“This has served you well?” I ask, gesturing to the room and the hall full of junk. I knock into a tower of papers, and it cascades onto the bed and floor. “Damn it.”
Heat flashes up my neck and cheeks, bringing angry tears. I try to hide them as I go to collect the pages, but as I crouch, I see bulging black garbage bags stuffed under the bed. It never ends. I toss the last few pages I can separate from the clutter on the floor onto the bed with the rest of the papers.
“I can’t do this,” I sniff and say mostly to myself as I make a stack at the foot of the bed.
“I understand, sweetheart. I know it can be overwhelming.”
“No, Dad. No. It’s not because it’s overwhelming. It’s because you want to pass everything by Mom, and I didn’t sign on for that. On the ‘good days,’ she’ll say no to everything, and on the ‘bad ones,’ she won’t even remember us.” A ball of stress in my chest grows with every word. I’m starting to wonder why I’m even here. “This is serious. We have people from the county coming heretomorrow. We need a plan or you’re going to lose the house. What do you think Mom will think about that?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he says, sitting on an empty spot by the pillows propped against the headboard.
I take a deep breath and remind myself I made my dad a promise—if he’s willing to clean out the house, I’m willing to help him. He might not see how messed up the situation is, but I know how to work with demanding clients and sell them on my vision.
