Hunter Huxley

Now, as you’ll guess from the last part of that sentence, my mother will come off sounding kind of bad. In her defense, you’ll have to consider some things. She lost her father to a sudden heart attack when she was nine. Her mother’s sanity descended as the days passed. My mother and her twin sister had a pet German Shepard which would run up to any car which pulled in to the driveway the way it always would when their father arrived home; because this reminded her mother (my grandmother, obviously; now departed) of her father she had the dog put to sleep. When my mother went off to school in the morning my grandmother would say things to her like, “don’t be surprised if my head’s in the oven when you come home.” Before long she was in a mental institution and my mother lived with my other aunt who is about ten years older and was married. My mother would have to go visit my institutionalised grandmother in “this big dark ugly brick building.” When my aunt wasn’t around, her husband would sexually molest my nine year old mother. He was a serviceman.

When my grandmother returned from the institution she met a guy. He despised my mother and her twin sister, so the gap between them and my grandmother grew until he kicked them out of the house at fifteen; true to the nature of step-fatherhood, and true to the typical way a woman will receive it and side with the man. From both first and second hand experience, I know this for a fact: the only object which claims a woman’s affection more than her offspring is the New Guy. Nobody knows the raw amoral mechanistic biological truth of woman’s reproductive strategy like the child of a divorced mother.

My mother had to start working. She got pregnant at fifteen with my eldest half-brother (seventeen years older than me) and had him at sixteen. She then had my sister (half, although I’ve always considered them full) a couple of years later and my other brother a couple of years after that.

So in short, before I continue, I love, respect and admire my mother more than I feel any of those things for probably any other person. She is probably the most honest and humble person I know with a wonderful sense of humour. It took her a while to grow in to it all; she has had to figure it all out with no assistance, amidst bad childhood memories and the tragedy of the untamed self-destructive female hypergamous instinct.

***

When I was five my mother started dating a guy called Wayne. He was a fun-loving, lovable, hopeless, womanising alcoholic. In the most cliche fashion he would arrive home late at night with lipstick on his white collar. They would have screaming arguments about this late at night; to this day I hate hearing people yell and make a point of never ever yelling at people myself.

Wayne had a loser friend called Steve who stayed with us for a while. After a few years when my mother finally couldn’t handle any more of Wayne’s womanising drunken ways, she left him…for Steve. Steve was by this point living in a different friend’s garage.

He spun the shit and promised many things which allowed him to mooch off my mother for about six months, rent-free. After this six month period my mother was constantly angry at him for reasons ranging from a pair of stockings she found in his possession to trying to prevent her from feeding me. (Well, the former got her angry; the latter merely bothered her.) One time during one of these angry episodes of hers, she went in to their room to get away from him; the room was right next to the living room where there was a fireplace with firewood. He asked me, as he was sitting on the couch, to grab him the biggest piece of firewood; he threw it at the closed bedroom door, breaking a hole in it, I guess to intimidate my mother.

Dinner time was always a drama. It would very often involve his serious recommendation that we have vinegar on bread for dinner; he ate this. My mother would then begin cooking whatever she could find in the fridge; she had no money because he had slowly drained it from her with his mooching and his conning her with some bullshit business deal he convinced her was a good idea. Just when she’d start cooking he would buy take out for himself and her (with his money); he would deliberately buy none for me (I was seven or eight at this time) and would physically stop my mother from giving me any.

One day I came home from school and saw Steve had some cuts and scrapes on him. I wondered what these were until my mother came out and, I guess not for the first time that day, attacked him with a pathetic display of teeth, nails, and tears. His con plan had culminated.

I was always a naughty kid in school, but at this stage I was particularly naughty. They asked me about my home life, which I denied there was anything wrong with. (I actually didn’t realise at this point that there was much wrong.) I think they figured it out though when one day I was at school with no lunch or lunch money and had to ask a teacher to buy me something to eat.

School was easy because I understood everything with no effort and never did any homework. My parents never knew or cared because they left school at fifteen (my mother) and sixteen (my father). They just never checked up. The only time any attention was paid was at thirteen when my mother heavily reproached me for arriving home with a shocking report card documenting no achievement or effort and all backchat.