Coming Clean: A Memoir Read Online Free

my mother cutting all my food for me. I figured I’d watch what my parents did at dinner, practice, and then surprise them one night when I could premiere my newfangled ability to cut my own food.
    The third upstairs room was by all accounts the master bedroom; it was the largest in the house, but my parents had moved out of it when I was born, taking over a downstairs bedroomcloser to my room. The only things that lived there now were a bed frame, a broken mirror, some newspapers from before I was born, and cat feces. It was the cleanest room in our house.
    Our entire existence revolved around the kitchen, living room, and two bedrooms downstairs. The kitchen and living room took over half of the first floor and bled into one another, with the exception of a small aimless wall in the middle of the room. Against the dividing wall in the living room were a break-front that housed porcelain Lladró figurines, dishes we never used, and an old black-and-white photograph of my mother. When I first discovered this photo, I asked why we had a picture of Aunt Lee naked and hiding behind a pillow. My mother and her sister looked so similar even I had a hard time telling them apart, the only real difference between them being that Lee was tall and my mother tiny. When my mother defensively announced that the sexy young woman in the photo was her, an obsession was born.
    I couldn’t imagine that my mother was ever the glamorous and coy woman looking back at me seductively while wearing nothing but a couch cushion.
My
mother wore her hair in a braid every day, had giant round glasses that dwarfed her skinny face and drank a glass of chocolate milk for breakfast every morning.
My
mother read
Madeline
in a French accent at bedtime and played my heavily scripted game of “mermaids” during bath time. The woman in the picture didn’t seem like the kind of woman who would do those things, and I wanted to know everything about her. When no one was watching, I would climb atop the piles of yard sale finds and yellowing newspapers that took up the majority of the living room to get to that picture, so that I could inspect it tirelessly for signs of the mommythat I knew in the naked-pillow-wearing woman she once was.
    There was a television in the living room, but because the three-seater brown couch with a tropical leaf pattern usually only had room for one adult at a time, most of our time spent as a family was spent on my parents’ bed.
    The kitchen was the room in the house that changed the most on a daily basis. At least, that is, the kitchen table. The table seemed to be in a constant state of flux between clean and piled high with my father’s latest finds. My mother would indignantly tell my father that she wasn’t going to clean up after him but would crack after a week or so of family meals at the foot of their bed, and the table would be cleared off for a few weeks before the stuff could take over again.
    My bedroom was next to my parents’. My mother couldn’t part with my crib when I outgrew it, and there was no room in the garage to store it, so it remained next to my twin-size bed. It became my de facto toy box; I would climb from my mattress over the wall of the crib to surround myself with the stuffed animals and dolls that made up the majority of my social life. At night, Cara, our German shepherd, would sleep under the crib. She had been doing it since my parents brought me home from the hospital.
    My parents’ bedroom was the center of life in our house. We ate our meals there on strategically placed folding tables when the kitchen became too messy. Their bed rested in the middle of the room, but both sides of the bed had become storage for the piles of old newspapers, worn and forgotten clothing, and must-have purchases that never needed to be had, trapping the beautiful antique armoires that once held neatly folded sweatersand carefully hung suits behind their mass. The surrounding trove only seemed to make the bed