Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 70524 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70524 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
I’m sure Mum will find something wrong with this job, too.
I jerk when the front door slams shut. “Honey, I’m home.”
Oh, no. It’s Daddy. He’ll see the mess in the kitchen and—
I don’t know what he’ll do.
He walks in and widens his eyes. “Dios mio, what the hell happened in here?”
I bite my lip. I don’t want Mum to get in trouble. I love her, and I love Daddy. I have friends whose parents have gotten divorced, and they’re miserable. Always packing a bag to spend every other week in a different place, having their Mum and Dad compete for their love. Having to choose a side whenever they have a fight.
And Mum isn’t always like this. It’s only every so often.
“I… I broke some dishes.”
Daddy scans the kitchen floor. “Lissy, this looks like every dish in the kitchen.”
“I got mad. Mum wasn’t happy with how I cleaned the dishes. So I broke all the dishes.”
Dad squats down until he’s at my eye level, pushing my hair back. “Lissy, that’s not the truth and you know it.”
I burst into tears. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t clean the dishes right, and Mum got upset. She told me I had to do them all again, and when I told her I spent so much time cleaning them already and had to do my homework, she got this scary smile on her face and said that we’ll just have to buy new dishes. And then she broke everything.”
He wraps his arms around me for a moment and then whispers in my ear, “Let’s go talk outside, querida.”
He holds my hand as we walk into the backyard. I take care not to get my shoes muddy.
Dad takes a deep breath and sighs. “Lissy, you know that your mummy and I love each other very much. But…you should know that Mummy is sick.”
“She’s sick?” I feel an ache in my gut. We had an aunt who died of cancer a few years ago. “Is she going to die?”
“No, angel, not at all. She’s not sick in her body.” He taps his finger on the side of his head. “She’s sick in her mind.”
“Huh?”
“People can get sick in their brain the same way they can get sick in the rest of their body. It’s called a mental illness.”
“Are there doctors for mental illness?” I ask.
Daddy nods. “Yes, and your mum sees one once a week. He’s called a psychiatrist, and she’s been going to see him for a few months now. Mum has learned that she suffers from something called obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a disease that makes your brain focus really hard on keeping things clean. That’s why Mum gets so intense sometimes. The disease in her head rears its ugly head now and then. And she has another issue as well. It’s called Anti-Social Personality Disorder. It makes her act aggressive sometimes.” He runs his hands through my hair. “Did it seem like Mum became another person when she started breaking the dishes?”
I swallow and then nod.
Daddy sighs. “Your mum is getting medicine to help her with the OCD—the disease that makes her need everything to be clean. There isn’t medicine for her personality disorder, but she’s learning how to manage it, to live alongside it. But there will be good days and bad days. Today was clearly a bad day.”
My lip quivers. “There isn’t medicine to keep Mum from becoming the scary smiling person?”
“No, but she sees her psychiatrist once a week. He talks to her, helps her learn to deal with things. She fell short today, but I think in time your mum might start to get a little better.”
I furrow my eyebrows. “How can talking make her less sick?”
Daddy smiles. “He helps her see things in a different way. The other day, he told her that even the most clean, pristine kitchen you can imagine could still have one tiny flaw. A wayward crumb, a singular grain of rice, or a teeny-tiny germ just waiting to get in your body and make you sick. You can’t tell just looking at the kitchen that it’s not perfectly clean. It still looks good.” He places his hands on my shoulders. “But nothing is truly clean, Lissy. Whenever something seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
Nothing is truly clean, Lissy. Whenever something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Dad is the only person who ever called me “Lissy.” Mum always called me by some pet name. Pumpkin, angel, sweetheart.
Mum got better over the years. She still had bad days, but it was never as bad as the day she broke every dish in the kitchen.
At least…it wasn’t until the bitter end.
Dad helped me clean everything up that night, and when Mum came down the stairs, she acted as if nothing had happened. We went to a department store the next day and bought new dishes and glassware. White with red stripes. My dad still uses them to this day. Before Mum died, I would check to see if any dishes were missing every time I came home. They were always all accounted for.