Thriving out of Spite
Life is weird.
I currently co-own a business in the downtown area of a small Los Angeles suburb. I lived in this suburb until I was ten years old. It’s a small city; it’s conservative and quaint. They play weird serial killer music throughout the entire village all day long (and by serial killer music, I mean it’s this bizarre 1940’s crooner music that haunts the streets even amidst a global pandemic, and the looming threat of a third world war.)
My parents were thrown out of this town in 2001.
Maybe some backstory about my parents might help.
My mom was born in Colorado and raised by a single mother. Her dad was a con-artist, who went by the name of Patrick O’Brien; he claimed to be an Irish orphan who made his way to the United States at 13 years old, and had his teeth removed by Vietnam soldiers in the 60’s. He died of emphysema when my mom was in middle school, and everyone later found out he went by a pseudonym; nobody really knows who he was or where he came from (or whether or not his teeth were really real.)
My maternal grandmother eventually met another man, Tom, who was abusive and ultimately forced a decision between himself and my mom. My grandmother chose him, and his crackpot conspiracy theories, and so my mom moved out to California to pursue a communications degree from a popular Christian university. Her mom did not attend her wedding, and instead chose to live out her days on a secluded farm in Colorado, drinking her own urine, convinced that the government was going to come and force her to convert to Satanism or something.
My dad was the golden child of an attractive couple from Los Angeles county. My paternal grandfather was a star football player, and my maternal grandmother still boasts about her glory days as a popular trendsetter in high school. My paternal grandparents inherited the childhood home of my grandmother, and became founding members of a church only a block away from the business I currently own. It was then known as Bible Brethren, but is today known as Cornerstone. My grandfather is currently a senior elder there.
My dad went to UCLA, played football, and never drank at high school parties. He was engaged young to a woman who ultimately left him, and he rebounded with a mutual friend: my mom. They met at my mom’s job in a camera store, but became closer when my mom started to attend Cornerstone.
Hindsight gives me a clearer picture of this dynamic: my mom was white trash. She came from a broken background, she felt discarded and alone. She came to California to find a way out of the life she had escaped, and my dad was the golden ticket: tall, handsome, educated, Christian.
My dad, on the other hand, never wanted to go to college. He hated school, and had lived his entire life trying to meet this impossible standard impressed upon him by his parents. He did everything right, but he was angry. He didn’t know why. Marrying a convenient, cute, blonde woman who had just the right amount of edge was his rebellious antidote to being perfect.
This dynamic worked, for a while. You might say it still works, if your idea of an ideal marriage is separate bedrooms and mutual passive aggressive disgust.
In the early 90’s, my dad worked as a school teacher while my mom stayed home. We all attended Cornerstone multiple times a week. My mom tried desperately to live out her “cute, connected, blonde, California girl” fantasy, and managed to make it in with the “popular group” of Christian moms. The head Mom lived in a fancy house and had a pool, where we would spend most of our summers. My mom thought the head mom was kind of a bitch, but when her rental house became available, my family quickly moved into it.
This was all fine. Well, mostly fine. My mom was “chronically ill” for mysterious reasons that no doctor could explain. Our homeschool schedule meant that my sisters and I were readily available to attend every doctor’s appointment my mom ever had- and she had a lot. Cortisone shots, neurologists, pathologists, chiropractors, you name it, we saw them all. Most of these places had a heavy, earthy, vitamin smell. I tried to ignore it while reading my Dear America books, or arguing with my sisters over plastic dog figurines.
Eventually, a black mold was found under the wallpaper in our rental house. Y2K was looming, and now we had an even bigger monster to contend with: stachybotrys.
If you don’t know, stachybotrys is an insidious, toxic black mold. My parents were quick to blame my mom’s mysterious health issues on it, and suddenly the only reasonable solution was to destroy everything we owned and move an hour away to the mountains.
Imagine being a sheltered 10 year old who doesn’t attend school: your entire world is your house, and your belongings. Then one day, out of nowhere, you’re told that everything you know and love is infested with a deadly mold that is killing your mother. You have to start over completely. That teddy bear you’ve had since you were a baby? Burn it. All the clothes you like to wear? Burn them. Every friend you’ve managed to make in your pathetic home school group? You’ll likely never see them again.
Understandably, I was upset. I voiced this displeasure one day in the car, as my mom rattled on about how “evil” the top popular mom was for allowing us to rent her toxic mold house.
My mom stopped the car, as she was driving, turned around and looked at me, and said, “You are so selfish.” She burst into tears. “You care more about your toys than you do about my health. How can you even live with yourself being as self-centered as you are?”
My younger sister Lauren also burst into tears, and unbuckled her seatbelt to comfort my hysterical mother.
“See!” My mom sobbed. “At least Lauren loves me, and doesn’t only think about herself.”
Yeah. What. The. Fuck.
But back to my mom prattling on about how evil their former-friends-turned-landlords were- there was a great divide forming in the Cornerstone “cool mom” group. My parents were enraged that their friends rented them a house infested with a deadly mold. Their friends, on the other hand, were livid that my disgusting, filthy family had left the house in such a condition to even harbor such mold.
The friend group was forced to choose sides, and of course, they chose the rich lady with the pool over my whiny, white trash mom.
My family was no longer welcome in the church, or the community. From the perspective of the members of this town, my family were a bunch of dirty, dramatic hypochondriacs.
We didn’t end up moving to the mountains at this point (although we eventually would, a few years later.) Instead, my parents fell victim to the preamble of the housing crisis, and stupidly thought they could afford a custom built home in the dry, windy soul vacuum of Fontana. One lone family sided with my parents, and helped them disinfect and salvage what little belongings we had, in preparation for our move.
It’s ironic, because this one family that chose to help us was labeled “crazy” and “weird” by my parents. Interestingly, the patriarch of this family currently washes the windows of my business about once a month, and I think about how his family helped mine, despite the fact that my own family felt “better than” his. Now, the only news I get about my parents is from this window washer.
It’s been 20 years, and through owning a business in this town, I frequently encounter characters from the past. My family was ostracized, but this community kept going. I want to say they’ve become even more bitchy and cult-like, but the reality is that the dynamic is the same, just with a 2022 filter over it.
Most of the kids I knew then are either current radical right wing breeding machines, or sardonic alcoholics. Sometimes I meet people who joined the church well after my family left, and they share their own horror stories.
It’s funny to think that I spent many nights as a kid sobbing over the fact that I had to leave this town, and that I’m now back. I feel like I’ve conquered it- I returned, and staked my claim in the most coveted strip of this city. Maybe in some fucked up way, I felt like I had to avenge my family name, even though I actually hate my family. Yes, my grandfather remains a prominent member of the church, but I felt the need to come back and make a splash in a different way.
I was talking to a client the other day and she said, “I can’t keep resenting my father for never validating me. I am as successful as I am today because he never did.”
And honestly, same. I will continue to thrive in the town that rejected my family out of spite. Out of spite for myself, but also in spite of my parents… and somehow simultaneously for them.