Toxic Blood: Home Improvement
Chapter 14
I can at times be very angry with Mother for being a selfish liar, and generally just not the sort of person I ever want anything to do with. However, I also feel some sympathy for her, because she did try in a lot of ways which Father could never be bothered about. She was exhausted and overburdened, and now and again attempted to make time for her children. If I ran into a new problem, I knew I could go to her and there was a decent chance she would attempt to help the situation, even if her efforts were woefully inadequate or in retrospect made things worse.
Part of that was very much Father’s fault, since he was almost never there, and almost never any help with anything, even during the times he was unemployed and laying around the house all day. Mother was the primary breadwinner and emotional support, and Father was generally useless for anything, even household chores of traditionally masculine provenance. He was especially useless for the kinds of chores that needed doing on a regular basis.
Father was a machinist by trade, and also considered himself quite the handyman, but there are very few home improvement projects he undertook that turned out well, and none that were done up to code. The older I got, the worse the projects turned out, probably at least in part due to deepening depression.
My parents bought their first home the summer before I attended 2nd grade. It was a single story, four-bedroom house at the end of a cul-de-sac in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Santa Rosa, California. One of the more interesting features of the house was a small atrium in the center, about the same size as the smallest bedrooms. It had a concrete floor and white walls, so during the summer it baked like an oven. Mother wanted to be able to put plants in it, but they literally cooked. Father offered an easy solution: put garden awning material over the atrium to cut the sun intensity. All he had to do was climb up on the flat part of the roof with a roll of material and staple or nail it in place on the wooden beams framing the top of the atrium. I was roughly seven years old, so I cannot put a great deal of stock in my perception of time, but I recall it taking him long enough that I figured it was never going to happen, and Mother was happily shocked when her atrium was finally useable.
Next was a ceiling fan installation in the vaulted ceiling of the livingroom. Knowing a bit about electrical work and electrical code at this point in my life, I shudder to think about how much cussing or confusion a future owner of that home will have if they need to do anything involving that ceiling fan. I hope he installed the wiring safely, and it will just be confusion about where the wire runs and why it would do that. Where it was not too much trouble, he ran the wire under drywall, but there were some odd points in its travel where he had a hard time puzzling out where to put the wire. In many places he carved a groove into the drywall and plastered the wire directly into it. He was deservedly proud of the wood frame he created to hide the wires along the apex of the ceiling and hold the ceiling fan, and bragged on using oatmeal instead of ceiling popcorn texture where he patched holes in the ceiling drywall. At the end of the day, it was probably a little unconventional, but it was secure, worked fine, and looked nice. The main drawbacks were the possibility of attracting insects looking for a meal, or the nightmare scenario of ever needing to change the wiring, but thankfully neither happened in the two decades my parents owned that home. Hopefully neither happens to a future owner.
Mother and Father wanted to replace all the old aluminum windows with double paned windows, for safety and insulation. They could not afford to do the whole house at once, so they decided to do the three windows on the West side, the direction which was usually hit hardest by storms. Father did the installation himself to save money.
The installation of the windows themselves went fine, even if the project did take him months longer than his confident estimate of just a couple weeks. Father decided that while he was at it, he wanted to make nice wooden windowsills and window frames for the two bedroom windows. Making the frames also did not go as smoothly as he expected, and he ended up rushing to finish them before the rains came in fall. The windowsill in Older Brother’s room was installed and completely finished first. The windowsill in my room was installed in a rush right before the first storm of the fall season was coming in. Father told me there was not time for the caulking to set completely, so he would need to caulk it later after the house had dried out completely.
I asked Father about the caulking after the storm had passed, and he put it off. I waited a bit and asked again, but he did not have time. Every time I asked, he could not do it then, he would do it later. I felt like a bad person nagging him about it, so I let more and more time pass between reminders. I would have done it myself, but as a small child I had no idea how to, and Father was completely unwilling to show me or even tell me how to do it. I was not worried about it during the dry half of the year, so I gave him a final reminder when we were coming back into fall, a year after the original installation, and I wanted to have the window caulked and sealed before the rains came again.
Father looked at me with confusion and told me I was mistaken, with all the authority of someone experienced at gaslighting. He had already done that. He caulked the window when he installed it. To do anything else was insane. He would not have left the house exposed to the weather for an entire year. I was being silly worrying about that. I was not remembering it correctly.
I did not ask him again, but I could plainly see the uncaulked gaps between the frame and the window, and my room developed quite the mold problem. Father refused to come look at it because I had to be imagining things. He had caulked the window. I was clearly insulting him by even suggesting he would do something so negligent.
Cleaning skills were so challenged in my family that I had no idea what to do about the mold until a friend saw it. She told me to bleach down the wall wherever and whenever the mold tried to come up, which was half the wall beside my bed, all winter, every winter. I was long out of my parents’ home when they decided to sell the house and move out of California, but Mother made sure to tell me that they found a ton of dry rot in my old room. There was so much that they had to hire a contractor to replace the vertical support beam on that corner of the house, or it would not pass inspection to be able to sell.
But I was totally mistaken about Father not caulking the window.
Mother hated both the bathrooms, and wanted the showers redone at the very least. Again, to save money it was on Father to do it rather than hire a contractor.
For the bathroom that my brothers and I used, they settled on an inexpensive plastic tub surround. It went in quickly and smoothly, and Father caulked it. I am not sure why, but the idea of my brothers and I using Mother and Father’s shower never came up. Instead, we had to sit and stink while he worked on it for a week. When he finished, he said we could not use the shower for 24 hours so the caulking had time to fully set. Within six hours of non-stop whining from my brothers, they were allowed to use the shower. Half the caulking went down the drain, never to be re-applied. When my parents sold their house, they also had to tear out the shower area and replace it because of dry rot.
It was not just us kids that suffered from Father’s inability to follow through on projects. Mother and Father decided they wanted to redo their shower in tile. I strongly suspect Father had never actually worked with tile, but he had that typical unjustified white male overconfidence going for him. He started with gusto, got frustrated by broken and improperly set tiles, and finally stopped working on it entirely. It was literally years later before he finished the project, and the whole time Mother and Father had to use the half-caulked “kid’s” shower.
From the day we moved in, there was also a problem with water leaking into the master bedroom through the atrium sliding glass door. Father never addressed the problem at all, and he and Mother entirely ignored it unless they were listing off Things That Need Doing in search of sympathy regarding their busy and oppressive lives. When I was in my late teens Mother was shocked and upset to discover that all her wedding photos and the family photos were ruined by mold. She had intended to organize them into photo albums, but had instead accumulated them in repurposed cardboard boxes, boxes that had been sitting, for years, right next to the sliding glass door where water leaked in. Mother was the only one who was shocked. I just thought it was completely predictable and a damned shame.
When we moved in, the back yard was in fairly good shape. There was a lawn, a couple fruit trees, a fruitless mulberry, and a patio area. All my parents had to do was maintain it, but that ended when we got a family dog. Dominic was a surprise from Father, who brought him home unexpectedly, because every middle-class family should own a house and have a dog. He was some sort of Labrador mix, with no shortage of energy and a painfully short attention span. Dominic did not receive any real training as a puppy, instead mostly just roughhousing with three very young children who did not know any better. Once he was grown, he was too big and too strong to safely roughhouse with, or even exist in the house, so he was banished to the backyard.
Father built him a doghouse, including putting crude shingles on the roof. Father was very proud of those shingles, declaring that Dominic had his own house, complete with roof tiles. Of course, Father did not bother to replace them when Dominic had climbed up on the roof so many times he tore all the tiles off. It was his favorite place to sit, especially when he did not have run of the yard because he was chained to his house that provided no comforts other than shelter from rain. He never even had a dog bed or other cushion.
Dominic was miserable and lonely out there by himself. He dug up the yard and pooped everywhere. I was the only one who would go out in the yard to spend time with him, and my heart ached for him. My parents hired a couple different dog trainers to teach him, but the entire focus was on teaching him commands, often through harsh methods, rather than teaching all of us how to have him be a happy member of the family. Every chance he got he tried to run away, and I remember more than a few evenings spent by my brothers and I on our bikes combing the neighborhood looking for him. At the time I was worried for him, but looking back, I cannot help but wonder if he might have been better off had we not found him.
Mother finally rehomed him when I was in junior high. We went to visit him once at his new home, where he was happily lounging in the livingroom with his new family. I barely recognized him, though he was very happy to see me. I could tell Mother was horribly embarrassed as soon as the words came out of my mouth, but I could not help but ask why we could not ever have him in our house, calm and happy.
The backyard was by that time nothing but a field of tall weeds and wild grasses, the mulberry, one of the fruit trees barely clinging to life, a couple patches of mint, and one hardy rosemary bush. I decided I wanted to make the yard nice again, but I did not know if I would follow through, so instead of saying anything I just got to work. That summer I spent a couple hours in the morning each day manually clearing weeds and preparing the yard to put in a new lawn. It was painstaking work with no help and inadequate tools, but I found myself enjoying the process of clearing out the old and making way for something beautiful.
I think I was maybe 1/3 of the way into clearing the yard and about a month into the project before Father realized what I was doing, and that I was likely to see it through. He had complained about the state of the yard since Dominic was banished there, and he understandably was interested in seeing it restored. He came swooping in, with offers of advice and assistance. I was surprised that he wanted to help, and happily accepted. However, instead of advising or helping me, he pushed me to the side and took over, proudly declaring that he was showing me How to Do It Right.
Father bought a broken rototiller, fixed it up, and turned under the entire yard. It was my project, so I begged him to let me do it. He refused, saying it was too dangerous, and I was not strong enough to control the machine. He put in a very minimal sprinkler system, again, refusing to let me help in any way, but welcoming me to watch him work. By the time he got around to seeding the lawn I had stopped paying any attention. My peaceful, meditative work had been hijacked, and he did not give a flying fuck.
At one point, Father purchased a project car. It was a 60’s VW Bug, so not very expensive, but I remember Mother’s barely contained anger and frustration when he brought it home to live in the driveway. It was as close to arguing as they ever did in front of us. She had no confidence he would get it running and did not appreciate a new money pit when the family finances were so tight. I remember the smugly confident, almost smarmy grin on his face while he assured her that he would fix it up and it would not cost very much, and then they would have another car. It sounded like a debate, but it was not a debate. He had decided he wanted it, and so he was going to have it.
Surprisingly, Father actually did get his little VW Bug running. It had more problems than he anticipated, so it took a few months longer and significantly more parts than he had planned for, but he did get it running. He invited my brothers to help him and learn how to work on a car, but neither were interested. I was curious, and in the interest of fairness he was not going to say “no”, but he only told me vaguely what he was doing or named the parts he was working with. There was little about how to use the tools, and he barely let me get in there and directly see what he was doing or get my hands dirty. I suppose it’s possible he was just that bad at teaching, but when he had his hands in something he wanted to do he was never willing to hand it off, so selfishness or ingrained misogyny most likely played a role as well.
I do not believe Father deliberately sabotaged all of his own projects. He was too proud of pointing out the ones that had gone arguably well and used them to stroke his ego about how accomplished he was. He was too much of a blowhard about the projects that took insane amounts of time to finish, and ignored the unfinished details on other projects so he could declare them further evidence of his success and capabilities. I cannot say if he was deluding himself about his “accomplishments”, or if he was lying to make himself look more useful than he actually was, but the end result was a lifetime littered with projects that mostly went unfinished or were finished disastrously poorly. They were projects he never should have undertaken in the first place, because it was more about self-aggrandizement than a sincere desire to improve the home his family lived in, and as a result he did more harm than good. The proof of that can be found in Father’s willingness to gaslight me rather than admit a project he frequently bragged on was unfinished and causing the house to rot.
The only project that he finished in a reasonable amount of time, and did well, was fixing up the backyard. I have no doubt he did that because my steady work, with inadequate tools, was going to get the job done, and I was doing it well. If he finished it instead, he could protect his status as the one person capable of improving our home.