Maybe it is because I live a relatively clean life, I often forget the filth that filled my childhood. It's hard to predict just how obscure things can reduce me to intermittent ptsd trances where I the past feels so very real.
Not that anyone particularly likes them, but I hate maggots. Let me be oh so clear on that...I HATE them.
Last week, my dog carried in a dead bird. Weeks of excessive heat, plus a dead bird, you see where this is going. Luckily, my husband took care of the bird before I had an opportunity to be completely freaked out. The next day, we saw trails of the nasty little boogers crawling in a parking lot and on a trash can.
That has been followed by almost a week of constant nightmares. Whether I sleep 1 hour or 6 hours, I wake up in a sweaty mess after dreaming of being eaten alive by them. I've also had flashbacks of childhood every day since.
You might not think something as silly as a maggot would illicit a response any stronger than just common disgust. I guess that comes directly from the way I grew up.
I grew up in absolute filth. We always had roaches, which my dad blamed on the wood he stored in the basement for the wood burning stove. We always had ants or spiders or other random bugs that he was convinced wouldn't be there without the wood. We had mice. I don't mean just a couple field mice in the fall either. We had entire families of huge mice and all over in the house. Of course my dad blamed those on having children. Silly enough, I believed him for so long. I believed that if you had kids, they brought mice.
The truth was we had all these things because we lived a dirty life. My mom nor dad ever picked up after themselves, thereby not teaching their children to be clean. All house cleaning fell on me starting at a very young age, 6 or 7 at the latest. I hadn't been taught, but just expected to know how to clean.
As a kid, I didn't really know there was much more than doing dishes, vacuuming, doing laundry, and taking trash out. Oh boy, there's so much more to keeping a house clean. It doesn't sound like much, but keep in mind I was a KID. My days were largely filled already with going to school and doing homework. Oh yea and trying to do as much as I could to avoid the inevitable abuse that would be waiting for me every night.
I still do not understand why my parents didn't give my brothers any responsibility. They weren't that much younger than me.
My parents didn't have a real air conditioner. We had a little window unit that my dad didn't allow us to run during the day. When the summer days got really hot, the unit was moved to their bedroom only. My mom covered all the windows with foil and we weren't allowed to open them. You can probably imagine just how hot our house got.
That was a bad combination with our trash. In our kitchen, we had a full size rolling cart size trash can. Living in a small town in the 1980s, we were only charged when we had trash to pick up. The trash can held a lot before it was ready to be taken outside. After it was full, I still had a hard time with it because of the weight. Needless-to-say, the trash sat for a long time before it got taken outside.
You can see where this is going, right? Hot house, lots and lots of trash in a filthy house...
I spent lots of time as a kid trying to clean up rivers of maggots crawling in our kitchen. We had a carpeted floor in our kitchen, making it impossible to smash them. Not a lot of things are safe to spray on carpet that will kill them either.
It was usually a process of scooping them up with a shovel, carrying them to the driveway and smashing them. This was my reality for week after week every summer of my childhood. If my dad found out we had maggots in the kithcen, I always got beat for it too.
That would probably be enough to cause anyone an adverse reaction to them for years and years. However, that just wasn't the worst of it.
After spending sometimes hours cleaning up, I would have my own mess to clean. There were so many, I couldn't keep them from crawling on my feet. I would have to sit down on the floor and pick the ones out that had burrowed into my feet.
I remember so many times that my dad would stand and laugh at me. He would tell me that if I missed any of them, they would crawl through my body, into my brain and kill me.
The flashbacks now are awful and I wish there was a way to stop them. I do my best just to avoid things like this so I don't have to deal with the flashbacks. It makes me so thankful that I no longer live in filth and that my husband would never allow that for us.
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