The trunk in the attic

Where the cats and dogs are kept.

You never really know how messed up your family is until you start spending time with someone outside of it.

This is mostly why I have always waited until the last possible moment before introducing a dating prospect to mine.

Not including, of course, my mother, who I’ve always introduced to everyone as soon as humanly possible.

Honestly, I’m mainly talking about my father, who could be a little much for someone of a more suburban sensibility. People raised in loving environments where homemade Christmas cards were exchanged didn’t get him at all.

Before dementia dropped a piano on him, my father routinely lost his shit. His offspring, including myself, inherited that volatility. So, when we used to argue — over anything at all — we’d always reach for the nuclear football first. The goal? Complete obliteration of supposed loved ones.

The sheer aggressiveness of it all used to terrify people I happened to be dating. They got too close to the sun.

“This isn’t… normal?” a girlfriend once said. I think it was after a family member threatened to throw a puppy out the window if we were late for dinner.

Welcome to the family.

Still, how I envied people who didn’t always take a scorched-earth approach to family feuds — and waste years not talking to each other afterward.

At least, fights with my mother didn’t last long. Sure, frightful words would be exchanged. Then a couple of days would pass and everybody would pretend nothing happened. Easy-peasy. Let’s do it again!

But we haven’t done it again. Not in a while, at least. There are a couple of obvious reasons for that. I’m not a drug addict with a disagreeable disposition any more. My father is currently in a nursing home, tilting at windmills. And, of course, ex-crack smoker’s little helper goes a long way.

For everything else, there are boundaries. Funny it never occurred to me earlier to cut out the drama merchants. A reduced craziness diet has done wonders for my sense of wellbeing.

But the biggest reason why all is quiet on the family front these days? I learned to fight like normal people.

When I used to quarrel with my partner — again, as a disagreeable drug addict — she made it impossible to go back to business as usual. This partner insisted on accountability, including a particularly painful postmortem: Do you understand your actions? Why did you say what you said?

“Why do we have to keep picking at the scabs?” I protested. Bygones be bygones and all that.

I wasn’t used to having to reckon with my misdeeds. But the thing is, my partner, being normal, wasn’t used to being eviscerated in every verbal altercation. She wanted to make sure it never happened again. That shit hurts. She had to take every reasonable precaution against feeling that way again.

Sadly, her lessons were lost on an addict with my particularly problematic genes. And, true to her word, she decided not to let bygones be bygones — but rather to just be gone.

Her ideas on accountability turned up again when I went clean. Every 12-step program insists you make a list of people you’ve wronged. Then you’re supposed to actually make amends. Imagine how daunting that must have seemed for someone like me — raised on the ‘fire-and-forget’ fighting method.

Instead, I was told that all the things we do, the vibes we spew, the hurts we inflict — it doesn’t just evaporate. It stays with us, a trunk in the mind's attic. And over time, it seeps into our daily lives, toxifying us from the inside. When you go clean, you have to do some actual cleaning. Starting with that cursed chest.

I’m still a reluctant witness to the old-school of squabbling today — the say-awful-things-then-pretend-nothing-happened approach. As soon as both parties have licked their wounds and recovered from their blood frenzy, they’re right back to being ‘friends’ again. Rinse and repeat. And all the while, we tell ourselves, it’s better to spend more of this precious life together than it is to be right. Or have any boundaries. Or even ensure it doesn’t happen again and again.

Sorry. This is a shit cycle. No accountability means no escape from the endless loop of fighting-and-forgetting-about-it.

Being accountable doesn’t mean never having an argument. It’s a reminder to be gentle. It’s knowing that you’ll have to answer for the hurts inflicted. Or else they’ll end up in that cursed chest. And no one should spend their lives lugging that thing around.