Read A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me for Free Online

was some blood in it. But there wasn’t a lot of blood. The smell was unbelievable.”
    They rushed Mom back to the hospital and kept her there for most of another week on a course of industrial-strength antibiotics. They stitched her back up, and did it right this time. And while all of that was happening, Dad took care of me himself. Mom wasn’t breastfeeding, so I had barely any contact with her for the first fourteen days of my life.
    â€œThose first few weeks are critical,” Dad would say, over and over again. “That’s when you bond with your parents. Their face. Their scent. It’s called imprinting. Only your mom couldn’t be with you, because she was so sick. So you bonded with me. Never so much with her.”
    That was his theory about why things happened the way they did, and why he was the better choice to raise me. He was a big believer in the idea of behavioralism—of positive and negative reinforcement, and psychological conditioning. He seemed to take a lot of comfort in the idea that I loved him because I had no choice. That I obeyed him because I was programmed to.
    I took it less seriously as I got older.
    *   *   *
    I turned four a few months after I got back to Eugene, and about a month after that my mom moved to San Francisco. It should have been a smaller deal than it was. She hadn’t wanted me to live with her while Dad was in jail. Instead she sent a letter to my grandparents explaining that I was better off with them and that she had other priorities. “The only thing that keeps me going is my art,” she wrote. “I believe in my heart that art is God’s great gift to humanity … It’s the only thing in my life I haven’t botched miserably. When I give with art people take gladly. I’ve had so much locked up so tight inside me for so long, and now some of it is finally flowing out.” I didn’t know about the letter for another twenty years, but I didn’t need to. Even a four-year-old could see that parenting wasn’t at the top of my mom’s to-do list.
    Not to say she didn’t raise a huge stink when she decided to move to San Francisco. For weeks, she and my father raged at each other. Sometimes over the phone, sometimes in our living room. Sometimes out in the yard. One day they stood at opposite ends of the dining room table in the Hayes Street house, legs apart like a couple of gunfighters, and screamed at each other for what seemed like an hour—Dad saying Mom was too irresponsible and selfish to ever take care of me, Mom saying she had a right to raise me. Everything came into the argument: Dad’s arrest, their mutual drug use, Mom’s drinking, stuff from when they were still together; times he’d been out for days without so much as a phone call; times he’d come home to find the sink full of dishes, me screaming in a dirty diaper, and her hiding in the upstairs bedroom, too overwhelmed to deal with any of it. Then they’d argue about who loved me more. There was a lot of swearing.
    I found it strangely thrilling to watch them while they did this. I got light-headed. Euphoric. It was like their voices just sucked all the air out of the room.
    When Mom finally gave up and went to California, I felt strangely bereft. Not about her moving, but because I didn’t get to watch them fight anymore. I needn’t have worried. She called once a month or so and they jumped right back into it over the phone. I only got Dad’s half, but he’d always done most of the talking anyway.

 
    7
    One advantage of having my parents fighting over me was that they periodically tried to buy my affection, or my forgiveness, with presents. The regret and guilt they felt was transitory, but the swag just kept accumulating, so I had a slightly ridiculous stock of really nice toys.
    My favorite was an old cap gun that was designed to look like an old cowboy six-shooter.