The Strippers Raised Me
In 1991 I emerged from a hospital that was torn down before I grew up. A viral internet video documents that a woman was abducted by aliens, then checked into that hospital afterward. Despite all my degrees and logic, I believe her. I felt like I was born to an alien in the same hospital, after all. Trisha Paytas was born there too, a Taurus like me. I was destined to be an unstable girl. My early memories smell like citrus. As far back as I can recall, I was not wanted, which makes sense because both of my parents were sixteen at my birth, and not dating each other.
As a mother of young children, I find myself wishing for a mother for myself and a grandmother for my kids. I have close friends and other relatives, but really I wish for a mother who is close and who loves me like I love my daughter. My wish will never be granted. It’s like navigating a spooky cave; you know that no one is coming to your rescue, but you can’t help calling for help anyway.
Everything I remember of my own childhood is so dark. I remember trying to open a door that was locked from the outside, often. I remember staring at the wall for hours alone, thinking about how much it changed based on the position or the sun or moon. Now, I fall back into that same sort of emptiness in my own exhaustion in motherhood. I’m feeling all the stresses and the pressures: looking at the swelling costs of everything around us, same as everyone, and measuring the salaries of jobs I’m cut out for.
I thought I would do something great with my life. I really did. I thought running away from all of the death and dysfunction, advanced degrees in hand, might mean something.
Now I’m a mother who doesn’t cut it. I barely get dressed most days, covered in dirt from the garden and deluge from the bathtub or sink. My meals are very basic as I go through the motions, assessing fruits and vegetables, bathing my kids and brushing their teeth assiduously as I grapple with the mess that is my hair.
During a brief window in February, there was no illness and everyone was on track. Bedtimes were perfect. I did my hair and makeup while watching the kids play in the sandbox outside from the bathroom window. I had a writing routine. I had a painting routine. I had hoped that my projects could mean something, but now I’m contemplating factory work. I don’t know what part of the machine I belong to, and I just want to clog it up.
My father is dead. My mother is absent from my life because she thinks Elon Musk is stalking her and our planet is being overtaken by lizard people.
Many parents to young kids, like my husband and I, struggle to find safe, reliable childcare. We aren’t alone in this. I hear plenty of nostalgia for how women parented in the past. Social media clips keep talking about villages. I am dubious. I think the women of my broken genealogy had quaaludes and vendettas.
In patriarchal culture, it was harder in a lot of ways for previous generations, but thirty years ago, it was easier to find an affordable babysitter. Today, my family’s monthly daycare bill exceeds our mortgage. Many of the mothers who grapple with this reality are the same women who experienced freedom and were encouraged to be independent.
I felt like I could have it all, and now, I am really, really bad at keeping quiet and sucking it up. Trying to show up for my kids as the person I want to be, not a remnant of the trauma I survived, is a daily effort. My mother had a large village when she was parenting me, and thank God for that. She was a teen mother in the ‘90s. My parents had two contributing families that helped raise me, albeit dysfunctionally. When my mom married my stepfather, his large blended family chipped in too. As I neared tween age, I mostly watched over myself. However, I spent that in-between time, from ages five to nine, in the care of strippers and misfits.
Like some other single moms in need of money, mine turned to sex work. I was left in the care of a number of questionable people, so my village consisted of exotic dancers with extensive shoe collections and (alleged) access to the Playboy Mansion.
On occasion, we spent time with low-cost babysitters who wore their traumas on their sleeves and their bellybutton rings. This was the high desert I was living in, known for. Alicia was not a sex worker to my knowledge, but she was saddled with many children by age 28 and she had sex appeal. She wore blue eye shadow, an early Love Witch figure I emulated deeply. My first Lana del Rey, if you will. She was only 4’ 10” and had Sabrina Carpenter hair, including the bangs. She had dark eyes, freckles, a strong nose that reminded me of a witch, and perpetual shorts and crop tops that exposed her bellybutton ring. Under a year after having a baby, she had a flat stomach again but wasn’t a major dieter or anything. She was hot, probably, but I only saw her through a child’s lens. I only saw a good mother that I wished I had. Her kids got three square meals no matter what, even if it was Top Ramen. When I was with her, I did too. Ramen meals at her house were my favorite.
Alicia knew my mom abused me. She was maybe the first adult who acknowledged it and grappled with how to approach it. She asked me careful questions. She held me when I would come over, just a small girl, crying and shaking because I suffered through another long night of screaming and chaos.
Alicia’s imperfect three bedroom apartment was a sanctuary for me. Alicia was sad. She shared too much of her personal life with me. She took us six kids to the pool nearly every day. She showed me so much love when it seemed like she didn’t get a lot of it in her life. I wonder and wonder and wonder if me and Alicia would even be friends or close as adults. After my dad got custody of me and I had to go live with him when I was ten, I never saw Alicia again. When really bad things happened to me all throughout the rest of my childhood, I thought of Alicia. I thought about how she took us trick-or-treating and put on Shrek for us, but also about how she got in big fights with her trucker husband Don and how glass would break.
One incredibly hot night in the desert, I watched Alicia roll around in the sprinklers in the middle of the night. She was drunk, but I was too young to know, and she scared me. I thought she was possessed. She was laughing hysterically, the sprinkler water smudging her makeup and ruining her hair, while chanting “You’re good. You’re a good girl.” I let her lean on my shoulders on the walk back to her apartment. Don yelled at her all night long for being a “drunk whore.”
If you are familiar with Lana Del Rey’s “Ride” persona, well, that’s basically Alicia. I’ve played it over again frequently, particularly back when I was a teen getting smashed myself. She was the first shitfaced drunk person I remember seeing. I didn’t know what it meant. For all her faults, my mother never drank.
Growing up, all the desert sand made me long for grass.
One day, my mother, sister, and I drove out to the stripper compound. Ice blue sports drinks rattled around my ankles on the floor of the car. I looked outside into the bright almost-nothing. No trees, just sky as electric blue as the plastic bottles. Other women at the compound used to watch me and my sister while my mother disappeared for periods of time.
“The sun is beating down on me, Mom. I’m so hot. KT keeps trying to scratch me.”
“Shut up. We’ll get there when we get there,” she replied, adjusting her freshly blown out box-dyed red hair. I know she wanted to leave us out there, in the devil’s playground. Why, oh why was I born?
Ghost towns dotted the high desert near the Inland Empire, and I probably visited every one of them. I longed to mine gold and strike big to escape the life I was living so badly. I longed for a life like I have now. Why am I still so sad sometimes?
I found fool’s gold then, but I’ve struck real gold now. Yet, I’m stunted in different ways, hitting the walls that you hit when trauma and abuse eat you alive in the parenting years. I take joy in slow mornings with my kids, long nature walks, hours out in the garden with rocks and dirt and chickens. However, this way of life can be incredibly lonely as well. Suddenly I must live for people other than myself, and the challenges are at times crushing.
Maybe Alicia’s sadness and my mother’s resentment weren’t just about their own poverty, youth, and trauma; maybe their struggles weren’t as different from mine as I once believed. I used to think that if I just met my children’s basic needs, I would be an infinitely better parent than mine. Why doesn’t it feel that way?
About the Author
Rae Piwarski is a PhD recipient in English literature from UT Austin. She lives in Montana with her husband, children, and many pets. Her other work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Lit Angels, and Fiction on the Web. Her substack is Art & Whimsy with Dr. Rae.
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