The mother of a nineteen-year-old psychopath cleans out his room

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My son's room had been empty for some time. He's nineteen, and has been home from college only once. Spring break was last week. He didn't come home. He told me he was staying with a friend from school.

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I had dreaded dealing with his things, cleaning up the room, because I knew how my heart would be torn to shreds. But I could no longer afford to have this room empty. I had decided to rent it.

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Yet time and again I found myself unable to throw away even the silliest things, because they were his. I kept putting it off. This is a boy who would step over me in the street if I were bleeding to death. I know that. But he is my son and I love him. I could not even bear to throw out one pair of his old shoes in case he might want them, or a single notebook he had ever written in.

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Yesterday, I found out that he had lied to me once again. He wasn't staying with a friend.  

He had gone to meet my mother, my childhood abuser, the woman who had ruined my life and tried to ruin his. I had last seen her in a courtroom when she was fighting me for custody, trying to take my son away and destroy my family. She lost. Fifteen years later, she's crawled out of her hole again, to try to hurt me through him.

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My son claims not to remember the custody fight, though at the time he was terrified by it. He was four.

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Her money was now green enough for him. He'd taken it, bought a six hundred dollar plane ticket, lied to me. I had told him the next time he lied to me would be the last.

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So yesterday I had to make a painful decision. I will not be lied to. Though I will always love him I will not give him any more money. That means I will never hear from him again.

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That night, I accidentally left the bathtub water running and it flooded his bedroom. Now the room had to be dealt with. I couldn't put it off.

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There was less than a quarter inch of water and not much damage. I decided I would tell my first deliberate lie to my son: I would tell him the boxes of books and belongings he had left in his room had been ruined. Then I'd throw them away.

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His middle school yearbook was in a box. Did I dare? I tore out the pages with his pictures. I burned them in the bathtub. At first I didn't feel anything, and then it felt good.

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The CDs, those violent computer games I refused to give him but he stole anyway, played when he was supposed to be doing homework. At nineteen he was still obsessed with them and didn't want me to throw them away.

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But he would never be home again. Suddenly, without planning to, I threw one violently and it broke. Good, only plastic, no glass to clean up. Would the CD itself break, or just bend? Break. A good noise.

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The notebook from his music lessons, with his handwritten note to himself: Study for test! Remember this is a quarter rest!

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That nearly did me in. There had been that time when he seemed so talented and full of promise, so willing to work hard. I'd spent thousands and thousands on music lessons. That careful childish writing; he once cared about pleasing his teachers, about doing well on a test----

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I had to sit down, sobbing. Oh, wasn't there good in him once? I know I saw it! Where could it have gone? Where was that little child I used to call my good, good boy?

Could it really be that it was my fault? Was it me who killed all that was good in him?

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How could I ever know what happened, what turned in him? He was so beautiful and sweet. He once made me a Mother's Day card saying Best Mother in the World.  

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The teddy bear stocking I'd gotten him for Christmas when he was three, filled each year with candy: the eyes of the bear mocked me. I could have beaten him senseless day and night and it would have been the same.

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And then I remembered how I got the stocking at the dollar store because I was so poor that year, and I actually thought: If only I'd gotten him a better stocking...

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In the end, it was actually a pitifully small bundle. Only one garbage bag.

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The poems he wrote when he was 13, the T shirts bearing the proud names of the summer camps and schools I'd sent him to, the puzzle he loved when he was six and never wanted to throw away, the school ID where he could barely sign his name, the framed award from camp for the "Best Moo", the pieces from the Monopoly games we used to play, books of music, the box from a gift I'd once given him. It wasn't a large bag but it was oddly shaped and bulky and didn't want to go down the compactor chute. I had to pound on it to fit it in. Then I slammed the door hard and it was all gone, just like it never existed.