Some memories are just sad little fragments. This is such a scrap.

One bright beautiful day in late spring or early summer of grade six, I rode my bike home for lunch. I chained my bike up on our patio, and trotted up our few stairs, ready to eat.

Inside, Mum was laying on the couch. The sink was full of dirty dishes, and there was nothing made for lunch.

Mum started asking me to wash the dishes and I said “why didn’t you do it?” Within a moment it was a yelling match. I felt that she was slovenly, lazy, and trying to badger me into doing a chore I saw as hers.

It just kept escalating. “WASH THE DISHES!” she shrieked at me. A full-on verbal explosion from the couch.

I can’t remember eating lunch – just yelling back at her, feeling disgusted, wanting to escape our confrontation and get out from under my embarrassment.

I was about eleven. At the time, I was thinking that all the neighbours must be able to hear us yelling – they’d all know what was happening in our house. I couldn’t stand the idea of that embarrassment, and I blamed my Mum for it. Dad always took care of things. Why couldn’t she?

In reality, my Mum was depressed at that time, all the time. Even at her healthiest and happiest, she was generally not suited to motherhood. Now she could barely take care of herself, and certainly wasn’t taking responsibility for her kids or her home. At that point, she was really more like a passenger in our lives than a parent or a responsible adult.

I have my own moments of laziness and procrastination to be sure, but it’s so alien to my nature to just give up on everything like that. Maybe the closest I can come to understanding that aspect of my Mum is to recall times when I’ve been really sick with a fever, or debilitated with bad back pain. When your body feels so incapacitated, your pride and willpower go up in smoke, and you just want to escape from life, because everything feels miserable.

Maybe that’s what a debilitating depression feels like.