Suburban Hellscape

bad things that happened in my childhood

I encountered David Lynch shortly after this period of my life. If you’re familiar with Lynch, you know that much of his work is set in mundane American neighborhoods that are ~not quite right~. Although the story I’m about to tell is a true one, one that I lived, consider my recounting of it a partial homage to him.

Little pieces of hell exist in all corners of the world. This is the one I ended up in:

I had just turned 17. My family lived in one of very few affluent neighborhoods in El Paso, Texas. We had a trampoline, multicolored rose bushes, three dogs, and a view of the mountains. My mom spent most of her time playing tennis at the nearby country club, and my dad ran a real estate development company across the border. They had two daughters: me, and my younger sister.

Around 2015 my sister fell ill. She is far more private than I am, so I am going to be deliberately vague when speaking about her and avoid doing so as much as possible. However, it is important to note that her illness was the precipitant of the following events.

My mother always had quite the hysteric side. And my childhood was far from rosy. My parents had no coherent parenting strategy, and my mom often resorted to physical force. It is barely an exaggeration to say that what could get me slapped one day could get me ice cream the next, and quite often it would get me both. They were hardly equipped to be parents in the best of cases.

So all of their halfway built strategies crumbled down when one of their children developed a severe chronic illness.

For the next few months, they spent most of their time in hospitals with all types of physicians. Every day felt about the same: I’d wake up to a loud fight (I recall the morning fights being particularly explosive). Screaming, crying, often the sound of objects breaking. I’d go to school. My dad went to work. My mom and sister spent their day at medical appointments. I would get home. More fighting. Gruesomely long spiraling conversations. More crying. My sister would go to bed. My mom would come into my room to debrief. None of us were sleeping well.

This started interfering severely with my dad’s ability to work. Eventually, he fully moved across the border to Juarez (where his business was located) and visited only on weekends.

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With a loss of support, and a loss of hope in both her and the medical system’s ability to navigate the situation, my mom found Jesus.

My parents were nondevout Catholics when I was growing up. My mom even self-described as agnostic. But desperation led her to an Evangelical church. I started finding pictures of Jesus across the house: under my bed, in the vents, beneath the coffee maker.

With God, though, came the Devil, introducing a whole new frame to our woes. Now, we were no longer dealing with merely an illness in the family: we were at war with malignant ætheric forces.

To give you an idea, here were some of the hypotheses floated at the time:

• Our house was haunted by the vengeful spirit of the first person to have ever owned the land we lived on.

• Aliens were going to make contact soon, and my sister was an open vessel for their initial possession(?)

• Something about angry past-life ancestors.

• My personal favorite: a very distant relative (think father’s brother’s wife’s cousin) had voodoo dolls of our entire nuclear family in her home and was using them to inflict illness and torture on us.

• And my personal least favorite: I, seventeen-year-old Paola, was a highly powerful demon who had (essentially) hyperstitioned all of this into existence out of both spite and a desire to gain control of my dad’s assets.

Priests came in to bless our home. Several times. Everyone in the family had an exorcism performed on them.

Shortly after, my mom started growing disillusioned with the church, and began leaning towards new age spirituality. This transition somehow also resulted in more exorcisms and changed nothing other than the aesthetics.

Sleep deprivation and paranoia started really getting to my mom. She began keeping me up at night to tell me about her plans, which now involved a murder-suicide scheme for the entire family. I remember for a while she tried to get me on board with just killing myself alongside everyone else in the family. I remember I would sometimes agree. This went on for months.

She sometimes thought that murder-suicide was what cosmically needed to happen. Or, that she wanted to lose her ongoing fight with the Devil. Or, she was just exasperated and looking for release. There were several fluctuating theories that all led to the same answer. Again, I was often unsure of whether she was wrong.

In one instance things got out of hand, and my sister managed to call child protective services. No one could believe the evil that existed in our home, and so none of our relatives, family friends, or neighbors corroborated my sister’s story.

I was the only real witness. They interviewed me a few times. I figured it would result in my sister being put in foster care, not getting the medical resources she needed, and my family’s financial situation crumbling. So I lied.

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Eventually, the sleep deprivation and paranoia got to me too. During one of my most serious suicide attempts, I heard a loud snap out of nowhere. The pingpong table that had been sitting in the same place in the garage for about five years had split vertically. Another night, I came back from a party at 2 am to find that no one was home. I started seeing faces in the windows. The lights turned on and off. None of my messages or calls were going through. A computer that hadn’t been touched in at least a year made static noises and then reset. I started having regular nightmares, and to this day have a hard time distinguishing which images are memories from that period and which are from the dreams.

I am certain I have inherited my mother’s ailments, which is another horror story of its own.

One day, I came home and no one was there. Two out of three of the dogs were missing (leaving only the one that was clearly mine). They’d moved across the border into Juarez to get more direct support from my dad and forgot to tell me. I was terrified of being inside the house alone.

During this time, I recall my mom would send me on these kafkaesque quests to find specific medications and bring them into Mexico. When I’d fail to complete a task, my mom would tell me that I clearly wanted my sister to suffer or that my family would disown me for my failure.

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They eventually came back, and I was able to move out shortly after.

I visit my family sometimes, but I never fully return in some sense. Everyone in this story is better now and has gotten something resembling psychiatric care. Our relationships are strained but nothing close to what you’d expect given the above stories.

Nearly every time I try to talk about what happened with them, it still turns into a conversation about demons. I used to feel resentful about this, but have come to believe it’s the most functional narrative. Maybe they need to think evil just came, briefly touched our lives, and left. Or maybe the exorcisms worked.