Mom Killed Me To Teach Him

It seemed the only reason I existed was to serve as a cautionary tale for my brother’s upbringing.

I remember when Tyler first started middle school and developed a junk food habit. My mother decided to fill an old Gatorade bottle with concentrated weedkiller and left it sitting right on my nightstand where it couldn’t be missed.

I drank it. The agony that followed was a white-hot serrated knife twisting in my gut, sending me heaving and thrashing across the floor.

My dad threw me into the car, racing through the night toward the ER, only to be pulled over at a sobriety checkpoint.