I was the household dishwasher from an early age, pulling my weight you could say. Scrubbing dishes after a meal, cleaning up after my family. My favourite part was always putting dishes away exactly how they should be. It brought a strange sense of glee to have control over this one tiny aspect of our house. Doing the dishes themselves didn’t bring me joy, but this small part of doing them did. I stacked cups from tallest to smallest, the tallest glasses standing proudly in the back while the small ones got to go up front, unobstructed by the others. The largest spoons and forks always got placed at the very bottom of the pile so the small ones could be perfectly perched, supported. The picture-perfect embrace, nestled like small children in their parents’ arms. I liked to stack the Tupperware containers precisely how they came out of the box, neat little piles stacked not only to use every bit of space, but they looked good. I always stacked the lids standing up, always tallest to smallest, like-pairs together, shapes defining where the lids could go. It made sense—why would anyone put dishes away unruly, untamed, borderline psychotically? That seemed like the biggest problem in my small little mind.
It’s silly how much Tupperware containers can affect a person.
I was three years old when my mom and I were left on our own. My mom and my dad separated around the time I was born, but it took him 3 extra years to leave. She was 19 when she had me—a teenage girl who should’ve only been tasked with figuring out her own life, yet she was suddenly bringing another kid into the world. I was only three when my dad stopped visiting, so it didn’t click that he was suddenly gone and out of my life. He never lived with us and being told he was busy when I went to visit my grandparents only bothered me a little bit since I didn’t fully understand what was really happening. As I got older, the dots started to connect, the questions I had finally started to be answered, and bits of information spilled from my mother’s lips about the kind of man my father was whenever I had the courage to bring him up. He was a cheater and an addict.
I was 7 years old when my mom brought me to Prince George to visit my grandparents. She never stayed; she just dropped me off. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was because they were my dad’s parents. They represented a side of me she didn’t want to be reminded of. He’d left not only me but his other daughter, too. It’s hard to stand behind someone willing to repeat the same hurtful mistake not once but twice.
My pops and I were driving, likely going to the grocery store or liquor store, unimportant information 10 years later. He must’ve recognized the guy who was skateboarding along the sidewalk because before I knew it, we had pulled up and stopped at the curb. They talked for a moment and we drove away. The man didn’t say hi or acknowledge me and I didn’t, either. I had no idea who this guy was, no recollection of him whatsoever, so why would I have? As we pulled away from the curb and the random guy skateboarded away, my pops turned to me and asked if I recognized my dad.
I hadn’t.
It’s silly how much Tupperware containers can affect a person. Day after day, anxiety would follow when I would go to do the dishes and somehow my perfect system had been messed with. Cups not perfectly in line with each other, the perfect descending line, the neatness, the orderly system that my very being seemed to thrive on had been deconstructed in some way. I couldn’t begin to fathom why someone wouldn’t take the extra two seconds to recognize the system, the perfect order of everything, instead of just shoving things wherever they might fit. Things took up even more space if they weren’t exactly where they should be, and my thoughts would revolve around the disorder, anxiety creeping up my spine and laying the path for more chaos. I felt like I was going crazy. Sometimes I still feel like that—how could silly little lids, cups, and Tupperware containers occupy so much of my mind? It made no sense to me. I thought I was just more mature than kids my age, obsessed with the cleanliness and organization in my home, a house I called my own but didn’t have any control over. I was just a little girl craving control and acceptance. It seemed at the time these two things were intimately connected—how could I ever be accepted if I didn’t have control?
It’s silly how much Tupperware containers can affect a person.
I had talked to my mom about my dad throughout the years, but each conversation left me in my room sobbing to the point of hyperventilation. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t good enough for him, why he would leave me before I could even remember his face. I couldn’t recall any of the times we did visit because I’d been too young. I went on with my life, constantly plagued by thoughts that no one really liked me. How could I be likeable, I wondered, if my own father didn’t bother to stay? I couldn’t bear to stand up in front of a group and talk. There was always a voice in the back of my head that told me everyone was judging me, making fun of me behind my back. Still some part of that voice lingers in the back of my mind today, a silent plea to never be called on whenever there’s a group discussion in class. It leaked into every part of my life.
My panic attacks started at age 7. It took me a long time to figure out where the anxiety came from, a need for control. It took me 5 separate counsellors and getting caught self-harming at 12 before I finally came to realize my father had a bigger impact in my life than I ever cared to admit. This was an important realization: I mean, at least I had someone else to blame then.
It’s silly how much Tupperware containers can affect a person.
We had just moved to Castlegar a few years prior to the incident I’m about to share with you. One morning, I was doing the dishes like normal. The same anxiety I held onto for most of my life crept into my body and soaked into my bones. I hadn’t put anything in my body that morning, just the coffee I’d downed before starting my morning chores. It probably added to the anxiety, and it wouldn’t have been the first time I’d accidentally set myself up for a panic attack, being an over-caffeinated pre-teen too lazy to make breakfast. I opened one of the drawers to put away the oh-so-perfect Tupperware containers and found it was a mess. There were circular containers trying to fit with rectangles, lids thrown into the drawer with absolutely no regard. It’s not like I had younger siblings in the same house that didn’t understand—it was my own mother [LD1] [SC2] chipping away at my system. The lids didn’t even belong in there. I felt the hyperventilation taking hold, heart racing a million miles a minute, the Tupperware I was holding threatening to fall from my shaking hands. I sat down and I cried. I hysterically cried, sobs wracking my shoulders, full breaths a foreign concept. I tried so hard to keep it together but that damned drawer took a sledgehammer to my resolve. I was frantic, and every little thing I had stressed about over the previous six months, school, boys, all the typical teenage drama, came to eat me alive in that one moment. I couldn’t function. I moved myself to the bathroom with no windows so I could lay on the bathmat in complete darkness and pray to a god I didn’t believe in to just to make me normal.
It’s silly how much Tupperware containers can affect a person.
The very next year, I met my dad for the first time in 12 years. A strange concept, meeting someone you share half your DNA with after twelve years of absence. I was a wreck, and the hour-long drive seemed to take years as I thought of a way to act so he’d finally maybe like me. Looking back now, I realize that I didn’t need him to like me; after all, I could just blame it on him for making me unlikeable.
I went with my aunt, the only one in my family still in contact with him. We drove out to his little trailer in the middle of nowhere, and when I got out of the car, he gave me a hug. A hug I had wanted for so many years, but in the moment, it felt unnatural and weird. He invited me in and offered me a beer. Of course I took it, but it was a little weird to offer his 15-year-old daughter a beer as a welcoming drink—father of the year right there. There were some awkward silences, then he suddenly asked if I wanted to see what he did for work. Naturally I said sure, thinking he had a cool home office or something. He led me to a door just off the front entry and opened it up to reveal row upon row of pot plants on a fake daylight cycle. I didn’t know what to say. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got nothing against smoking weed, but it seemed so strange that my dad, who I hadn’t seen in 12 years, not only showed me he was quite literally a drug dealer but also asked if I wanted to light up with him. At that moment, I realized this wasn’t someone I wanted in my life. He wasn’t a role model, never would’ve taken me to my sports games and cheered me on. He was basically a 40-year-old teenager with a drug problem.
Ever since meeting my dad, it feels like part of me has been put back together. Maybe not completely put together, but a little less broken. The fear and anxiety I experienced daily has loosened its grip on me; the nagging voice in the back of my mind is so much quieter. It didn’t rid me of all of my stress, but it mended a part of me that let my anxiety control my every moment, my every waking thought. I didn’t feel like a little girl unworthy of daddy’s love anymore; I was a girl who had a fucked-up dad she didn’t need or want. That little girl in me suddenly didn’t feel so sad and out of control anymore. Instead, she felt so thankful for the family she did have. The family that came to cheer her on at all her competitions, entertain every wild idea and silly story, the family that stuck around no matter what. I think it helped me make friends, too. I wasn’t scared of what other people would think about me. If I could come to terms with the whole dad situation, surely I could approach someone new and talk to them.
After I realized it wasn’t me who was unworthy of love, suddenly mismatched dishes didn’t seem like that big of a deal. It’s funny how those things that battered my brain and cracked my resolve suddenly seemed like simple blips in my otherwise stable life. It’s still strange to me how unorganized dishes flipped my mindset, how they could attack my brain the way they did for so long, only for one small little meeting to change everything. I might not need those silly containers anymore to keep me from breaking, but they’re a part of me, a part of my story.
Maybe it’s not so silly how much Tupperware containers can affect a person.
About the Author
Savannah Callahan is from Castlegar, BC and is currently working towards a Bachelor of English. She is currently in a creative writing course at Selkirk College where a new love for creative non-fiction has blossomed. She enjoys all things reading and writing, so her idea of a good night is one spent with a book and her cat.
