As you get older, you notice more often that some things are out of whack. Mom says something nice to another grown-up, but you know that she doesn't feel that way. You can feel what she's feeling, and it isn't even close to the nice thing she said. If you're brave, you ask her about it. She denies feeling anything but niceness to that person, and says you must be imagining things. She gets that closed-face look, and you know better than to ask more questions. You open your book and start reading.
When you're ten years old, you find your voice. It was there all along, but you've read enough now to understand that you're the downtrodden person in this family. You're the oldest, and you're adopted and someday your real family will show up and take you away from these people and love you. That's all you really want. And your anger comes out of your heart, and you ask your mom questions, lots of them. She gets caught in a logic trap you've set, and she can't get out. She slaps you across the face to get you to stop. Two decades later, she'll tell that story at a funeral to a large group of family members, ending with, "I don't know what made you do that. If you had stopped yelling at me, I wouldn't have had to slap you!" Until that moment, you had no memory of that event.
As a teenager, you are trapped, and you are gnawing your own limb off at all times. You want to escape so badly. The migraines have been bad since seventh grade. Your family constantly blames anything wrong in the world, in the family, in the house, on you. You're too sensitive. You're too obnoxious. You are too ugly. You don't know how to do anything. You're ridiculous, and you don't take things seriously enough. You you you you you.
There's no way to succeed in this household. You can only survive. I used to look at all of my classmates in college and wonder what it would be like to be valued for 18 years before you had to go out into the world and try to achieve things. Instead, I had to fight just to feel like I deserved oxygen, food, love, housing. I fought and fought and fought, and gave up a lot. I spent a lot of my early years in a dissociative fugue, trying to escape my actual feelings. I couldn't face the world, and I couldn't face my own reality.
Someone asked me once, "Didn't you have a mirror in your life? Someone who would reflect back to you exactly how gifted and smart and beautiful you were? Someone who really saw you?" I couldn't think of anyone. My teachers knew my mom, and though I was a gold star student, I craved so much attention that I was probably off-putting in that desperate way. When I started going to public middle school, my bus driver was really sweet to me. In high school, I idolized my Spanish teacher, who ended up thoroughly disappointing me in a myriad of ways. For a time, though, I had someone who I thought valued me for who I was. That got me through a lot of years, despite how it ended.
I see my past clearly these days. I no longer have any contact with my parents. After decades of continuing to blame me for, well, everything, despite my success, despite my siblings' dependence and underachievement, despite any clues to the contrary, I finally gave up. I said, I am done. You have no idea who I am. I was shaking when I mailed the letter, but I wrote it, mailed it, and cried for a while. The letter was specifically for my mom, and my dad contacted me a few weeks later. Hopeful, I decided to have lunch with him. He made it clear during lunch that I was required to fall back into line and take care of my mother, who was crying every night.
I'm familiar with that crying she was doing. It says, "Comfort me! Make me feel better! Fix things for me! You have made me feel bad, so now it's your job to make me feel better! Come, prostrate yourself before me, and everything will go back to the way it was before, as long as you apologize for making me feel bad, and promise to never do it again, ever. Because my feelings are your responsibility, not mine. You are behaving badly, not me. I am long-suffering and so sad and that is your fault."
Because it's all about her. My dad asked me zero questions that day. He didn't ask me how I was doing, how my husband was, or even (logically) why I wrote the letter. He didn't want to know. He just knew that I had made his life harder by cutting contact with my mom, and he wanted it fixed, now. I walked away from that meal knowing that I had never had a mother or a father, just two people who wanted their every whim fulfilled by people they had abused into believing they could never be treated better.
These days, I work on myself, piece by piece. I know who I am. I know who I want to be. I also know exactly what it's like to grow up in a household where reality doesn't exist. On my last visit to my parents' house, I was alone for an hour or so. I walked through the rooms, just feeling all the pain and anguish and anger that lives there. It wouldn't be so bad if the family portraits of smiling faces weren't staring back at me from their spots on the walls. I remember what it was like being 10, 12, 15 years old there. I remember having to smile and pretend it wasn't like that.
The floors are crooked in that house. The foundation is partly wood, and it's been sinking since forever. For thirty years, that was my childhood home, my password when they asked What Street Did You Grow Up On? I remember every inch of the place, hiding places, nooks and crannies, secrets in every room. I will never go back.
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