I don't mean that as a value judgement; I was really broken myself. But it was more hidden for me than for most of my friends. They had divorced parents, or had suffered trauma. One of my friends from camp was a foster kid, in and out of different homes in the big city. I could barely imagine her life, let alone relate.
E was being abused by her dad.
T was traumatized by a sexual assault and later withdrawn from school entirely.
My friend D lived far away, and was severely abused by her family, and later diagnosed with multiple personalities.
B, the previously mentioned foster kid, had grown up way too fast, and was having sex with her much older boyfriend at fifteen.
A's mom was much like mine: narcissistic, controlling, angry all the time.
These aren't value judgements. I loved my friends, even if they were only my friends for a little while, or off and on. Most of the time it was distance that kept us apart. Sometimes they would become friends with someone closer, and I would slowly be phased out of their world. Other times, they would form an alliance against me, and use my confidences to make fun of me and gain currency with their newfound friend.
But my family looked perfect to them. My parents were high school sweethearts, and had been married for almost twenty years. I'd lived in the same house since I was nine. Both of my parents worked, and we had more than enough income to live on. I had pets and siblings and played sports and was in advanced classes. More than one friend straight up said as much to me: You've got it made!
It was something I'd thought about myself. Why did I gravitate toward these types of friends?
Now I know. Instinctively, I knew that I was just like them. I knew my family was broken, and that I could only seek refuge with other broken kids. I knew that I would only find comfort with other people who would understand what I was going through, who felt my pain and anguish, who would understand what I was saying when I said, I have to get OUT.
I was crying out to the wilderness that no one understood me, that high school was awful, that my parents just didn't understand, and they heard me. But even I didn't know the full scope of the problem. I didn't know that parents were supposed to help you, they were supposed to lift you up, they were supposed to listen.
To this day, when I watch a tv show, or even a commercial where a parent is truly parenting their child, sometimes I start crying. I don't know what that's like. I know what it's like to want that. I know what I wanted when I was a child, and I've done a lot of work to give myself that feeling from within. But if I'm in a good space, and my husband [who shares similar familial issues] is watching with me, I usually turn to him and say, "Hey, is that what real parents are like?" He just laughs and says, "Huh! I wouldn't know, but that's what I've heard." And we laugh.
Because making him laugh makes me feel better. And it's funny because it's true.
Not all of my friends in high school were broken. Those that had good parents and happy childhoods were worshipped, wide-eyed, and studied like rarities. Sometimes I felt like I was on uneven ground with them, as they just walked in the world not flinching or expecting bad things to happen at any moment. I had a few boyfriends like this who I dropped with no real explanation, because I couldn't understand why they were with me, a clearly broken person who didn't deserve them. (If you're reading this, sorry!)
But the thing that makes me angriest about my lovely, complicated friends is how my mom reacted to them, and what she would say to me later. I'm gonna have to bullet this because otherwise I'm going to type so angrily that nothing will extinguish the flames from my computer. Deep breath here.
- My mother will never self-examine enough to understand her own motivations. I'm doing more work here to understand her than she will ever do.
- She wanted to keep me isolated and dependent on her for everything, to keep me all to herself.
- She was constantly projecting all of her insecurities on me and everyone else. Everything she didn't like in herself, she projected into someone else and criticized them for it.
- Any time I had friends over, she had to treat me like a beloved daughter to preserve her public image as a doting mother. To put it mildly, this was not something she liked to do.
- She enjoyed putting me down, and this was just one more way to do it.
- Any time she had to treat me like a beloved daughter in front of other people, as soon as no one else was around, she would immediately cut me down so I wouldn't get too big for my britches. That's a direct quote.
So. Once my friend left, I would get an earful. "You sure do know how to pick 'em." "She isn't very smart, is she?" "I don't like the way she does her hair. Doesn't her mother care about how she looks?" "That friend of yours is weird. Why does she dress that way?" "Is her mother divorced? Well, I guess she can't help how she's being raised, but still. She could have been more polite."
When my friend B came to visit, my bedroom door latch had been broken for months (why bother fixing it just for me?). The door accidentally closed on her, and she had to climb out on the roof to ask someone to come and let her out. For months, I heard about the "Fiddler on the Roof" and how weird she was. During that same visit, our septic tank clogged, and I had to spend two days digging out the septic tank because my parents both had bad backs and they couldn't be bothered hiring someone to dig it out. Instead, their fourteen year old daughter was tasked with using a shovel to dig a hole in the ground five feet deep, eight feet long, and five feet wide. But yeah. My friend was the weird one.
These days, I still gravitate toward the people I think are different in some way. I can feel it in how they act, and sometimes we talk about our experiences. I'm not often wrong about it; it's a wistful type of radar, but one I'm glad to have. It's nice to know who will understand where you come from, and what you really mean when you say, "I couldn't stay in touch with them anymore. I had to get out."
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