We moved when I was in 8th grade. Almost the end of the school year and I had to start all over in a new school, well myself and my three other sisters. This was going to be a new beginning in a supposedly better neighborhood. It was a better neighborhood, but it didn't mean that the children there would be any less mean or taunting. Going into a new school right at the end of the year did not make it any easier. I made one friend that was going to end up going to the same high school as me. The middle school split and some kids went to one high school while the rest went to another depending on where you lived. Those 3 or 4 months were hard, hard adjusting to the attitudes of a bunch of kids who were privileged, when I was clearly not. Hand me down clothes and shoes did not help the situation, especially when the shoes were mail order shoes that your mother decided she didn't want.
I made it through and onto high school I went. I had already had a regular babysitting job at our old house and was determined to find something now so that I could buy my own clothes. Here and there and doing extra chores around the house and I would save up enough to go and buy a new shirt or pair of pants every once in a while. I remember Ditto's were in back then and I must of had a pair in every color.
I was pretty shy, so I didn't have a lot of friends, but believed the friends that I did have were quality friends. I tumbled through high school, socially awkward and shy with most people thinking that I was stuck up. Never really dating but trying to get involved, even running for publicity for ASB. Didn't win, someone more popular did, but she knew I had talent and asked me to be on her team. Fun times watching the football team run through our posters. Going out for pizza after a game and just being a kid.
Just about my senior year my mom and step-father started having problems. He liked to drink and wouldn't admit that he was an alcoholic. The situation became tense and by that time I had a regular job and a car that I had bought and was so glad that I did. If I wasn't at school I was working or would hang with my friends. My two younger sisters weren't so lucky and lived in the middle of a war zone. By the time I was 19 I had already moved out and right after that their relationship ended. I certainly wasn't surprised, but I felt really bad for my mother. Two kids to raise and get out of high school and on her own again. She succeeded with one and the other dropped out. For all of us this was a really bad time and then my father decided that it was time to come back into our lives after a 6 year hiatus.
Showing posts with label loneliness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label loneliness. Show all posts
Friday, September 21, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
10. Anonymity
Sometimes it's nice that no one knows you and what you are about, other times it's horrid that no one does. The times when you think that somebody should have known that something was going on and been there to help you and they're not. Didn't someone see that the behavior of my sister was not in the norm. She hid things well from us, even tried to protect us on those occasions when my mom let us go see my dad at my grandmothers house. My grandmother had no idea what was going on, she should have, but my mother never said anything to my father's side of the family. Yet, I can't believe that there wasn't another adult out there that didn't see that something was wrong. Back then, as it is today, people mind their own business, but for the sake of a child, I can't understand that nobody noticed anything at all.
This set her, as well as the rest of us on a destruction course of our lives. And when my mother finally did do something about it, she then remarried a man who had no idea how to deal with children period, especially one who had been damaged so severely. At a time in my sisters life when she needed a father figure that could show her the right way to be a dad, he belittled her and mentally abused her. Pushing her further into a deep, dark hole of desperation. Sometimes I think that it's a miracle that she is the person she is today, a loving, giving mother and wife, an asset to society. I see the course that could have been followed and I am so glad that she took a detour. Not that her life as been peaches and cream, not in the least, it has taken her 50 years to be "okay" with herself. But there are others that are not so lucky. They have been spent by their abusers and thrown out like a piece of trash.
I don't remember anything happening to me and I don't want to remember anything. I'm positive that something happened, but I don't see any details. And I know that most of the reason is that the rest of us were younger and my sister tried to protect us. When on occasion we did stay at my grandmothers house, my sister would put us all toward the wall and sleep on the outside so my dad couldn't get to the rest of us. At age 11 to 13 she was already our protector. I can't even imagine the pressure she must have endured and how terrified she must have been everytime we went to go visit my dad. I don't know what my mother was thinking by letting us go, but she perpetuated the pain that my sister was already enduring.
The visits stopped only for my sisters pain to be replaced by a different kind of abuse. At the age of 15 she could take it no more and ran away from home. This was a difficult time for the rest of us, this is the only time I remember my mother ever being absolutely frantic. She loved us, I could tell, but she had endured so much pain as a child that she didn't know how to be there for us. But this hurt her, really bad, I think that she knew that this was her fault, she was not there for my sister the way she should have been, as a mother who would do anything for her children, and she knew it now. It was a few months before they found her and in the mean time my mother had forgotten that she had three other girls to raise. She was there, and cooked and got us to school, but she wasn't really there.
This set her, as well as the rest of us on a destruction course of our lives. And when my mother finally did do something about it, she then remarried a man who had no idea how to deal with children period, especially one who had been damaged so severely. At a time in my sisters life when she needed a father figure that could show her the right way to be a dad, he belittled her and mentally abused her. Pushing her further into a deep, dark hole of desperation. Sometimes I think that it's a miracle that she is the person she is today, a loving, giving mother and wife, an asset to society. I see the course that could have been followed and I am so glad that she took a detour. Not that her life as been peaches and cream, not in the least, it has taken her 50 years to be "okay" with herself. But there are others that are not so lucky. They have been spent by their abusers and thrown out like a piece of trash.
I don't remember anything happening to me and I don't want to remember anything. I'm positive that something happened, but I don't see any details. And I know that most of the reason is that the rest of us were younger and my sister tried to protect us. When on occasion we did stay at my grandmothers house, my sister would put us all toward the wall and sleep on the outside so my dad couldn't get to the rest of us. At age 11 to 13 she was already our protector. I can't even imagine the pressure she must have endured and how terrified she must have been everytime we went to go visit my dad. I don't know what my mother was thinking by letting us go, but she perpetuated the pain that my sister was already enduring.
The visits stopped only for my sisters pain to be replaced by a different kind of abuse. At the age of 15 she could take it no more and ran away from home. This was a difficult time for the rest of us, this is the only time I remember my mother ever being absolutely frantic. She loved us, I could tell, but she had endured so much pain as a child that she didn't know how to be there for us. But this hurt her, really bad, I think that she knew that this was her fault, she was not there for my sister the way she should have been, as a mother who would do anything for her children, and she knew it now. It was a few months before they found her and in the mean time my mother had forgotten that she had three other girls to raise. She was there, and cooked and got us to school, but she wasn't really there.
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