Wynsday's Child

“Micah’s gone!” my dad exclaimed early one summer Sunday morning, a hint of panic in his voice. I woke up to these words and sheer confusion to what he meant. It quickly became apparent, my older brother had left in the middle of the night. He was seventeen and he was gone. That day there were swirls of calls to friends, family, police. Heightened emotions. Panic. Fear. Dis-ease.

My twelve year old brain didn’t know what to make of things. Just the day before, my older brother had asked me if I wanted to go to Wendy’s for lunch. I was confused. We got along like oil and water and no amount of emulsifying had ever brought us together. My first thought was one from experience: He’s playing a trick on me and is upping his game. I was convinced that he was going to leave me there alone or dump me off somewhere. I initially told him no because I didn’t have any money. He told me he was going to pay. Now I was sure it was a trap. Not only did he want to take me somewhere, but he was going to pay for me to go??? My inner hypervigilance was screaming. I don’t remember what exactly convinced me to go. Quite possibly my mother encouraged me to go with some coaxing on her part to bond with my brother. But we went to Wendy’s and he told me to order what I’d like, a rare treat for me as I often got scolded and called piggy despite my very average physique. As we sat down my brother talked to me like a human, congenial and inquisitive. This was the same brother who hated being seen with me in public because someone had mistaken me for his girlfriend once, me being tall for my age and pretty-if-not-goofy and him having barely hit his major growth spurt at sixteen years old. I was uneasy, but even at such a young age I’d already been conditioned to disregard my gut.

After lunch we drove around. We had lived in our hometown my entire life, my parents having bought the house I grew up in when I was just mere months old, so I knew it well but was still worried he was going to stop and dump me somewhere. I remember thinking I’m lucky I’m a wanderer who enjoys solo walks, and can simply walk home if he does. Instead, he drove me by his friends’ houses pointing out where each one lived. I don’t recall how long we drove around, I’d say a good half hour or so, but we eventually made our way back home, both of us in the car, and the day progressed as if it hadn’t been a monumental occasion in our sibling relationship.

The next day it was like he had evaporated.

Late that night, after I was in bed but still awake and listening, my parents received a call from the police. I don’t recall if it was that night or the next morning that I’d learned that he was found drunk and that, while in Texas you can move out on your own at 17, you still cannot drink and certainly cannot be publicly intoxicated. The cops gave him the choice of going back home or going to jail. He chose home that night. Jail would come later… and often.

The next few years he was in and out of our home. He moved in with the friend who he had planned to roommate with when he ran away, and eventually it became more normal than not that he wasn’t living in the home. I was a teenager now. My second seventh grade year, which I’d just completed when he left, was my younger brother’s and my last year in private school. (I has passed my first seventh grade year in homeschool, but my mother “didn’t feel that [I] was ready for 8th grade” so she held me back; this meant that I was now in my younger brothers grade as we were only 14 months apart in age, and, while we were close, I found it embarrassing that people assumed I had failed a grade.) During that school year my mother had begun confiding in me. She would pick me up from school and tell me about going to see her “friend”, about how she brought him flowers or met his children, but not to say anything to dad because he “wouldn’t understand.” I never spoke of these things because when your mother has called you a liar all of your life, you don’t expect anyone to believe you, and I was branded “liar” early. And not to say that I never lied, all kids try to get away with things and I was no different. I certainly wasn’t the liar she portrayed me as, however. But I digress..

Unbeknownst to her, I knew who she was talking about when she referred to her friend. As a night owl I would stay awake for hours in between the time we were told to be in bed and the time my dad got home from his second job, near midnight. I noticed that she would talk on the phone to the DJ from one of the pop music radio stations in the nearby city and hang up just as she heard my dad pull into the driveway. She spoke in hushed tones but her laugh was fun and flirtatious. Even at twelve years old this bothered me. Some years earlier, my mother had decreed some very strict rules such as no secular music, church three times a week, no more celebrating Halloween, amongst others, so it was plain to me that this not only broke her commitment to my father but also to our family and our religion. Now I was being used. Now the label of “liar” was used to force me to carry her secret, that she was cheating in her marriage. If I told, I would simply be called a liar. Doubt would be forced by her manipulation.

The following summer she suggested we have a weekly “girls night” to strengthen our bond, something she constantly placed blame on me for us not having. I reluctantly agreed. Much like caution I felt with my older brother, I was wary of my mother’s intentions. The first night, she drove us miles into the city only to leave me at a table in a TGIFriday’s off the side of a freeway by myself. Jut after ordering our meals, she told me she saw a friend on the other side of the restaurant and wanted to say hi. It was not however, a quick hello. I ate my dinner alone. Initially, I figured it was chance, and she just got to chatting as one might do, she didn’t intend to leave me there by myself all night, so I gave it another chance the following week. By the third time it happened in as many weeks, I understood that she was using “girl’s night” with me, her daughter, to cheat on my dad.

I guess it was the fourth week that I refused to go out for girls night. She frustratingly made some sort of angry comment to my dad that was, essentially, “See what I put up with from her!” It was intended to imply that I was not interested in a relationship with her. My dad turned to me, and, with encouragement in his voice, he said, “Your mom wants to spend time with you, Sarah.” I had to look my dad in the face and tell him that I sat at a table alone on girls night so that she could visit with her “friend.” I knew what I was telling him and it hurt. What I didn’t tell him was that, the last time we’d gone out, I actually got up and walked the entirely of the large restaurant and couldn’t find her in the building. She was either hiding from me or she was simply not in the building. I was thirteen.

My dad’s countenance changed. He understood me without pressing me to go into further detail, and for that I was thankful. He dismissed me to my room. A fight ensued. There was no “girls night” that night or ever again. I’m so grateful that my dad never saw the liar she proclaimed me to be.

—————————————————-

There are two instances of being called a liar that stand out to me before I even started school. One was when my younger brother and I were going to start a preschool, and my mom had just bought us our first lunchboxes with a thermos. It was exciting for us, and as soon as we got home we wanted to play with them and ran to the bathroom to fill the thermoses. My mom called out not to drink from them since she needed to wash them first. So we filled them with water and played without drinking from them. When she came in to see what we were doing in the bathroom the thermoses had water in them so she accused us of disobeying her. I tried explaining that we did not drink, just play. I got in trouble as the older sibling not only for setting a bad example, but for lying. I was spanked repeatedly until I confessed to drinking from the thermos, something I had not done. A part of my spirit was broken that night. Another time, I was playing with the things on the bathroom sink: soaps and bottles and things. I remember I was pretending to do “science” but, since I had previously gotten in trouble for pouring out my mom’s nail polish remover, this time I only opened the bottle and pretended to pour then closed it again. My mom came in and smelled the nail polish remover and I got in trouble, even though I told her exactly what I’d done. She went as far as telling me the wash rag sitting on the counter smelled of the remover, which was impossible. Both of these instances could be dismissed as parenting mistakes had she not continued calling me liar throughout my childhood. I realized then that my word did not matter if she convinced herself I’d done something. I was five.

————————————————-

Over the years it became commonplace. I would say something and my mom would ignore what I said, tell me she didn’t believe me, or worse, tell others that what I said wasn’t true. As I got older I drew inward. My younger brother was my closest confidant in the home and we palled around like best friends from the time he was born. As we got older I had to rely on him to convey what had happened in any instance because I was not to be believed. If there was an event we wanted to attend, I would have him ask because I knew I would be rejected outright. I felt burdened with a weight I couldn’t convey to others, one where I was distrusted for little or no reason. As an adult I understand. It was my scapegoat origin story.

By the summer before my fifteenth birthday, I’d taken fully taken on the role of punching bag – at times physically and other times emotionally – when my mother felt terrible about herself, a role my older brother had previously filled. I still feel today like I did then, that she has a deep hatred for herself, and that my older brother reminded her of herself in that they were both oldest children suffering from the expectations an oldest child endures. In kind, that reflection of herself shifted to me once he was gone, and, being the only daughter, she saw me make some of the mistakes she’d made as a teen girl and instead of reacting in an understanding manner and guiding me through, she took out her self-hatred on me. She would hold me hostage for hours going on and on about the abuses she endured at the hands of my grandfather, about the man she had had an affair with early in her and my dad’s marriage, about the problems she had with her siblings, being told the mother who raised her wasn’t her mother at fifteen years old and of meeting her biological mother for the first time in her mid twenties. I’d become her therapist at fourteen years old. It was during one of these sessions that she casually dropped a bomb on me: “You know your older brother is not your dad’s biologically…” I did not know. I hated her for telling me in such a flippant manner, but any push back could turn into a beating. I learned my lesson, and I stayed silent.

Summers were the worst. I seemed to stay grounded. I got in trouble for things my friends did. I was literally beaten so hard it hurt to sit down when my mom found out I knew people who smoked pot. I was grounded for weeks, and eventually the entire summer, after an end-of-school-year party my brother and I had been allowed to have in our back yard all because a cheap styrofoam airplane that we’d been flying broke accidentally and was then shredded by our guests. Somehow that was my fault – I never understood the reasoning. She claimed our guests’ behavior was proof that I befriended bad people, even though these were friends my brother and I had made together in our first year of public school.

The Christmas I was fifteen, I got a radio/boombox with detachable speakers. I was ecstatic. My brother got a Nintendo/ that year, too, and our parents moved an old TV in his room to play. We felt so grown up! By January I was grounded yet again. It had become so commonplace it was my norm. Trapped in the house to do my mother’s bidding, to be verbally berated, and occasionally hit. This was my lot. The radio that I was so excited about was removed from my room and placed on the dining room table where we never ate. I was never allowed to have it in my room again.

Around the time I was sixteen I got a driver’s license and eventually a job, and life became a little easier. Things at home were not good, but some pressure had been relieved. The rules about church and secular music had been lifted, even if we still got in trouble for listening to “bad” music, i.e. metal and alternative styles my younger brother and I so enjoyed. Even when I was grounded, I was sent on errands that got me away from the house. I worked a few nights a week and had a little spending money. I got to go to Chicago with my best friend to visit her mom for two weeks at the end of summer. When I returned from Chicago, it was about a month before my 17th birthday and the start of my junior year of high school. I briefly dated a biracial boy who was two years older than me, and, while there had been a whole-ass discussion about race mixing between black and whites being wrong, when his mom called my mom in the upcoming days after I’d told him what happened, I was once again called a liar and my mom swore to his mother that the issue was our age difference and the fact that he was already graduated from high school. He was closer in age to me than the 17 year old I dated at 14, and that 17 year old was a high school drop out. So was the 18 year old I dated at 15. Anyways we couldn’t see each other and broke up. Once again I was a liar. I was seventeen.

My parents were also no longer sleeping in the same bed, my dad was on the couch each night. In November, just after turning seventeen, I’d been home sick with a stomach bug for 2-3 days. On Thursday I’d returned to school, and was collecting makeup assignments from my teachers. My Spanish I teacher told me I could just get the answers for that weeks homework from my brother, who was also taking Spanish I from her, and study so that I wouldn’t have to make up the weekly quiz on Friday that counted as our grade for the week. That evening I asked my brother for his homework in full earshot of my parents, telling him what the teacher had said. My mom began yelling at me and accused me of cheating and trying to involve my brother in deviant behavior despite my explanation. My brother came to my defense saying that this is how our teacher operates. With distain in her voice she told him that he shouldn’t defend my actions and to go to his room. I asked her to call the teacher to verify, there was a teacher directory with their contact information by the phone in the living room, but she acted as if the suggestion was ridiculous. My dad stepped out of the kitchen where he’d be puttering and listening to all of this and told my mom, “I believe Sarah!” He then dismissed me to my room and took on the fight himself. Once in my room, I called my best friend and told her I was packing to leave. I was done. I had fantasized about running away since I was eleven years old and how I would feel being free of her, and if I did so now no one could make me go home again. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes my brother had, I just wanted to be free from the oppression I had lived under for so long. She told me to hang tight then went and spoke to her parents. When she called me back, she said they would allow me to stay with them.

When I opened my bedroom door again, things were eerily quiet in the house. My dad was sitting on the couch and my mom had gone to her room. I told my dad that I’d talked with my best friend and that I would be staying with her until I figured out next steps. My dad and I talked and cried and he told me that he was planning to leave, too. He finally told me that he had been trying to stick around for us kids, but seeing that she’d run two of us off already, he understood that it wasn’t working out like he’d hoped. He said a coworker had an apartment available for him to rent, and that I could live with him once he got things in order and asked me to give him a few weeks. Then he asked me to do one thing: Go tell my mom I was leaving. It was in this moment I realized something. My dad had been abused, too.

When I knocked and entered her bedroom she was lying in bed, angry. I told her that I was leaving to stay with my best friend indefinitely. She just laid there, frozen in her anger, and blamed my dad who stood behind me. She didn’t speak to me directly. My best friend came to pick me up, we loaded my bags into her car, and I left. A few weeks later my dad had completed the paperwork for the apartment and we moved in. In my room was the radio I’d been given for Christmas two years prior.

My mother claims to this day that I hate her and that I’m unforgiving when the truth is trust was not built from the start, and that was her responsibility as the parent. My brain is wired by the events that happened in my childhood, and while I can do my best to move forward, some of that is just permanent. For this reason, our problems continued into adulthood. She continued to show me that she was untrustworthy and I struggled with my own worth. I am her doppleganger in physical appearance, and that comes with a lot of assumptions about who I am as a person. I spent decades as an adult just lost and wanting to be better and do better. After my second divorce in 2018, it was time to figure things out. It was time to rebuild. I cut ties with my mother permanently, realizing that that relationship was never going to be made whole. I focused on my relationship with my now young adult child and on healing parts of me that were left bleeding for so long. It’s been eight years. I’d love to say I’m healed, but the truth is I may never be fully healed. But every day I show up for myself. Every day I want to be a positive example and an encourager for my child. My son and my inner child need me.

I am happy and full of truth.