I Have Always Been Alone.
This is all going to sound very tragic. And it really is. And I'm writing this more as I would speak it because it helps me feel more genuine. Anyway, it's tragic, but I have never really layed it all out there, and I feel like maybe it's what I need to do to move on. I need to close some doors.
I am not going to get all pretty and poetic, because that's not how life is. I have always sworn that my life would make an excellent story to be shared, maybe it would touch someone somewhere, maybe it would validate some of the suffering. Maybe it will. There is happiness in it, but then, there's happiness to be had everywhere if you allow it to be had.
I was unwanted from the day I was born. My birth destroyed my parents marriage, my temperament as an infant destroyed my mother's already fragile mental stability. I have always been wrong. First, the wrong gender. Then, the wrong size, wrong hair color, wrong personality, wrong intelligence, wrong, just wrong. My mother honestly didn't even try to hide her feelings for me. Beside the beatings there were the words. The words that everyone knows hurt more than anything.
"Shut up, you talk too much!" "You fat, disgusting little girl..." "You're pathetic." "Nobody wants to be your friend, because you're annoying." "You are so stupid." "Stop being so weird and maybe the teasing will end." "I hate you." "I wish you had never been born."
At the age of 3 years, my mother left me locked in an apartment for three days. I was naked and unfed when the police found me and put me in foster care, eventually I was sent to my grandmother and back to my mother. This is my earliest childhood memory... completely naked, hungry and scared.
As an adult, it has become apparent to me what my mother experienced emotionally. The depths of despair that one faces in mental illness couldn't possibly be understood by an outsider.
The cycle of abuse continued my entire childhood; abuse, neglect, foster care, grandma and back to mom.
I never met my father. I dreamt of him... that he was someone amazing who would rescue me one day. That he would love me and that he would find me funny and pretty and smart. As the years went on, I realized that day would never come, and the stories I had made up for my friends to explain his absence were only stories.
Then, my brother and my sister came, and they were lovely and perfect. I suddenly had a purpose, and that purpose was to care for them. For many, many years I was happy for this purpose. It made me feel like a real human being to be needed by someone. She would disappear for days, weeks, and I was their mother. I was it. It was terrifying and intoxicating.
I often say that I raised myself, because I did. I was sometimes supervised and many more times not. It's the scenerio every kid dreams of and never realizes it's a complete nightmare. I had no money or food or clothes. I stole what I needed and often went unnoticed. I spent a large part of my childhood homeless, truent and wandering aimlessly, illiterate. They say these things don't happen in America. The people who say these things don't know what's happening in America.
I drove a car for the first time at the age of 9 years... to go find my mother. This became a routine for the next several years before the inevitible end to her years of drug addiction and mental instability and unwillingness to change.
I would often drag my drunk and unconcious mother to a safe place where she could sober up. Sometimes, when we were staying with the newest boyfriend, that would be an actual bedroom. I never thought much of it, it was neccessary to keep her safe, so I did it. It wasn't easy work, as she was extremely overweight, and I was a child, but I did it. Because the truth is, you can't even begin to imagine the depths of a childs love for their mother. No matter how completely and utterly horrible she has been to the child, the child knows nothing more than pure love for her face and her name and her smell. She is almost holy to them, she is forgivven instantly.
Regardless, there comes a point when even the most well adjusted family argues. Most families can forgive and move forward. Mine was no such thing.
She came home drunk and high and God only knows what. I was 12 yo, the adult of the house and irrate. "Where were you? Why do you always do this?"
"I don't have to answer to you, you're not my mother. Go away, you stupid little brat."
"Shut up. I'm sick of this. It's always the same with you."
On and on it went. It escalated, as preteen fights do. This was a different kind of fight though. I had no idea it would be the last.
"Well, I should just kill myself. That would make you happy, wouldn't it?" She sobbed.
"You know what? You say this over and over and you know what? If you want to be dead so much, why don't you just do it? Everything would be better if you just did it anyway." I instantly regretted these words. I would regret these words for the rest of my life.
"My baby hates me, my baby, my baby..." I left her in the darkness to ponder my anger, to really understand how much she had hurt me, to punish her for the years of loneliness she had put upon me, for my stolen youth.
I heard her opening the pill bottles and did nothing. The thought occured, maybe I should apologise. No, not this time, I thought, no. She doesn't deserve that from me. I heard a loud noise late in the night and went back to sleep.
The next morning I decided to go to her, hold her and tell her I loved her. To tell her I forgave her and to beg her to forgive me. I found her on the floor, and she was too heavy for me to lift alone, so I called my brother.
"Drunk again?" "Yep." "Ok, well, let's get her up." Laughter, sarcasm "Oh, Mom."
She was cold, her eyes flooded in purple. She had done it. She had really done it.
I will forever remember her eyes. Empty, dark. I really don't want to go too much into that.
The case worker later told me that I should be the one to tell my siblings. They thought she was in the hospital. They thought she was coming home. They knew it was my fault, they were mad, but they also thought she was coming home. I wept, I plead, I couldn't tell them. In the end, I did.
They haven't really talked to me since that day 15 years ago.
I lost everyone I loved that day. At the age of twelve, I was alone in a sense that nobody should ever feel. I have never lost that feeling.
After three months in foster care, my father appeared. He was my brothers and my father, and he was going to take us home with him. We moved away from our home town, across the country, away from our sister forever.
I'll give you the short version. He was sexually abusive to me for three years, I became an emancipated minor at age sixteen and worked my way through highschool. He was nothing I ever dreamt, he was in fact very much the opposite.
I found music, it saved me. Kept my feet shuffling when I longed to fall to the ground. Lifted my heart, helped me see God in a way that can't be taught.
There is an indescribably long period of sadness, attempted suicide, hospitalizations, medications and punctuated loneliness at this point called 'college'.
Many years, a decade long emotionally abusive marriage and two babies later, I feel as though I am finally finding my song.
And singing it loudly.
It has been a long road, sometimes a very difficult one to traverse with the darkness those years filled me with.
This is a story with no end, because love never ends. Sometimes the weight of these years feels like it is crushing me. Sometimes I feel invincible for the strength that I have been granted. Regardless of how I may sometimes feel, there is but one truth: Love overcomes all.
If you have read this in it's entirety, I thank you, and I hope it can mean something to you. I hope that whoever you are, wherever you are you know that you are unconditionally loved by someone who understands true loneliness. I have spent years hiding in corners and stairwells of schools and behind fences, and let me tell you, love always finds me in the darkest places. Completely impossible and beautiful things happen when you least expect them. People find you, you find the place to be.
That is how I am here to tell you that I don't know you, but I love you.
And I always will.
