I don’t believe in destiny. Not one that’s preordained in anyway. That said, there sure is enough things—things that I consider little but maybe when held together add up more than I give them credit for—that do seem to suggest the title of this post.
I am statistically an anomaly. I’m 1/5 of my mother’s kids, and only me and my youngest brother are still alive. I no longer live in poverty. I have a house, with a finished basement, a couple of cars (one even has an infotainment system). Things I thought I’d never see.
I grew up getting yelled at a lot. Never beaten or abused. But yelled at. We moved a lot. We lived in other people’s houses often. At one point in my childhood I could count the houses we lived in, but I don’t know if I still could. Typically we’d move every 3-6 months. The longest span was three years in one home. Money was typically the issue. Suddenly, somehow, we couldn’t afford to pay the rent anymore, and we would be off. To live with Pa (my sort of grandfather), before moving again to some place a couple months before not being able to afford it anymore.
My dad usually didn’t have a job. He just spent my mother’s disability checks on pot or guitars, or whatever else. He often wasn’t there. As in not in the state. He’d be in Las Vegas working with my uncle at a brass factory that provided railings for the casinos. He’d get laid off and would “come home” after a few months.
My mom during certain years was angry about this. Angry he was gone. Angry that she was given the duty by my father to stay behind with us to go to Haysville schools. She yelled at me about this sometimes. When my dad returned he spent a lot of his time yelling at my mom about being stupid, and the source of many (if not all) of his problems.
At school I worried about being outed as being poor. I was really ashamed of it. I knew other people’s families didn’t live in their mother’s ex-husband’s living rooms. I knew their dad’s weren’t absent for 2/3 of the year, and that their mother’s didn’t blame them for this fact. I knew their parents bought them clothes from a store, instead of from Goodwill. Kids are smart.
The ripples of this stuff, of this chaotic world I lived in, would color the rest of my life. Like a shadow that I couldn’t get away from. There would be replacement families along the way. Mental breakdowns. Tragic deaths (my childhood best friends’ dad drowned underneath me in the Arkansas River), and eventually, somehow, normalcy. It was simultaneously a lot easier and a lot harder than I ever thought it would be.
For a long time I chose to run from all of this. I never pretended that it didn’t happen, I just pretended that it didn’t matter. That my life was the future, and the past was just this thing that happened, and was now done. I think this started when I was around 19 or 20, and some friends were swapping stories of their childhood and I gave one of mine and there was just silence. At that moment I realized, “Oh…my childhood makes people feel weird. I need to never talk about it.” Which was basically my motto for the next decade and a half.
I am failing to mention the bizarreness. It’s coming off like it was mostly just sad, and yeah, I suppose in retrospect it was, but a lot of it was also really weird. Just crazy stuff. Bathing in trashcans because there’s no running water inside (they were new trashcans), your grandfather being your mom’s ex-husband, poop seeping out of the drains whenever it rained (because the septic tank would fill with the rain), and other weird shit like that. My brother and I would just laugh our asses off about it (during our teen years). Just how crazy and ridiculous it all was. My parents, also had incredibly bad reasoning skills which often made them come off goofy and unserious. They were always stuck in a loop. Well, more my dad was, and my mom’s only concern ever was to be sure that he never wanted to divorce her. But my dad was always scheming on how he was going to defeat poverty. Some crazy new plan every other month. And, eventually these crazy plans would mean we’d have to move to go realize it. Shit. I guess it mostly is sad, lol. But trust me, my brother and I laughed a lot. That is a weird part, that overall, I think fondly of my childhood. I liked being a kid. I always had friends (wherever we were) and I was always happy, despite whatever crazy stuff was happening at home. Did I sometimes cry when my parents told me (yet again) we would be moving? Yes, I did. Very hard, I’d bury my face into pillows. Did I cry when my mother told me it was my fault she couldn’t be with my dad? Yeah. That one hurt. I was old enough when she said it so bluntly to know it wasn’t true, but it still hurts when your mom accuses you of ruining her marriage by existing.
There was a point where I was angry. As an adult. I wanted my parents to know what they did was wrong, and to get some kind of an apology. But I couldn’t have that. My mom would just cry. She didn’t remember any of it. Not the yelling. Not the mean things she’d said. It was like it was all blank for her. Often, my mom (now) seems like a child when you speak to her. It just ends up making me deeply sad when I speak to her, and there is no resolution. Only sadness. My dad I’ve spoken to as little as possible since I learned about some of the more sinister things he’s done and/or threatened to do. He’s not a good person, and I can’t pretend that he is and try to hold any kind of conversation with him.
Again, in my late teens I was very angry. And it would come up again here or there I suppose in my 20s. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair my parents had denied me a loving home. That I was taught nothing about the world of adults. About how money works. How anything works. But anger can only last so long. It burns out, and you feel hollow. When the other party doesn’t even remember what happened, you don’t even know what you’re mad at anymore. You’re mad at a ghost.
Then, came a sort of distant sadness. A sadness for what wasn’t. Because as you age, and you start to have a family, and your friends all have families, you see how useful, and how nice it must be to have an original family to incorporate your new family into. Grandparents. Aunts. Uncles. I have none of that to give my children. For a long time that really hurt. I felt that I wasn’t providing for them in that respect. But, I’ve been very fortunate to have great in-laws, and great friends. And, I’ve kept that glass half full attitude from my childhood. It’s never left me.
Lately, as I’m edging closer and closer to my life’s likely half point, I have been thinking more about the ways my experiences have shaped me, and my ongoing behaviors. For good and for bad. And, it’s strange. It’s a new feeling I’ve had about the memories of my life. I think it might be some kind of sense of pride. But not a sense of pride for having survived it, but maybe simply a sense of pride for no longer being ashamed of it. I think that’s it.