Slow Dance

It probably hurts my father to know that I refuse to call him anything but his given name, Gary, but he usually accepts it. There are days when I wonder how and why my life has turned out the way it has. Even more there are days that find me wondering why my life brought itself about in the way that it did. More often than not though, I find myself just trying to handle the facts. My family may not be the epitome of "normal" or even "conventional" but most days I know that they care about me. I do still have some trouble dealing with certain parts of the past, but in time I will learn to look beyond it all. These are the facts, as irrefutable as law, and I accept them.

 

I suppose it all started eight years ago. My younger brother, Sean, and I had decided that it would be a good idea to start living with Gary. The lure of gifts and attention that he showered on us were overpowering compared to the second fiddle card we were used to playing with our mother. It was not that our mother did not love us, it was the fact that she had an even younger child, Justin, who was just four years old at the time. In the shock of realizing that we were no longer as important and we were not her entire world anymore, Sean and I struggled to regain some of what we had lost. Gary swooped in bearing gifts, attention, and the promise that he would not ignore us the way our mother had started to. Being so young, we followed willingly; the sheep into the lion's den.

The first few months were not entirely bad. There were, of course, many changes that we had to come to terms with. Our mother hardly ever saw the two of us anymore. This was a substantial change from what we were used to; there was a difference between not being her biggest or most important priority and only seeing her once every two weeks. Eventually though, her visits stopped completely and we did not see her for several years. I became the mothering figure and I took up the challenge of cooking meals, cleaning, and doing laundry. I watched as my childhood as I had previously known it went from one of shy leisure to that of a full-time, in home job without benefits or pay. Sean was taken off of his ADHD medicine and his rapid decline in mood and attention were surprising if not completely expected. There was almost no sign of the life we had grown so accustomed to, what else could change?

 

That was probably the last year I was ever actually a child. The law states that people under the age of eighteen are minors, and they are therefore adolescents or children, but I have yet to meet a ten year old that has as many responsibilities as I had at that age. I started to become very introverted and my knowledge of how to play around or have fun with people my own age slowly began to fade. There was not enough time in the day for me to take care of an entire house, make sure my younger brother was fed and did his homework before he took a shower and went to bed, and then do my own homework and shower before I finally crawled into my own bed. Gary was out driving his truck a lot in the beginning, it was just Sean and me taking care of everything we had normally depended on an adult to do. Over time though, Gary began working less and less, his time was spent more in the house than not. My duties never changed, but when he was in the house everything became very tense. When dinner was not done at a specific time or when house work and clothes were pushed aside for homework or some other responsibility, I was punished, and punished hard. Sean was in the same boat that I was quickly sinking in, but I tried to keep his head above the surface as best as I could.

 

I have often pondered what it is that makes a person strike their own child, and though I know a million and one excuses for that behavior, it is still as much of a mystery to me now as it has been over the last few years. Studies suggest that stress or previous exposure to abuse greatly increase the chances that someone will harm a person dependent on them, along with anger problems or mental illness. Gary did have a problem with his temper, but how had he concealed that for so long? How could he have hidden such a monster from his youngest children and then convinced them to live with him when he knew what he was capable of? I'm not sure I will ever figure out an answer to these questions without bringing up the past with Gary and having him actually talk to me about it, and that is something I will never do.

 

Four years after Sean and I moved in with Gary, we found ourselves the pawns in a very evil game of chess. Gary was fighting to retain custody of the two of us, and our long lost mother was again playing a role in the horror picture that was our lives. She had recently married a man named Kim and he was pushing her to win custody of Sean and me. He found it apalling that she would let us live the way we were, and he wanted to see us in a safer environment. After Kim had picked up the script, our mother made more appearances and she slowly began trying to warm up to us again. It was hard to understand what she had done and the choices she had made, and even harder to act like the child she still thought of me as. During her four year absence, her oldest child, her little girl, had grown up considerably, and her middle child, Sean, was almost unrecognizable. I may have tried as hard as I could have, but what ten year old has the power to keep someone so impressionable from turning out like their father? The resemblences between Gary and Sean landed both of us in counseling so that we could talk about how we were feeling and what we wanted out of the situation.

 

Those counseling sessions were a joke for me. I never wanted to talk to the counselors and when I did, it was mainly to achieve one goal; I wanted them to leave me alone. In retrospect, I may have been my own downfall when I made that decision, but it was not in my nature to talk to others about the way that I was feeling. The previous four years had taught me not to talk to anyone, least of all about the feelings I had about certain matters and the changes I would like to see in life. Sean, on the other hand, showed enough of himself to be diagnosed with a mental illness called bipolar disorder, and then he shut down in his own way. Whereas I was eventually granted freedom and a reprieve from counseling sessions, deemed healthy and wise beyond my years, Sean was never supposed to stop. Funds ran low though and without any progress being made, the decision to pull the plug on his counseling was made and we both went back to holding onto what we were feeling.

This was roughly around the time that I found an english teacher who was very passionate about writing and saw some sort of spark in the papers she required of my class. There was never an explanation as to what exactly caught her attention, but within weeks I found myself on a writing team, expressing myself in a manner that let me vent and yet still hold my secrets close to my heart like armor. As my counseling sessions wound down and the court battles raged, writing became my escape. I fought with pen and paper, waging my own little battles, and then stashed away my victories for later inspection. To this day, I still have some of the poems I wrote when I first started writing and though they are not my best, they remind me of a time when I thought life would never be any better. They tell a story that I will never truly forget in a manner that would be hard for me to reproduce without having the outline they provide.

 

Unfortunately my brother did not find solace in writing as I had, and the idea of talking to someone appealed to him about as much as a car accident appeals to the parent of a new driver. Sean instead turned towards bottling his emotions, mainly his anger, until they exploded from his chest and brought down everyone around him. His way of handling things quickly became a large problem that he has yet to fully correct.

 

In April of 2003 my mother and her new husband were granted custody of the two long lost pawns; check mate, if you will. Again, Sean and I were subjected to many changes that left our heads spinning and our hearts unsure of whether to break and shatter or burst and fill with joy. Kim was unsure of how to handle two teenagers, and even more unsure of how to handle two teenagers who had seen their own private hell in paramount for so long. His attempts were heartfelt though and I am still grateful for his presence in our lives. Our mother was almost a completely different story though. Somehow she had come to the conclusion that by pretending the previous four years had not happened, she could make us forget what we had come to learn and expect. Shouts still made us cringe though, and I still tried to be the mother in the equation. I probably could not tell anyone who asked how many times I was scolded for trying to help raise Justin. It did not matter how many times I tried to explain that I was unsure of how else to act, I was automatically in the wrong. In the end, Sean could not take it and he left to live with Gary again. This was a leap of faith I, myself, could not make and I stayed with our mother, Kim, and Justin.

 

For the first time in all of our lives, Sean and I were seperated. It was not as bad as I had thought it would be, but it was still difficult to wrap my mind around. There was not as much arguing and fighting, but a piece of my family was missing and it hurt to know that he had left me alone to handle things on my own. Again my mother quit talking to Sean and I feel a little ashamed to admit that I was happy about it. I remembered how bad it had felt to be on the receiving end of her silent treatment but in some way I felt that he deserved it. We had worked so hard to move away from Gary, towards a better life, and he had taken four long steps backwards in time.

 

The following four years proved very trying on my patience. I had come to believe that I had as much patience as anyone could expect, if not more, from someone my age, but life was about to prove otherwise. Through almost constant arguments with my mother and near constant clashes with Kim or Justin, my patience was worn thin. School became my escape then and I did whatever I could to stay as long as I could without having to be too extroverted. My self confidence was, and still is, very low and I found it hard to get involved in too many things during that time. Writing once again came to my aid though. Poems and short stories began littering my notebooks and the folders in my room. Eventually even that was not enough and I started writing on my walls. Lyrics, quotes, whatever I could find, they went wherever they seemed to fit and my patience slowly began to form again.

 

It was not meant to be however, and just four years after my mother and Kim had fought so hard to gain custody of Sean and me, they said goodbye to me as well. My act of leaving was not, as Sean's had been, voluntary though. There was a lot that went into my parents' decision, and I can only accept it with more grace than they were expecting, and hope that this time around, Gary continues to hold his temper in line.

 

In a sense, my life has come around full circle, twice! I cannot say where I'll be in another four years but I can hope for the best and continue to learn from the past. Over the last eight years I have learned a great deal of patience and understanding. The counselors that I had so abhorred actually helped to show me the career I'm currently on my way towards, and Gary has shown me how not to act around young children who trust me. His temper has subsided for the most part, but it is now in my power to leave whenever I feel I need a break. Sean and I are not as close as we once were, and I accept that we most likely never will be, but we do share a bond that not one single person we know can break or understand. We are siblings who have endured more than our fair share of malice, but we did it together and we came out in one relatively whole piece. Our mother may have made some mistakes in our eyes but we are slowly beginning to realize why she made her decisions the way she did. Somehow, perhaps it is in the knowledge only a mother carries, our mother knew that it would have been a very bad idea to refuse to let us leave, regardless of what she knew may happen. Since moving back in with her, and even after leaving again, she and I have discussed the choices she made, and the choices I made in turn. We may never have the close-knit mother daughter relationship that she wants, but she understands that as long as she does not try to push me, eventually we will come to an agreement that the two of us can both live with. I, too, understand that although I was a surrogate mother in a way, it is no longer my job. That doesn't mean I have completely grown out of it though, some habits die hard!