When I was in middle school my teachers swore I was going to grow up to be a lawyer. Not because I love to argue or hear myself talk, but because if I see a wrong committed I cannot let it go until it’s fixed.
Growing up in my family makes this difficult. For so many reasons I can’t begin to relate them all, I do not fit in to my family in any way. Not one. I suppose I look like them, but that’s about it. Because of this, my siblings were all horribly mean to me. And my parents are awful people, but since my goals for my own personal satisfaction happened to make them look good, I was the favorite child and they rubbed that in the noses of the other kids. When I had a gang of disgruntled kids against me, how was I supposed to skate away unharmed?
I just talked to my youngest sister the other day for the first time in over a year. Until extremely recently she’d been living with my mom who I don’t talk to, so that unfortunately meant I couldn’t talk to her either. During the course of our conversation she told me that I was the favorite and that made it suck for everyone else, and I didn’t deny it. But I hoped that she would agree I didn’t do anything to encourage it. That their choosing me to fawn over in their demented way brought it’s own curses and that I wouldn’t have wished it on anyone seeing how it’s destroyed my relationships with all my siblings. She didn’t. She called me a tattletale.
I left home when I was 16, which meant that D. was 6. 6 years old. I’m sure she has some memories from 6 years old, but when I was 16 I was the oldest at home. The next oldest sister hadn’t lived at home since I was 13, which meant D was 3. How would a three year old look at her older sister, go “Dang, that girl is a tattletale!” and then remember it 13 years later? She wouldn’t.
This is a pattern with D. Over the years she’s called me up and read me letters written to me, but never sent, by my mom. She’s accused me of things she wasn’t even alive for, distorted facts she was too young to know about. Part of it she seeks out because she’s 8 years younger than the next youngest kid and feels left out of everything, and part of it is because my family members are vicious gossips with no desire for accuracy, just sensationalism.
The fact that I’m so frequently and blatantly misrepresented by my family drives me bonkers. That they can’t see how they’re causing their own problems and “enabling” (to use a hoary word) my mom while they preach self-righteously about how it would be good for my soul to talk to mom again…well, it makes me lose my mind.
My “twin” sister Reagan visited me a few weeks ago and I’m still recovering. After literally begging her for years, she finally visits me and left her mind behind. She told me that I’m not honest and that I can’t be trusted with her version of events. And then when I expressed shock and hurt at that she yelled at me that I backed her into a corner and I wasn’t looking at my fault in the argument. Oh there was so much more that by now is so tiresome to relate, but the point is: my family doesn’t know me at all.
And the truth of me that I try to show them doesn’t fit with the devil they want me to be, so they ignore it completely.