Coming Out as Donor Conceived

I've been considering something for awhile.  I've been considering coming out on Facebook as donor conceived.  It isn't a secret among my nearest and dearest, and I don't keep it a secret at all anymore really, but it's something most people don't know about me.  Almost none of my family or my high school friends know I'm donor conceived, and those two groups make up a significant portion of my social media "friends."

The reason I'm considering coming out is that I want to push people from my hometown to take DNA tests and I was hoping this might be attention grabbing enough to... get their attention.  I was conceived locally with fresh sperm from a local donor.  I already accidentally found a paternal second cousin who is a friend of a friend.  Any DC half-siblings I might have were (I am 95% certain) conceived at the same hospital as me, and I'm not from a big city.  They were also (again, I'm 95% certain) conceived around the same time as me.  We might have even gone to school together.

I will never know if I've found all my DC half-siblings.  There is no way for me to know for sure.  But I feel pretty certain that there is at least one out there somewhere, and odds are good that s/he and I know some of the same people.

I was thinking of doing one of those videos where the person holds up poster boards of text like the bad friend does to Keira Knightley on Love Actually.  Those seem popular for getting people's attention.  Here is what I'm thinking of writing on them:

"Hi, I'm Christina.  

You might know me from Smalltown High School.  

What you might NOT know is

We might be related.

I was conceived with sperm from an anonymous donor.

The doctor said not to tell anyone, including me.  

An estimated 90% of people don't know they are donor conceived.

DNA testing through AncestryDNA or 23andMe can tell you if you're one of them.

It will also tell you if you're my sibling.

I don't know how many half-siblings I might have.

But I hope to meet them someday."

I'd like to hear your thoughts, both on this whole idea and on what words to use if I were to do it.  Has anyone else done something along these lines or with this goal in mind?

Spending My Childhood on Antibiotics

I complained of stomach aches a lot as a child, from as early as I can remember until I was in high school.  As much as I loved seeing my friends at school and socializing, the idea of inadvertently doing something wrong or getting in trouble terrified me.  I approached almost every school day terrified that I'd forgotten to do some piece of homework, or that something had been assigned during one of the many hours I'd spent zoned out and daydreaming without even realizing it, or that I might get scolded for something I didn't mean to do wrong.  In hindsight, my stomach aches were probably a combination of stress and my looking for any excuse to get out of school.  In most cases, my mother wouldn't let me stay home unless I could produce physical evidence that I was ill -- either a fever, which I ran only a few times in my life, or vomiting.

My mother took my temperature rectally until I was at least six.  When I asked why I couldn't use the oral thermometer like everyone else in the house, she said I would bite down on it.  I promised I wouldn't.  I don't even know what the problem would have been if I had -- it was a plastic digital thermometer, not one of the old style ones made of glass and mercury.  When I asked why we couldn't get one of the digital thermometers they stick in your ear at the doctor's office then, she told me they aren't accurate enough.  I wonder now how much of her insistence on using a rectal thermometer was as a punishment for my daring to ask to stay home.  I think it was at least a little bit punishment.

On the rare occasions that I was allowed to miss school, my mother took me to the doctor without fail.  I remember her saying something along the lines of how, if she let me miss school, I wouldn't be allowed to just stay home and lie on the couch watching TV all day like she did in my absence.  If I didn't go to school, by god, we would spend the day at the doctor's office.  She wasn't going to incentivize my sicknesses by letting me lie around at home all day.

No doctor ever found a source for my stomach aches or proposed that they might be stress related.  With few exceptions they told us instead that I had an upper respiratory infection and prescribed antibiotics.  I also had strep throat a lot, for which they injected me with penicillin and I was allowed to rest at home for 24 hours without being treated like someone who was trying to get out of something.  Getting a positive strep test was like winning a small lottery to me and always made me happy. 

Once when I was eight or so, my mother found an open packet of Sweet Tarts candies on a file cabinet in the family room.  I don't know how long it had been there -- it was a hoard house after all -- but she mistook them for antibiotics and got very upset at me for not taking them.  "Those are candy," I explained.  They weren't even mine.  Dante might have left them there, but they were from one of the communal baskets of candy my mother left scattered around the house, so it's anybody's guess.  I always took all my medicine though.  It never would have occurred to me not to take a dose of the medicine she gave me, let alone leave them scattered on top of a file cabinet.  To this day, I have never stopped taking a course of antibiotics before they ran out.

I was also about eight when I got my first vaginal yeast infection as a result of the antibiotics.  My entire vulva felt like an inflamed mosquito bite, and it itched so badly I writhed on my bed and cried.  I didn't know what was happening, but my mother did.  When she took me to the pediatrician and announced that I had an yeast infection, the nurse asked, "Oral yeast infection, I assume?"  When my mother said, "No, vaginal," the nurse raised in eyebrows in surprise.  When she left the room, I asked my mother why she had done that.  "Vaginal yeast infections are normally just from having too much sex," my mother told me.  "But yours is from all the antibiotics." 

She bought me Monistat antifungal treatment from the drug store later that day.  I didn't need the vaginal suppositories, she said, just the cream, but she insisted on applying it herself.  When I asked uncomfortably why I couldn't just do it myself, she argued that I wouldn't be able to see where to apply it.  "I don't need to be able to see it," I told her.  "I can feel where it itches."  She denied my request and rubbed in the cream with her fingers while I laid on my back on my bed hoping she would stop soon.  Not knowing how to explain the creepy, skin crawly feeling that was upsetting me, I told her, "I don't like it.  It doesn't feel good."  "It's not SUPPOSED to feel good!" she barked.  "If you liked this, there would be something wrong with you!"

A Good Memory of My Childhood Home

When I was in elementary school, when it was cool enough, back before styrofoam insulation and clear plastic covered every window of our house for years at a time, sometimes my mother would open the windows.  I can only remember it happening on a handful of occasions.

I remember riding the bus home from school once and, when it pulled up to my house, seeing that the heavy wooden front door was open wide with the screen door visible behind it.  I felt a jolt of happiness.  The windows would be open.  My mother must be in a good mood. 

My parents' house usually smelled of stale air.  My mother liked to keep the air conditioner cranked up and the house cold inside, but it still managed to feel stuffy.  Just being inside it with its unnaturally dark rooms and cavelike dankness made me feel drained.  From childhood to college, I remember having that feeling, like something in the house was sapping me of my energy.  I think my mother felt it too.  When she wasn't asleep, she often wanted to get out and go somewhere, and when we went out to dinner in my teen years, she was as loath to go home as I was.

On the rare occasions that my mother opened the windows, she also turned on the house's attic fan, which I can only vaguely remember because the last time I remember seeing it in use was when I was in elementary school.  I remember a large metal vent in the ceiling that would open when the attic fan was on, allowing me to see the fan spinning behind it, whipping up what I remember as strong winds through the hallway.  It was loud and powerful.  It felt nice to be surrounded by so much moving air. 

Sometimes when the windows were open, my mother even cleaned.  This is one of my favorite memories of my mother.  She put a Dolly Parton record on the big turntable in the family room and blasted the music through the house.  Because closed doors and narrow doorways were tricky for my dad in his wheelchair, our house had an open floor plan back before it was fashionable.  My mother hated how she had no way to close off portions of messiness to visitors, but the music carried well.  I don't remember if she mopped or dusted or what -- I remember being too young to be of use myself, maybe four or five -- but she sang along to the music, and I loved it.  She seemed happy and full of energy -- so rarely did she have any energy -- and it made me happy to be close to her with the music and the breeze playing around us.  The air smelled fresh, and cleaning products always smelled better than the heavily clove-scented air fresheners my mother used to cover up the other smells of the house for company. 

It's warm here today where I live now.  I have the windows open, and the house smells fresh.  I can hear birdsong and some of my neighbors talking outside, now that the drone of what sounded like a dozen lawn mowers and weed wackers has ceased.  None of the lights are on because the sun makes it brighter in my white-walled home than any amount of electricity could achieve when I was a kid.  I'm glad I don't live there anymore.  The good days were too rare, and they were still worse than the bad days are here.  Here I can clean and open windows whenever I want.

A Good Memory of My Mother

When I was in Girl Scouts in elementary school, my mother became a troop leader.  I had previously attended Girl Scout meetings at another girl's house where her mother was the leader, but my mother had volunteered to join as assistant leader or something of that nature, followed by a fight between the two mothers about something still unknown to me, followed by a schism of the troop.  The girls who were my friends came with us and joined our new (and admittedly better) troop, and other girls from school joined too.

There was a Girl Scout special event held in our church's basement one Saturday.  About a dozen troops from the area came.  Each troop had been assigned a table and chairs where they would each represent a different country.  We were supposed to set up a booth for our country where the other girls in attendance could do a craft or activity native to that country, or eat a food native to that country, or learn something about that country.  Most of it ended up looking about as interesting as a job fair.

My mother's troop represented Switzerland.  I didn't know what we were going to be doing that day until we arrived at the church.  My mother scrapped the traditional "booth" style everyone else used.  She set up the folding chairs side-by-side and then covered them with a large gym mat she'd brought from home (previously part of the Swamp of Sadness), creating a medium sized hump.  We would be offering people the chance to scale the famous Swiss Alp called the Matterhorn, she told us.  As each girl scrambled over the gym mat mountain and came down the other side, my mother congratulated her and presented her with a chocolate.  "Switzerland is known for its chocolates," my mother explained.  As the only booth offering both not-sitting-still and candy, ours quickly became the favorite of the day.

"Show Everyone What a Good Actress You Are"

Up until my late teens I thought I wanted to be an actress.  I was in school plays and church musicals and even the occasional summer Shakespeare program, but after enough of them, I realized I didn't like performing or even rehearsing.  I liked attention and I liked pretending to be something I was not.  If I could have skipped the plays and gone straight to being hugged and told I'd done a good job, that would have been my ideal situation, but I didn't realize that at the time.

When I was in high school and depressed and had to speak publicly or mingle with strangers or do something social I desperately didn't want to do, my mother would urge me, "Show everyone what a good actress you are."  It worked.  I didn't want to fake happiness for the sake of making my mother happy.  My mother vastly preferred complaining to strangers over feigning happiness, and it irritated me that she wanted me to be a shiny happy person while she said whatever she wanted about me right in front of me (sometimes comically flattering, sometimes cruel or mocking) and continued her reign of martyrdom.  But I didn't want to be like her either, and I'd already learned that being cheerful made me dramatically more popular, so I "showed everyone what I good actress I was." 

I felt painfully shy growing up, but behaving as though I were shy tended to get me yelled at and publicly humiliated, so I'd learned to shut down my shyness along with my depression.  They were still there, but I locked them in a room of my brain where they temporarily couldn't get out or show themselves. I knew they were there, but I temporarily couldn't feel them.  I wouldn't have been able to function the way I was expected to if I could have felt them. 

It was a sort of pleasant dissociation in which the feeling part of me went on lock-down and I wore a smiling mask set to a socially acceptable autopilot program.  I don't think I said anything particularly charming or clever on autopilot, but I knew how to smile and respond politely and ask simple questions.  Based on people's reactions, I seem to have done fine.  I don't even think my mother had a socially acceptable autopilot program.  She simply smiled and laughed a little too loudly while she complained and overshared ("How are you today, Annie?"  "Oh, fairly partly cloudy.  My hips hurts, my son's unemployed, and my daughter is a moody teenager who can't wait to spend all my money a thousand miles away at college.  Kids and dogs and husbands!  Ha ha ha ha!"). 

I remember once in high school I won a small scholarship award and my mother told me I'd have to give an acceptance speech at the scholarship luncheon like it was the Oscars or something.  I'd learned to perform songs and plays from memory without panicking years ago, regardless of the audience size, but I was horrified at the idea of having to come up with my own words.  Writing always made me freeze up, even though I always eventually got through it.  I can't remember if she told me in advance or sprang it on me in the car on the way to the function, but I panicked until I had formulated a plan for something vague and sweet and humble to say.  When we arrived I, of course, learned my mother had been lying.  None of the other scholarship winners gave speeches or even said a word beyond, "Thank you."

I asked when I got to the podium if I should give a speech and the person in charge said, "If you like," in a surprised tone of voice.  Whatever, I thought.  I've panicked and written, and I might as well say what I wrote.  I also knew I'd probably be in trouble with my mother on the car ride home if I didn't give an acceptance speech after she'd expressly told me to.  So I gave my acceptance speech.  I pretended what I was doing wasn't absurd -- that I'd been so moved by their generosity I simply had to speak -- and I beamed and thanked everyone present and pandered to the organization so effectively that they gave me the scholarship again the next year when I didn't even apply for it.  I'm proud of that.  I was an average actress in theater, but I'm pretty good in real life.  I know how to behave anyway.  My mother should have thought about that before she started slandering me to her few friends and family in the years that followed.  She doesn't know how to behave.  It was yet another valuable lesson she taught me despite never learning it herself. 

The Time My Dad Started Recording Over Videotapes of Me

My family's video camera from the '70s broke before I was born.  We never got another one, despite Dante's and my pleas for one throughout the '80s and '90s, so the only videos that existed of me before adulthood were from public performances where copies were sold en masse.

I was in annual church musicals and some school plays.  I started taking private voice lessons in sixth grade.  I remember when my parents made that decision.  I had just sung my first solo in a church musical at age eleven (the musical was "My Way or Yahweh" and I played a slave or possibly a very unimportant priest of the god Ba'al), and my parents apparently felt I had done a surprisingly adequate job.  I remember sitting in the back seat of my dad's van while they sat in the front discussing whether I should take private singing lessons in an effort to pursue this talent.  They decided I should.  I remember feeling excited.

The first time those lessons really paid off was an eighth grade talent show.  I had two years of lessons under my belt and had finally worked out the kinks of my voice that made me sing too sharp or sound worse than someone without training at all.  I sang "On My Own" from Les Miserables, and it was the first recording of a performance I recall listening to afterward and thinking I actually sounded good.

I was in high school when my dad came to my room with the VHS from my eighth grade talent show and asked if I minded if he taped over it.  I don't recall what he wanted it for -- a bad '80s movie or a rerun of MacGyver based on what I know of his taste.  We had a hoard of recordable VHS cassettes -- multiple cabinets of them -- and even now my dad has multiple hard drives filled with terabytes of old movies and entire series he has recorded from TV and never gotten around to watching.  I guess I either asked why that particular tape or paused too long because my dad prompted, "I mean, it's not like you're going to watch it again, are you?" 

I said, "I guess not," and he was one VHS cassette of old reruns richer.  I don't know if my dad taped over all the old videos of my performances, but I recall seeing others that had been relabeled in his handwriting before I moved out for college.  I've considered asking my high school classmates on Facebook if they have any old videos of performances I was in, but for now it seems awfully self-indulgent and pointless to collect old videos of myself mostly singing when I'm not sure I'll ever want to watch them.  Much like old family photos, they were simply something I wanted to be able to look back on and show to my daughter when she is older.  For now though there are simply no videos of me before adulthood.

Satirical Rhyming Verse

One of the ways I've processed my anger since childhood is through satirical rhyming verse.  This is the sort of passive-aggressive, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog coping mechanism I learned growing up with my family.  Where sharing your feelings would get you in trouble for inadvertently offending a parent or for "being too sensitive," mocking whoever upset me didn't seem to have a downside back then.  Not even my parents wanted to lash out just to be accused of "not being able to take a joke."

I remember turning in a poem in elementary school about going out to dinner with my family.  Each stanza featured a different dish my mother sent back for its unexpected imperfections.  As I recall, she was more regal in my version, but also less embarrassing.  I drew a picture of her cheeseburger and chocolate malt "with dots in it," as she'd complained repeatedly to the waiter, to accompany the poem.  I got an A on the assignment, as per usual, and it even hung on display for my school's poetry month, to my mother's relatively quiet embarrassment.

In high school I penned a series of mocking poems about a character named Fattie.  Sometimes Fattie was my mother; sometimes she was a classmate.  They were vague enough in terms of detail that the people I wrote them about could never seem to identify themselves.  I encouraged them to read the poems and then, when they laughed at my depictions of them, I fed off their reactions in a Palpatine-esque fashion.  One particularly difficult classmate who had bullied me from before I knew who she was started collecting my poems to make into a Fattie Anthology, never knowing the first one she'd read had been about her.

A December or two ago I started writing a Christmas song about my dad.  It includes lines like "My asshole dad, my psycho brother / I wonder how long till you kill each other," and ends with "Merry Christmas / I won't care when you die."  It's cheerful and up tempo.  I never finished it.   

The Time My Mother Filled Out the FAFSA Wrong On Purpose

The FAFSA, in case you aren't aware, is the form you have to fill out in the US if you're hoping to receive any need-based financial aid for college.  How much aid you qualify for is based on how much your parents earn.  The FAFSA asks specifically for taxable income, just as any tax forms do.  My family had no taxable income.  My parents didn't really understand taxes, for that matter, though I didn't know that at the time.  We lived exclusively off nontaxable government aid:  a combination of veterans disability benefits and social security.  It was a sizable income though.  All totaled up, our household netted about $120k per annum.  Seriously.  I know.  

When my mother filled out the FAFSA for me, she filled it out correctly the first time with $0 as the taxable income.  The results it yielded said that I wouldn't be expected to pay anything out of pocket toward tuition.  My mother said, "Well that can't be right.  We're not that poor."  I can understand why she was confused.  We really weren't poor, no matter how often she swore we were.  Then she filled it out again as though our total income (or some number along those lines -- it's not like we had tax forms she could reference) were taxable.  The FAFSA said I no longer qualified for need-based aid of any kind.  That was version she submitted.  When the formal aid package came from my university and said I would receive a sizable merit-based scholarship and no need-based aid whatsoever, my mother was outraged and told me to write up an appeal.  It yielded me a $500 annual "hardship grant," as my mother called it.  It was a comically small amount next to tuition.  She seemed content.

This all happened back when my mother was still insistent my education would be taken care of and I didn't need to worry or talk to her about money under any circumstances.  It was also back before I knew better. 

Laundry in the Hoard

The washing machine at my parents' house broke when I was in elementary school.  The laundry room was a yellow, walk-in closet-sized room off of the kitchen that held the washer and dryer, a sink, and a counter my mother referred to as "the breakfast nook."  I remember the room being clean once for I'm not sure how long -- I remember excitedly eating cereal at that breakfast nook when I was maybe seven years old, give or take -- but by the time the washing machine broke, the room was basically inaccessible.  There was an approximately five foot high mountain of laundry from the back wall to within a foot of the doorway, where it sloped abruptly downward.  The washer could only be reached by standing on some of the clothes, followed by strategic leaning.  I recall a beautiful pink sundress I had never worn being relegated to that pile because it had wrinkled in the dryer.  My mother didn't believe in ironing, and that was years before she bought Dante and me each our own iron and ironing board for Christmas (I was genuinely thrilled, and I think Dante was too -- she had previously thrown away or piled up anything that wrinkled, which severely limited our wardrobe options).  I don't remember what made up the rest of the mound.

After the washing machine broke, my mother started doing the laundry at the laundromat.  She said the house was too messy to let someone in to fix the washer yet.  She had to get the laundry room cleared out.  Years passed.  As I got older, I started helping her.  Once or twice a month she would load up all the household laundry into large garbage bags, I would haul them to the car where they took up the entirety of the trunk and backseat, and -- because I had either school or work pretty much any given weekday of the year -- we would spend Saturday at the laundromat. 

She started yelling at me for putting my clothes in the hamper after only wearing them once, as I had always been taught to do.  She yelled at me for only using towels once too, though there was nowhere to hang them except over the shower, where they got extra wet the next time someone used it.  That's where we kept them though.  We could only ever tell which towels were our own because my mother always bought brightly colored beach towels instead of normal bath towels, and none of them looked identical.  You just had to remember which one you'd used and hope everyone else did the same.

I remember asking in my teens why we didn't just clear out the laundry room and get the washer fixed.  My mother frequently complained about how little money we had, and I saw how much we spent in quarters every trip.  My mother brought large Centrum vitamin bottles filled with quarters, and they each held multiple rolls.  She insisted it would cost even more in water bills if we did the laundry at home.  She said she would also be expected to do laundry every day if we had a working washing machine at home, and she refused to do that. 

When I got to college, the laundry room in my dorm was made up of the little machines designed for home use.  It was ironically my first experience using a classic washing machine with a lid and an agitator, like the one we'd had in my house all my life.  I was used to the high-capacity, industrial-grade machines we used at the laundromat, and I needed help the first time I used the dorm's equipment.  "You didn't do your own laundry at home?  God, you're spoiled," a dormmate informed me.  I didn't correct him.  After all, I didn't do my own laundry at home.  And at one of the most expensive private universities in the country, "spoiled" seemed like a significantly more flattering image than the one people would associate with me if they knew the details.

My mother finally replaced the washer and dryer in one of her spending sprees after I graduated from college.  According to the paperwork from my parents' divorce, they cost $5000 when she bought them a decade ago.  I don't know if anyone other than Dante has ever used them.  I've had my own personal washer and dryer since my husband and I bought our house.  Laundry is my favorite chore because it feels like I'm getting something done while a machine literally does the work for me, and I don't have to leave my house.  I can sleep on fresh bedsheets every week and have my favorite clothes ready to wear with less than a day's notice.  I've had to have someone come over to fix the machines and even replace them at one point, and I have to say -- it is still easier than going to the laundromat.  Then again, I've never had to scale a Matterhorn of wrinkled laundry to use them either.

An Open Letter to My Mother in 1965

Dear Annie,

I'm writing this to your 15-year-old self because that is when I believe these words might have meant something to you.  We met when you were 30 and I was born.  I think 30 was too late.  Fifty-something, when I tried to tell you some of these things for the first and last time, was far too late.  The last year we were in contact, you were generally drugged and sometimes barely lucid.  So I'm telling you these things in 1965, when you were old enough to understand but still young enough you might have believed you could change and choose your own fate.

Things are going to get rough.  I know they've already been rough.  I know you are the only girl among all your brothers and that you have to help out around the house in ways they aren't expected to, and I also know your dad is kind of an asshole.  Don't try to claim he isn't.  We both know he is, and it's as much my right to say so as yours, so deal with it.  I also know you're poor, but you'll be surprised to learn your family is doing better than the majority of American households fifty years in the future, and your parents are going to be just fine thanks to unions and pensions.  You're going to be just fine too -- physically and financially -- but you won't see it that way, which is the bigger problem.

You are smart.  You might have always suspected this and someone convinced you otherwise, or maybe you never even realized it, but you are smart and resourceful.  If you are willing to believe these facts, you can be unstoppable.  But you have to try.  Continually trying is the really hard part.  Perfection is not important.  It's not even possible, so forget about trying to be perfect and trying to avoid failure, and just do.  Stop taking all the remedial classes in school so that you can get the best grades.  Stop taking the jobs you think no one else wants.  You are smart enough to do more, and you will never be perfect no matter how low you aim.  Just do the best you can.  Take every opportunity you can.  Keep trying, and you'll be fine.  You know how I know this?  I'm really smart.  Trust me.

In a few years, you're going to marry an asshole who reminds you vaguely of your father.  Emotionally stunted, fits of rage, decent provider, all that same old comfortable bullshit.  Don't let him break you.  Just because the disability checks come in his name doesn't mean he is the only one of value in your relationship.  Your innate value isn't based in US currency.  Neither is your daughter's.  Try and remember that.

I know you're pretty hard-wired at this point to buy goods cheaply and avoid investing in nice things, either because you've grown up poor with parents who grew up even poorer or because of your low self-worth or both, but please know this deal-seeking tendency is not the most fiscally intelligent tactic.  You will have plenty of money soon.  You'll have more than you immediately know what to do with, which will prompt you to eat steak sandwiches every night, as you will tell me, because apparently this is a stupid and expensive thing to do.  Anyway, if you avoid seeking deals and shopping for thrills and hoarding because it makes you feel safe, you will continue to have more money than you know what to do with.  When you need a new pair of shoes, spend five times as much as you would on the cheapest possible pair and get something nice and comfortable and sturdy.  It took me years to learn to shop this way, but it's actually less expensive than buying a ton of cheap stuff you won't end up using.  You'll also have less of a hoard, which I realize is also something you're probably hard-wired for at this point based on what your childhood home looked like and the stories you told me. 

You are mentally ill.  I know those words sting, and I want you to understand that it isn't something bad about you.  It's just something that is.  You are too young right now at 15 for most decent professionals to diagnose you with what ails you, and it probably hasn't even occurred to you anything is wrong yet at this age.  You probably seem like a fairly typical teenager.  It will get worse, but it's not entirely out of your control, and a good portion of what goes down will be courtesy of prescription drug abuse.  Yes, it's still abuse even though they're prescriptions.  Remember that.  If you can effectively treat an ailment without a prescription drug, do it, even if it involves hard work like therapy or regular exercise.  I kind of doubt even your 15-year-old self would hear me out on that particular note, but seriously, even prescription drugs can be dangerous and you will have a tendency to get out of control.  Know thyself.

I'm not sure how you feel about control at 15.  I've always craved control over my own life and my own situation, but the version of you I know generally wanted people to take care of her so she could check out.  I hope you aren't like that already.  You are powerful when you try to be.  If you don't like something, you can change it.  Please don't check out.  Please don't expect other people to take care of you like the wilting flower you will pretend to be. 

It might be hard to believe that you could get a full-time job that would support you comfortably or that you could earn a college degree or seek help from a mental health professional until you start to feel good from something other than excessive doses of prescription drugs.  You could do those things though.  I know your parents "don't believe in therapy," but fifty years from now, most of your family will be dead, your parents included, and the rest won't speak to you.  You'll be left with very few options beyond stepping up to the plate and taking care of yourself.  Please rise to the challenge.  Please take care of yourself.  Please be the smart, capable woman I know you could have grown into.  It's not too late.  It's never too late. 

And when your family stops talking to you, it isn't because they hate you or because you're "bad."  It's because you behave in a cruel and crazy way and they choose to stop dealing with you because they have to take care of themselves too.  You are almost full grown, and you haven't been the baby of the family since the year after you were born.  I'm going to lay some ugly truth on you:  you will never again be someone's number one priority.  Ever.  I hope you got the bulk of your mother's attention in the months following your birth, but that was it.  No more.  I realize you don't even remember that time.  I'm truly sorry, but that's the hand you were dealt.  You have to be your own grownup now.  If you refuse, well... I guess someone in a nursing home might keep you alive, but it won't be all that pleasant, and you will still eventually languish and die.  You can be the capable, in control woman I know you can be, and you can choose your own happiness, or you can languish and die.  You don't get to be someone's baby.  You don't get to be the beloved golden child.  Not everyone gets a turn at that fate, and if you ever did, it's long done now.  Sorry.  Them's the breaks.

I hope this letter isn't too much of a downer.  I wonder -- do you ever cry anymore?  I know your dad was kind of a dick about that with the, "Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about!" line.  You said the same line to me, followed immediately by how much you hated when your father said it to you.  You don't cry much in the future, at least not in front of other people.  I do want you to know though that people see how you feel.  You're not going through it all alone.  They can't do for you the things you have to do for yourself, but people are there and they do care.  They just can't save you.  You have to do that part yourself.  It's really hard, but I know you can do it.  You're smart and capable.  You feel things deeply.  It's hard feeling like you're all alone, but there is help out there, even when you're eventually old and alone.  But you have to try.  You have to choose to be the one in charge of yourself.  If you give up, no one will rescue you.  If you hit rock bottom, you will hit it hard and it will hurt.  No one will scoop you up and save you.  Know that.  It hurts, but it's important to know that. 

The most important thing you can ever do is take care of yourself.  You have a tendency to want to rescue people, to be their savior.  It doesn't tend to go as well as one might hope, but you could save yourself.  That would be amazing.  I hope someday in the future, more than fifty years in the future, when all the time I've known you is done, these thoughts reach you.  I hope you realize it doesn't matter how old or ugly or fat or poor you think you are.  You can still choose to take charge of your own life and take care of yourself.  And I hope you do.  Because I love you and have always wanted the best for you.  I just can't tell you face-to-face anymore.  I have to take care of myself and my daughter and my family instead because that's how this was always supposed to work.  I can't save you, but I will always pray you decide to save yourself like I know you can.  That's the best I can do.  Now let's see your best.  -- C

A Minor DC Discovery

I had my birth certificate out the other day because of bank-related nonsense.  As I was putting it away, back in the lock box with the passports and the social security cards and the letter from my sperm donor father, a familiar name caught my eye.  The doctor who delivered me was the same doctor who had inseminated my mother.  I don't mean my biological father.  I mean he was the man who is now known for having impregnated patients with medical student sperm.  I learned his name from another local DC person long after the last time I'd look at my birth certificate.  I don't know why it surprised me.  I guess I had assumed he had been something more than a run-of-the-mill obstetrician and that he wouldn't do prenatal checkups or deliver babies.  Impregnating women with donor sperm doesn't require a medical mastermind, but I'd assumed he'd specialized in infertility.  I'd assumed he treated... something.

I wonder if the same doctor delivered Hans.  I was conceived the semester our father started medical school.  Hans was born the semester that he graduated.  It doesn't matter.  I'm just grasping at things we might have in common.  I wonder if Hans and I have ever known someone in common.  I wonder if my father and I have ever unwittingly been in the same building at the same time.  I never thought about these things before I knew who he was.  Then I thought how likely it was.  

I wonder if any medical student anonymous sperm donor has ever examined a woman carrying his child, or been present for the birth of his own child.  It didn't happen to me because first years don't see patients, but what if someone donated as a third year or fourth year?  Third and fourth years see patients.  If a medical student had his obstetrics and gynecology rotation when a patient or four were gestating his offspring, it seems like there would be a decent chance he might see one of them.  He could see one of those patients or possibly even be present for the birth of his own offspring and, based on the secrecy and alleged lack of record keeping at the hospital where I was created, there would be no way he or anyone else would ever know.   

The Time My Mother Gave Me Caffeine Pills

My mother started giving me caffeine pills my senior year of high school.  I was very tired.  I was in the school plays, took private music lessons at a local university twice per week, was an officer in several school clubs ("colleges want well-rounded students"), and spent all day every Sunday at various choir practices and church groups.  I frequently fell asleep doing my homework and broke down in tears when I had yet another paper to write.  My grades didn't suffer -- I had made straight A's for several years, and that didn't change until I finally got an 89% my last semester of AP Calculus -- but my crying seemed to annoy my mother. 

One day my mother gave me a little yellow box of pills she had bought and told me they would help me get my homework done.  This was the same year she gave me anti-depressants, about three years after she started self-medicating with pain killers and muscle relaxants, and several years after she started doling out to both of us pretty much every vitamin supplement she read about in magazines or saw mentioned on television.  Dr. Oz wasn't a thing back then, but something comparable must have existed because she had us on multiple supplements I had never heard of anywhere.  I don't even remember how many pills I was taking daily back then.  Six?  Nine?  I want to say nine because I knew I could take eleven pills -- including a couple Tylenol -- in one giant swallow.  Most of the supplements she bought had no discernible effect, such as the aloe pills and the garlic pills and the vitamin E.  The caffeine pills did though.  The box she gave me said each pill contained the caffeine of two cups of coffee.  I didn't see how this would work significantly better than just drinking more coffee, but I did as she said and took one, as I always had when my mother gave me medicine.

The caffeine pills didn't help me think or stay awake.  I still felt exhausted, but now I was shaking and freezing cold too.  They left me too wired to fall asleep, but writing essays still took work.  My mother urged me to try the pills again, to take another.  She seemed sure they would help me get my work done, as I always had regardless of what I took or didn't take.  After a couple more tries with the caffeine pills provoked exactly the same shaking and chills, I stopped taking them.  My mother was wrong.  They only made me feel worse.  I would make do without them, as I always had. 

The number of pills I consumed dropped considerably after I left for college.  I didn't have money to waste on supplements that did nothing, and the doctor I saw at university health services when I needed a prescription renewed had made fun of me for being on so many things at my age.  No one had ever bothered to make fun of my pill consumption with my mother in the exam room.  No doctor had ever dared to imply I should take less than what my mother was doling out.  She has a knack with doctors.   

Mother Takes Her Cut

At the end of my sophomore year of college, I applied for and accepted a campus job as a Resident Assistant.  My payment was a rent-free studio efficiency apartment that would normally cost a little over $10k for the school year.  In order to accept the job, I had to quit my mail room job I had worked since freshman year.  It had been my sole source of income during the school year.

Because my RA apartment didn't come with a meal plan, I had no way to pay for food.  I also had no way to pay for the phone line the school required me to have, or clothes or anything else.  My social security checks were still being kept by my mother to pay for my books and tuition.  My parents kicked in a lot toward tuition, and I paid for the rest with a hefty academic scholarship and student loans.

After my explanation of the situation -- that she wouldn't have to pay for my housing and could redirect funds toward the things I'd previously paid for with my mail room job -- my mother agreed to give me a monthly allowance so I could buy food and necessities.  I believe it was $150 per month, if I recall correctly.  I know the budget I worked out allowed me to spend $20 per week on food, so I had to stop buying whole grain healthy stuff and eat a lot more ramen.  Unfortunately, that was the same year I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, so I had a lot of doctors bills, and I had to pay bus fare three times per week to get to the hospital for my initial follow-up appointments and some related blood tests.

I called my mother and told her I needed more money to pay hospital bills, and she screamed at me for daring to pay any of them in full.  ALWAYS put them on a payment plan, she told me.  NEVER pay hospital bills in full!  I hadn't known.  I asked for payment plans going forward, but I still needed more money.  I was barely getting by, and my boss got mad whenever I argued that I didn't have money to eat restaurant food with the other RAs.  My boss expected me to pitch in an equal amount whether I ate their food or not.  My mother eventually gave me a little more money and purchased me a small supplemental meal plan through the school so that I could eat larger, healthier meals occasionally.  Then she spent somewhere in neighborhood of $70 -- more than three weeks' worth of grocery money in my world -- to send me a Hershey's Chocolate Tower of Treats made up almost exclusively of foods my doctors had told me to avoid, such as nuts and popcorn.  I had even told her about the diet restrictions before she sent it.

After graduation, after my mother went off the deep end, my dad mentioned the monthly allowance I had lived off of for those last two years of college, except the figure he quoted to me was more than double what I had received.  "She told me you hated me," he said.  "She said I had to give the money to her because you would never accept it if it came from me directly because you hated me so much."  And then she had taken a more than 50% cut for herself.  Every single month.  I'll let slide the fact that she told my dad I hated him because parental alienation was old hat with her and shouldn't have come as a surprise.  But knowing I was struggling, hearing me cry over the phone that I couldn't afford anything and was embarrassing myself in front of my boss, she made the repeated decision to take her cut.  Every.  Single.  Month. 

My dad didn't even control their money.  He only ever bothered controlling his own comparatively tiny social security checks, which were about 10% of their total monthly income.  The rest was all hers.  About $9k per month, all hers, at least $6k of which should have been disposable income.  I guess she wanted more.

[Edited:  I forgot to factor in my tuition and their various car payments -- I don't even remember how many cars they would have been paying off at that time -- when I said they had $6k in monthly disposable income.  I was going on what their finances looked like when I took them over a couple years later.  I think their mortgage payments were less back then, before the refinance, but I don't know by how much.  They might have had as little as $4k disposable income per month. Of course that number also factors in if my mother had paid both the home equity line of credit payment and my tuition rather than paying the HELOC payment every month and then immediately borrowing against it again to pay my tuition, which is what she said she did (in one of her "you are why we're poor" rants).  Actually, she said she paid for at least one car with the HELOC too, so that payment wouldn't have been extra.  Never mind.  I can't even picture what finances looked like when my mother was in charge of them.  I've tried before, and that way madness lies.]

Homemade Gifts

When I was little, I used to make my family members gifts for holidays and their birthdays.  I think this is pretty typical for small children with zero income.  The stress that came from giving my mother gifts started when I was too young to remember.  If I drew a picture, she tended to mention how much better at drawing Dante had been than me even as a small child.  When I stopped drawing pictures and took to just coloring straight lines and shapes in the hopes of avoiding criticism, she told me my drawings were boring and that no one wanted to look at brightly colored lines.  Again, she would point to Dante's drawings (literally) as an example of what was good.  I could copy what he'd drawn at my age easily enough -- such things were still on my grandmother's refrigerator seven years later (hence the literal pointing) -- but doing anything Dante had done first was considered boring too. 

In school around the holidays, we often made things like "pencil holders" by decorating old tin cans, which I would eagerly offer up and my mother would accept with the sarcastic reply, "Great.  Another pencil can."  (It's not like she had more than she could use either.  Do you have any idea how many pencils you can find in a hoard house?  They are infinite.) 

When I learned to sew in elementary school and took to sewing and embroidering small throw pillows because it was all I knew how to make from the tiny scraps of fabric I could get my hands on, they prompted a disparaging snort and the similar response, "Great.  Another pillow."  That was around the time I started saving up all my birthday and Christmas money to buy proper gifts for my family.  I knew only babies made homemade gifts and that no one liked them anyway.  That point was very clear at my house.  That was the year my mother ridiculed me for buying her gifts at the Dollar Store.  It was around the same time Dante started stealing from me.  Childhood is the worst.

Consolation Prizes

I've mentioned here before that, as a child and teen, I had a habit of looking for "consolation prizes" when bad things happened to me.  Some people call them "silver linings."  Sometimes they were good things that might not have otherwise happened; sometimes they were simply lessons I'd learned.  I liked to believe everything happens for a reason because it makes everything life doles out so much easier to swallow.  I fell out of that habit though.  I want to get back into it.  Here are some consolation prizes for which I'm thankful.  They might get a little weird.

1) I'm thankful my mother is as low functioning as she is.  It's terrible for her, and of course I would prefer she be her best self and happy, but if she has to be cruel and work against me, being severely mentally ill and low functioning to the point that strangers can tell is a good thing for me.  It made her easier to cut from my life.  When I told people the truth about things she had said and done, no one seemed to doubt me.  I still have relationships with some of my extended family (the ones I like best) and do not feel like I have to fear what she says about me to them or to strangers anymore because I appear sane and trustworthy and she does not.  She also does not have the stick-to-it-tiveness to hire a hitman or steal my identity (fingers crossed) or anything else she might dream up against me in her darkest hours.

There are a lot of people with parents who have personality disorders and the like who aren't quite so lucky.  A high functioning parent who has a tendency towards cruelty and viciousness is a terrible thing.  It can make people call you a liar and treat you poorly.  It can make you doubt your own sanity.  My mother's spiral into darker depths saved me from that.  I did go through the self-doubt as so many of us do, but I know it was easier than it could have been, and for that I am thankful.

2) I'm thankful the dad I grew up with isn't biologically related to me.  Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, and maybe his health problems are mostly related to his paraplegia rather than genetics, but I don't see any way being related to him would have made my life better.  He's not so nice, and I'm pretty sure I got at least a few extra IQ points from my hyper-educated biological father.  I'm 99% sure my parents would agree with that too -- no matter how mad they got at me, they never seemed to stop believing I was significantly smarter than them.  Plus, now that I know who my biological father is, I have siblings with whom I'm on speaking terms.  Even if we never become close, just being their sister is something I treasure.

3) I'm thankful for the parts of my parents that wanted me to excel.  They had the same high expectations of me that I had for myself, and they were willing to put money into my education.

4) I'm thankful for the parts of my parents that wanted me to shut up and leave them alone.  Had they been exclusively helicopter parents who overprotected and coddled me, I might not have become self-sufficient as easily, but when they were sick of me, I had to figure out how to handle things myself.  I learned how to stick up for myself, physically and financially and (sort of) emotionally.  Perhaps I could have learned these skills via good parenting instead, but from what I've read, only about 50% of people have fully functional parents anyway, and I got what I needed, so for that I am thankful.

5) I am thankful I am hypersensitive and couldn't take anybody's shit even as a child.  Most of the things I have always hated most about myself can be traced back to being hypersensitive -- crying easily, getting upset easily, even fainting easily -- but I know there are ways this quality has actually served me well.  I think Dante would have abused me in worse ways had he not known I would scream and tell our parents.  My complaints and tears were a great source of irritation for my parents, but at no point did I just shut up and accept what was dished out, even when it would have been easier for all involved.  I hated that about myself -- the tears and complaints felt like more of a compulsion than a choice -- but in hindsight I think it was actually an effective defense mechanism in that house.  I have worked to change gears as an adult, especially since I have control over my own situation now and can usually just get myself what I need rather than complain about it, but I think being willing to complain is still useful.  When I can't take matters into my own hands and the most reasonable thing to do is file a formal complaint or call the police, I can do that, and that's a useful thing to know.

6) I am thankful for my childhood perfectionism and terror of doing anything wrong.  This is another quality I have spent a lot of time hating about myself.  It took me until my twenties to realize I was going to get yelled at just about the same regardless of what I did, so I spent my entire childhood and college years trying to be perfect.  I wasted a lot of time I could have been having fun feeling completely stressed instead.  If I did things just so, my parents would be happy and no one would yell at me, I thought erroneously.  However, as stressed as it made me, I did get good grades, and those helped me get out.  I stayed out of trouble and -- because I tried so hard to be perfect  -- when that still wasn't enough, I was eventually able to see that it wasn't my fault.  Accepting that your parents' bad behavior isn't all your own fault can be really hard, especially when they can point to things you might have done to provoke it (I'm going to let you in on a secret -- it still isn't your fault).

From what I've read, there are two routes children of unpredictable parents tend to take:  attempted perfection and rebellion.  I attempted perfection while Dante rebelled.  While I believe rebellion would have been more fun and I might still have turned out fine, attempted perfection has landed me in an okay place, so I'm making peace with the route I took.  Besides, I'm really glad I didn't turn out like Dante.  He still lives in that house.

6) I am thankful I was slightly fat as a child.  I honestly think I might have been in better health my entire life had I been raised by parents who fed me reasonably and occasionally took me to the park, but since I wasn't and I did spend all of my childhood slightly fat and miserable about it, I learned about nutrition and exercise myself, which has served me well.  Had I been as thin as Dante, I might never have forced myself to learn these skills and might thus have worse health now as an adult, as I know Dante does because he posts about it in online forums under a username I'm sure he thinks is anonymous. 

7) I am thankful my parents didn't allow me to go to therapy.  Maybe I would have recovered more quickly if I'd had professional help earlier, but I've also heard of people who learned not to trust therapists at all because of how their parents used their mental health against them.  The parents accused them of being crazy and painted fantastic pictures for their therapists of what terrible, troubled children they were.  I can only imagine how that would have broken me down.  Because my parents didn't allow me to go to therapy, it was something I reached out for on my own when I got out, and it has been gloriously helpful.  In my opinion, therapy is the #1 life hack of all time.

The First Time I Wrote Publicly About My Parents -- And My Mother's Reaction

The first time I wrote publicly and honestly about my parents was my senior year of high school.  I had to write a paper for English class -- one of many -- and I don't remember the theme of the paper, but it included a memory from my childhood.  My parents were screaming at each other in the living room.  I was maybe six years old and watching them from my hiding spot crouched behind the recliner at the edge of the room.  My mother wanted to leave the house and was trying to take her purse, and my dad had wrapped the shoulder straps around her forearm and was yanking on them, trying to prevent her from leaving.  When she finally got the purse off, there were red strap marks on her arm. 

I rarely witnessed physical altercations between my parents, so that one had stuck with me, comparatively benign as it was.  I don't remember what my parents had been fighting about, but the screaming matches were an almost daily occurrence.  My six-year-old self had crept back to my room at the end of the long hallway and scribbled a note to Dante, who must've been 13 at the time.  It read, "Mommy and Daddy are fighting.  I could really use a friend right now," and I folded it up and pushed it under his bedroom door, which was adjacent to my own.  A minute later his door opened and Dante stood in my open doorway holding the note.  "I could really use a friend right now," he mocked in a high-pitched voice, and then he threw the note into my room, laughed, and walked away.  Typical Dante.

Sharing this memory in an English paper was kind of a big deal for me.  We did peer editing, so several of my classmates had to read it before even the teacher did, and as far as I can remember, I had never told any of them about my parents' fights.  Up to that point, I usually tried to make my papers funny rather than serious.  I mean, look at Dante's reaction when I tried to write something sincere -- can you blame me?  The surprising outcome was how many of my classmates came up to me at the end of class and said something along the lines of, "I thought it was just me."  I hadn't expected to strike a chord with people who I thought had happy, loving homes.  That's when I decided everything could be relatable if the retelling is honest and detailed enough.

I finished editing my paper and turned it in the next day with the rest of the class.  I would get an A, as I always did in high school, though I didn't know that at the time.  My mother took me out to dinner that night at Outback Steakhouse.  This was years after she'd given up cooking at home.  She was sullen and significantly more quiet than usual that night.  I knew she was mad about something, so after we sat down to dinner I tentatively asked, "Are you feeling okay?" and she erupted.  She informed me that she had found my paper and read it.  "Why?" I asked, and it came out that she had a previously unknown to me habit of searching my backpack every night after I went to bed.  I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was surprised I hadn't found out about that sooner.  I was also surprised at how upset she was.  I didn't think the paper painted her in a bad light at all.  It was about my dad being physically abusive, and she was the victim.  It seemed like a depiction that would delight her, though I admit I wasn't enough of a fool to say so out loud.  Apparently I hadn't understood the house rules as well as I'd tried.

My mother had told me since I was old enough to write, "Don't write down anything you wouldn't want published on the front page of the newspaper," and I had indeed taken that message to heart.  Since I was old enough to write, she had searched my bedroom for journals and stories and notes under the guise of "cleaning," in spite of the fact that nothing ever got clean, and she'd read them out loud to me in a mocking voice much like Dante did, so I knew to be guarded.  I knew to make sure I really wanted to say what I was about to say before I wrote it down.  I knew to say only what I wanted to publish.  The English paper was the first time I understood that her intended lesson wasn't actually, "Don't write down anything you wouldn't want published," but instead, "Don't write down anything I might not want published."  But it was too late for that now.  Now I knew how good it felt to tell the truth.

My First Halloween Costume

My first Halloween costume I can remember -- quite possibly my first one at all since I've never heard stories or seen photographic evidence of my dressing up before the age of three -- was the negligee my mother wore on her wedding night.  It was sheer polyester chiffon in Pepto-Bismol pink, trimmed in cheap lace of the same hue, and it comprised all the dress-up clothes I owned as a child.  I cannot remember a time before it was in my possession.

I remember several preschool Halloweens for which I threw it on over my sweatpants and t-shirt and -- with the addition of some kind of accessory such as a toy wand -- claimed to be a fairy, a princess, or a fairy princess.  It didn't occur to me until I was much older that this was strange.  I am not remotely surprised that my hoarder mother would recycle her decade-old wedding night negligee by gifting it to a toddler, but it does seem a stretch that she took me out of the house dressed that way -- both for trick-or-treating and to preschool costume parades at our Methodist church.  I always wore clothes underneath, but it was still very clearly sexy -- albeit heinously ugly -- lingerie.  I also can't remember a time I didn't personally know it was from her wedding night.  She made no secret of what it was, and it was the only piece of sexy anything she'd ever bought -- she made that fact well known too.  Somehow as a child I thought that other people couldn't tell what it was.  As far as I could tell, it was simply the most elegant article of clothing in the house.

Wanting To Be Sick

When I was little, I used to fantasize about being hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.  I knew nothing about what went on in mental hospitals; no one in my family had been hospitalized for mental reasons at that point, and I was also very young.  I remember my mother talking about specific teenage girls from our church who were straight A students and on the dance team and preparing for college and how they would be hospitalized because of the stress of being so amazing at everything, and also anorexia.  I wanted to be like that.  I wanted to be so amazing that I had to be hospitalized for it.  I envisioned my mother and doctors and nurses stroking my forehead and telling me to rest, that I shouldn't work so hard.

Mental illness wasn't acknowledged in our house or in our extended family, in spite of my uncle's suicide and almost all my mother's siblings eventually being diagnosed with one thing or another.  The only illnesses that were valued and treated (and faked) were physical.  Stress counted as physical though.  Only the best, hardest working, most put upon martyrs felt stress, so my mother was in a fairly constant competition to be the most stressed out person she knew.  I think this is part of why I wanted to be hospitalized.  I wanted the attention, and I wanted someone to acknowledge that the stress I felt was real too.  I wanted a reaction that wasn't, "Why is that little bitch crying again?" or "Stop being so sensitive."

One of the best side effects of my mother going off the deep end was that she stopped responding positively to my ailments, including the ulcerative colitis I developed in college.  I learned that I had to care for myself and no one else would do it for me.  I could ask close friends for specific help, and they usually came through, and hired help is an option for almost everything if you have enough money, but I was responsible for making sure I had what I needed.  No one else.  No one would decide I was too sick or under too much stress and tell me to take a rest.  If I let myself hit rock bottom, no one was going to come to my rescue.  It is a little depressing to grow up wanting so much for someone to stroke your hair and take care of you and tell you not to stress yourself, and then to realize that will never happen, but it was an important lesson to learn, and it was a better situation than the one my mother had. 

My mother's parents took care of her until they died.  She lived within walking distance of their house up until they moved to the next town over in their 70s.  I remember watching her mother cook for her, and her father giving her money when she needed it, despite her income via my dad's disability payments being several times that of my grandparents.  She moved in with them after the divorce, when she refused to bathe or feed herself or find anywhere else to live.  She always had a human safety net.  Until she didn't.

Shortly after my grandparents died, my mother took a bunch of pills, called herself an ambulance, and ended up in the psych ward of the local hospital.  Based on what I've heard as an adult, I imagine the psych ward wasn't as soothing or nurturing as I'd fantasized as a child.  No friends or family came to her rescue that time, and they ultimately discharged her to a low-end assisted living home where she was required to see a psychiatrist.  He was the one who diagnosed her with bipolar disorder. 

I don't know where she is now or how/whether she takes care of herself.  I heard she left the assisted living home after awhile.  My dad said they wanted her to pay something to keep living there, but I don't know if she got evicted or if she left because she wanted to go.  She had tried to reach out to me via Facebook from that assisted living home to say my brother, my husband, and I were all the support system she had left in the world and she wanted me back in her life.  It had been some three years since I'd heard from her at that point.  I never replied.  After she left assisted living, she talked about suing my dad for more monthly spousal support and wanting to pick up the things she'd left at the house after the divorce, including some major appliances, but nothing ever came of it and then she disappeared again. 

The Time I Wrote a "Hero" Essay About My Mother

When I was in third or fourth grade, we had an assignment to write essays about our heroes.  We each had to write three short essays, so I needed to come up with multiple heroes.  The people I admired and wanted to emulate back then were mostly actresses and pop stars, and I knew adults tended to frown on such shallow choices, so I immediately chose my dad as my first hero.  Since winning the "Reflections" contest a year or two earlier with my sob story, I felt I knew how the game was played and that it would get me a good grade.  When I came home from school and told my mother about the assignment, she was outraged that I would write about my dad.  I guess she didn't remember the "Reflections" contest or how she had told me tearjerkers win awards and that I should always write about my dad when given the opportunity.  This time, she told me the person I SHOULD be writing about was MY MOTHER.  I said okay. 

The thing about writing about my dad is that it's easy.  He's a war veteran, he's paralyzed from the chest down, and it's easy to come up with a lot of filler fantasy about what we could be doing as a family if he weren't in a wheelchair.  My "Reflections" essay had even gone off onto a weird tangent about how, if Dad could walk, we could all go to Disney World together as a family (I could NOT stop writing about Disney World -- it was all I dreamed about) and how he could carry me if I got tired.  My secret Disney wish was not-so-subtly embedded in the ending (as well as my secret wish to have someone carry me around) and it STILL WON. 

Writing about my mother was harder.  She didn't have a paying career I could cite as the source of my admiration, but I also couldn't very well talk about all the home cooked meals she made or how well she took care of the house and family.  She was a hoarder who spent most of the day in a muumuu, lying on the couch and watching TV or napping.  That's not to say I didn't love spending time with her.  I just didn't think, "We watch a lot of television together," was a strong basis for a hero essay.  And I certainly didn't want to be like her.

To be fair, my mother volunteered a lot too, both with PTA and with a local clinic that offered free vaccinations to babies, but I knew very little about what she did (to this day I have no idea what she did at that clinic), so "she volunteers" only took up so much space in my essay.  As an adult, I think I'd be able to do something with her volunteer work and how much time she spent with her parents on an almost daily basis (it was like she never grew up, but I could spin it like she was helping out), and I'd lie and say she was integral to my dad's ability to live independently.  Back then though, I was afraid of lying, and I only knew how to write effectively (manipulatively?) about my dad because my mother had told me how.  She wouldn't tell me what to write about her.  She said I should KNOW.

My mother had a tendency to go on martyr rants about all the things she did for us for which we were ungrateful.  These rants happened pretty regularly.  I figured the things in her rants must be tasks for which I should consider her a hero -- why else would she talk about them so much?  Surely I couldn't say the wrong thing if I only said things she herself had said first, so I started writing. 

I don't remember everything I wrote in my essay.  I know I meant it to be sincere and loving, and I intended for it to make her pleased with me.  The only thing I remember from it was, "She stays up until 2am sorting Campbell's soup labels."  This line was from the excerpt of her rant about all the things she does that are school-related, and my school collected Campbell's soup labels to redeem for funding or computers or something.  She would bring home garbage bags full of soup labels from school, empty them onto the living room floor, and sort them until the wee hours of the morning.  "I was up until 2am sorting Campbell's soup labels," was often verbatim what she snapped at me while I got ready for school in the morning.  Anyway, the essay had multiple sentences like that, varied as little as possible from her own exact words.  I knew it wouldn't win any awards, but I didn't know how to make my mother into an award-winning hero.  I figured at least it was done. 

My essay about my dad, on the other hand, was largely borrowed from my award-winning "Reflections" essay.  My teacher asked me to read it aloud at a special program that my parents were invited to attend.  Some other kids read their essays too.  Afterwards, my mother was upset and asked why I hadn't read the essay about her.  I told her they didn't ask me to read it, just the one about Dad.  She wanted to see the essay about her, so I showed it to her.  "You made me sound like a crazy person!" she hissed.  Neither of us caught the irony back then.

The Essay Contest

When I was in second grade, I won first place for writing in my school's "Reflections" contest.  The theme that year was "I Have a Dream" or something similar.  To be honest, I can't remember a single year the theme wasn't some variation on "my greatest wish."

The topic of my original essay was an imagined vacation to Walt Disney World, which was at that time my greatest wish.  I had never been on a trip before, and I was obsessed with the idea.  My mother told me it would never win.  She said I should write that my dream was for my wheelchair-bound dad to be able to walk again.  Tearjerkers win, she told me.  I was skeptical.  I thought it sounded boring and untrue, but she made me a deal:  either I would win first place, or she would give me $20.  I accepted her challenge.  I ended up winning.

My essay went on to compete in the statewide competition, and I came in second.  The boy who won first place had a dead father, and his tearjerking dream was to build a telephone to heaven.  (Why aim so low, Kevin?  Don't you love your dad enough for imagined necromancy?)  This was my first experience with winning awards out of pity, but I began to understand the system pretty quickly.

I was invited to Cleveland to read my essay aloud and accept a small trophy at the awards ceremony along with the other winners from across the state.  My school's PTA president and vice president wanted to attend as well, each of whom had a child in my class who also wanted to come.  We piled into the PTA president's minivan and trekked across the state as a group. 

I read my essay and accepted my trophy.  Everyone congratulated me and told me I had done a good job, which was pretty much what I lived for.  We went back to the hotel to change into casual clothes before finishing off the day with some sightseeing.  I had packed what I felt was my most fashionable outfit:  an oversized t-shirt with butterflies on it and white capri pants.  It was something Stacey from The Babysitter's Club would wear, I'd thought in a satisfied way as I'd packed it.  It was too cold for capri pants though, so I wasn't sure what to do.  I came out to the main room of the suite where my mother and my friends and their mothers were sitting.  When my mother saw my outfit, she got angry.  "Is that seriously what you packed?!  Did it not occur to you some of us might want to leave the hotel room?!" she yelled.  I looked over at my friend Gretchen, dressed sensibly in a new-looking, well-fitting, warm-looking outfit.  It was much nicer than my casual wear.  I didn't own a thing like it.  Why didn't I own a thing like it?  Why hadn't I known it would be too cold for capri pants?  Gretchen averted her eyes from mine while her mother did her hair and my mother shamed me.  I didn't blame her.   It was awkward for all of us.

After rifling through my bag and deeming everything I had packed useless and unwearable, my mother instructed me to change back into the clothes I'd worn on the drive across the state the day prior.  "This will have to do," she sighed at the well-worn t-shirt my brother had brought me back from a trip to New Mexico and the multicolored paisley parachute pants my mother had bought me because they looked like her own.  She went through a phase for a couple years where she wore exclusively wildly colored, patterned rayon pants and bought the same for me. 

In hindsight, I think it's impressive I had as many friends as I did, considering how I looked and dressed.  My personality must have been sparkling.