I guess a part of me always knew that I
would end up here; you know- broken down, tattered, confused, hurt, and
ironically, hopeful.
I don’t know if it was only in my case,
or if every other ‘orphan’ or kid from a ‘broken home’ gets that feeling, even
as a child, that while they may try their utmost to keep from unravelling and
losing themselves, they just know that a day will come when all hell will break
loose.
When I say ‘all hell break loose’ I do
not necessarily mean it in a sense of a catastrophic backlash, going on a
drinking or drugging binge and losing all sense of control (although all these
things could very well be part of ‘coming to’)- just that there comes a day
when all the pretence and all the
smiling-in-the-faces-of-everybody-and-even-those-who-hurt-me-the-most just gets
too much, and for lack of a better comparison, it’s like being a caterpillar,
all wormy and hairy and creeping and
not-good-enough, finally making that transformation, becoming exactly who you
are without any need to hide behind anything, just exposing yourself in all
your brilliant beauty – screw whether or not you’re wanted in that person’s
garden – and flying into the unknown afraid, yet knowing, that there’s a world
full of flowers waiting to be discovered, and it’s just... well, exciting!
Well, that’s kind of what it was like
for me...
I don’t know. I guess I always knew that
something wasn’t quite right in my life.
For one, I always knew that my mother
was going to die. Well, I guess that everybody comes to a point where they
start to learn about death, you know, that death is something that happens.
For me, however, I was probably not even
five years old when I came to learn that my mother was terribly sick and that
my time with her was limited.
I spent the first nine years of my life
waiting, I suppose. And while I waited, I did everything that I could possibly
think of, trying to make it not happen;
keep her as healthy as possible, hoping that while I did that, that some genius
doctor would find a cure for her disease.
I kept everything as neat and tidy
around her as I possibly could, since she was lame and couldn’t do it for
herself. I fed her when I could, tried to brush her hair and teeth for her, keep
things as tranquil as possible, not tell her things that might stress her out
(like the fact that I was being abused), trying to make her laugh by telling
her silly jokes, ease her mind by reading her stories- just do everything that I could think of,
really.
But no genius doctor found a cure, and
nothing that I did stopped her from dying.
And so, at nine years old, I became an
orphan.
Ok, not really. I mean, my father was still alive. But he was on drugs and
into the wrong sort of things which inevitably made him unfit to be my father,
so I moved in with my first foster family.
My foster family were relatives of my
mother, BUT...
I don’t know if this is the case for
most kids who lose their parents, but foster parents/family, are just not like
your real family, whether they’re relatives or not- it honestly makes no
difference.
Besides dealing with my mother’s death,
I had to switch schools, friends, neighbourhoods, EVERYTHING! I also had to
deal with my mother’s passing away on my own, since her relatives didn’t speak
about her or what had happened. In fact, it was like I just woke up one day and
had a new home, new family, new life, with everything changed, and I was just
expected to act as if I didn’t remember that I had lived a different life just
the day before.
I missed my mother. I missed my friends,
my old school, my class, my grandparents, and everything that my life used to
be.
Yet there I was, pretending as if
nothing had happened to me, just so that the transition could be smoother for
my foster family.
Immediately it felt as if I was
responsible for making sure that there were no major hiccups, like I had to be okay so that no major steps were needed
to actually make everything okay; even though my life had become hell to live.
This woman (my aunt) was not my mother.
I knew that she didn’t ask to suddenly have an extra child, and how much of an
inconvenience I probably was, but I couldn’t shake the rage I had inside, the
pent-up anger and the scream I didn’t have the guts to actually allow out of my
mouth: I DIDN’T ASK FOR THIS EITHER! I
DON’T WANT TO BE HERE! I CAN’T FORGET MY MOTHER AND I WON’T BUT I WOULD LOVE
THE CHANCE TO BE ACCEPTED AS YOUR CHILD AND I WILL LOVE YOU, BUT I CAN’T IF YOU
MAKE ME FEEL SO OUT OF PLACE! I DID NOT ASK FOR THIS!!!I CAN’T HELP FOR THIS! I
DIDN’T WANT MY MOTHER TO DIE! I KNOW THAT IF SHE DIDN’T, NOT MY OR YOUR LIFE
WOULD BE SO SHIT!!!I’M SORRY FOR BEING HERE, DAMN IT!
It really didn’t help that I was given a
list of duties that seemed way longer than the list of duties that had been
allocated to her kids. I found myself scrubbing away at her en suite toilet,
wishing that she could suffer a loss that was of the same magnitude as mine
that she could perhaps come close to understanding the pain I was going
through. The thought gave me direction for my anger, but at the same time, I
could hardly believe that I was capable of thinking such terrible things.
She was just so different to my mother. She was cold, distant and robotic, where my
mother, while sick, was always warm, receptive and loving. I knew that it was
unfair to compare her to my mother and that I couldn’t expect anybody to be
like my mother, that I couldn’t expect anybody to love me the way my mother had, and I understood that taking me into
her home when she had kids of her own was a major decision and responsibility
to take on, but at the same time, I hated having to just accept things.
While I couldn’t expect her to be like
my mother or love me like a mother, it hurt me that I couldn’t expect it. I had
just turned ten years old. The concept of having to live my life from that
point without maternal love was just too big for me to just live with, even
bigger because there was nothing that I could do to change it, it being the
result of a doing that was not my own. I was just living, and my ‘just living’
wasn’t special enough to cause someone to love me anymore.
I wished that I had rather gone to an
orphanage, and I didn’t care what happened in an orphanage- I told myself that
I would probably be cleaning and ‘bringing my part’ in the same way as I was in
my foster home, but at least I would know that all the other kids were doing
the same and ‘love’ was something that nobody got.
I started wondering if she had taken me
in just so that none of the other relatives spoke badly about her. I watched
her with an aching emptiness as she smiled at her husband, as she ruffled her
fingers through her middle son’s mane of hair, as she laughed delightedly at
what the kids of her friends said, as she delivered sermons to the church to
which she belonged, as her eyes twinkled at the praises she received for having
such a saintly huge heart, as she spoke in her soft, gentle voice telling them
how it was not always easy, especially when I had a tendency to be ‘difficult’,
and my anger slowly started to fade; I became numb.
I was breathing only because I was
alive, and I was alive only because I wasn’t dead.
There were times when I thought that perhaps
she cared, and often I pushed the boundaries.
I was hungry for love and so I looked
for it anywhere I could, with some of the shadiest people.
I started to hate how she wouldn’t even
acknowledge my wrongdoings. I hated how I could bunk, and she would just tell
me that I was ruining my reputation. I wanted her to shout at me, tell me that
I was upsetting her, or even tell me that I was ruining her reputation (so that
we had some sort of link), or ask me why I was doing some of the things that I
was doing, and that maybe it would lead to some sort of dialogue. But I got
nothing except more feelings of hostility and more confirmation that I was only
there because there was nowhere else I could be.
I wondered whether she was waiting for
it to be close to my eighteenth birthday so that she could tell me that it was
time for me to make plans to get a place of my own.
When I first started to cut myself, it
was to kill myself. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
It became something I did when being
unloved was too unbearable; I would cut to have something that I could look
after and heal- unlike my forever broken heart.
I cut on my wrists, but hid them under
long-sleeved clothing.
One day, when I was washing up the
dishes, she stood beside me (doing some thing or another), and I felt her eyes
drift over to the bright red cuts all over my wrist. Adrenaline surged through
me as I hoped- hoped for a reaction, hoped for her to reach out and hold me
perhaps, hoped her to smack the back of my head with her hand and ask me if I
would stupid. Any reaction would’ve meant that she cared.
But she turned away and continued with
her pots.
And I continued with the dishes, stung,
still not having learned my lesson.
Only one thing changed- added to my list
of faults, another word was added: manipulative.
When you’re an orphan, everybody
changes. It felt that way to me.
When my mom was alive, she had plenty
friends, even though she was sick. All of her friends loved me. They would pick
me up and take me out for the day; they would buy me pretty clothes and
educational toys and tons of books.
But when she died, they all disappeared.
I don’t know if they were gone from my
life because my aunt didn’t want them around me, or if they only loved me for
the sake of my mom.
Back then I told myself that it was for
the sake of my mom, but since I’m not an adult, I have thought many times that
maybe it was my aunt’s doing. But maybe that thought is the epitome of ‘wishful
thinking’.
There was one couple who were friends of
my mom who were still in my life somewhat. They had become friends with my
aunt, and so they were there, but they’d become different versions of
themselves as opposed to who they had been when my mom was still around.
They believed everything that my aunt
told them, that’s how I knew that they had changed.
When you’re an orphan, you have nobody
in your court.
When you lose your parents (my father
passed away when I was twelve years old), you come to learn that you will never
again be anybody’s ‘baby’ and that you will never be unconditionally loved as
somebody’s child again, because you’re, in reality, nobody’s child anymore-
you’re looked after because you have to be, but you’re nobody’s.
My last desperate act for attention was
running away.
It sounds stupid now, looking back, but when
I did it, I really thought that she would come out and get me, and that we
would sit down and talk so that going forward, we could all be happy.
I know I should have known better when
she had kicked me out a few months before I had run away for something
seriously minor. I should have known better the morning after she had kicked me
out (her husband had come to look for me) when she told me that I was as much
of a bitch as my mother was. I should have, in general, just have known better.
Yet, after witnessing her melt into a
saddened lump of skin and bones when her eldest son ran away and going with her
to take him clothing and listening to her beg for him to come back home a few
times, some stupid part of me thought that she would do the same for me. So I did
the ‘manipulative’ thing and ran away, waiting for someone who just didn’t come
looking for me.
Instead, she told my second foster
mother that I could come fetch my things- just like that!
I would love to say that there’s a happy
ending, but there wasn’t one. There wasn’t a family who took me in and loved me
unconditionally. I was always the ‘adopted’ or ‘foster’ child- the one who
could cook and clean, the one who was manipulative, and the troubled child.
I never really made anyone proud. Nobody
ever expected much of me; maybe because I wasn’t theirs, I’m not sure.
I eventually realized that we are all
born with different problems.
Mine was that I was born to a separated
couple, a father who was dependant on narcotics and found family in gangs, a
mother who was sickly and eventually died and would have to live through a life
of not really knowing what a healthy and loving relationship consisted of.
I found myself in that moment of
realization- broken down, tattered, confused and hurt. But by then I had met a
few good people - people that had made me laugh, people that had given me small
little pieces of their hearts and shown me caring gestures – and I could scrape
it all together and look towards a better life that I could create for myself.
From not receiving the love I needed, I empathically
know when someone is in need of receiving love, and am able to give them that
warmth and strength that is needed to patch them up.
I know that I did not ask to be born.
I did not ask to lose my mother.
I could not help for most of what
happened as a child; many things were simply not in my control.
I know that I deserved and had every
right to love and nurturing.
I know that some people just don’t see
the bigger picture, and that’s ok, because there are many other people who do,
like myself, who can and will touch those in need in some way or another, and
change the course of a life the way those few good people changed mine.
I was a caterpillar and am now a
butterfly, and screw whether or not I’m wanted in this garden, I am here, flying
into the unknown, afraid, yet knowing, that there’s a world full of flowers
waiting to be discovered, and it’s just... well, exciting!
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