Essay- Being an Orphan

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!