New Short True Story -- Thanksgiving Photo

 Being July in t-minus 1.5 hours, I thought it would be the most perfect time to write a story about Thanksgiving, the most popular autumn holiday in the United States. 

 

Just kidding. We all know that's Halloween.

No, actually, I haven't written a story about my mother / my upbringing in quite a while, as I'm trying to get away from the whole "my parents abused me Waah waaah waah" mindset and look at things from a more balanced point of view. If I drag my mother's name and reputation through the mud, I'm no better than her, except for the fact that my stories are real and her stories are only real to her, insider her head, to help her push a narrative that constantly reaffirms her status as victim. 

 

Remember, the only way to lie effectively is to wholeheartedly believe the lies you're making up as you make them. 

That being said, I still need to get over some of the right BS I went through as a child. If I end up with horrendous dementia later in life, point to the chronic stress of my childhood as the cause. This next story is written to the best of my poor memory and if I find the embarrassing photo from my teenage years, I'll post it. I don't think words can do it justice, but I did my best...

**

Thanksgiving Photo

There’s a photograph of me that used to sit in some album from Thanksgiving in the late 1990s. The photo is a joke, as I stand at the stove in the small kitchen, holding a turkey baster over a plastic package of deli-wrapped lunchmeat as it sat unassuming in a cake pan. I wore my long-sleeved cotton theatre tee-shirt and had very short, thick brown hair. My skin was pale and my edges were rounded. I didn’t look like a girl; I didn’t look like anything really.

 

It's a bad photo. I wish I could look back at my teenage days and say: “Wow, I was so young and pretty!” No, no, nope, at the time, I was blundering through my days as a misshapen glob.

 

At the time, I found my mother complicated. It was only the two of us. I had quit going to my father’s house and playing family with his second go-around by the time the year’s Thanksgiving rolled around. I had enough of being the butt of all of their jokes, and the other incidents weren’t yet ones I could cope with on a conscious level. Besides, being carted off to my father’s second wife’s, moderately populated, extended family to some unknown-to-me location in the state every-other holiday wasn’t really my definition of fun or comfortable. No one knew my name, who I was, or why I was there. My father just stuck me in a room with other children under 18 with no introduction and told me to figure it out. Long story short, out of the twenty-or-so times this happened, I never did.

 

My mother’s family lived in Florida and we were over a thousand miles away from them. She told me stories about these distant relatives, about who they were and what they did. I had a hard time keeping the branches of the tree straight, as I had few faces in my memory to match with the many names. She grew up with these people, but now that entire community was only a piece of the past.

 

My father’s mother, my grandmother, lived on the property next door, about a mile walk from our front door. The last time I saw her was probably a year before, where she came to a show we were putting on at the high school. I recognized her instantly and she didn’t know what to do. She looked at me blankly, knowing I was her granddaughter, but seemingly annoyed that she had been caught in the same school lobby as me. Instead of doing what she probably wanted me to do, take her ticket, pretend I didn’t know her, and cry about it later, I took the opposite approach. A loud and bubbly “hello!” escaped my mouth and I gave her a hug that wasn’t returned. She wore the same perfume she had when she watched me after elementary school or during the summer. Then, in that moment, I said something excitedly to the tune of: “it’s nice to see you!” with all the genuine feeling of a Magic 8 Ball.

 

I didn’t really care to see her at that moment; however, pulling her into a hug and spouting some happy words seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It must have looked crazy to any outsider, seeing a grandmother not have any nice words or loving actions displayed to their granddaughter. I imagine any onlooker wondering what awful thing I did to make her hate me so much.  

 

Or maybe my family was just known as a mean family; I could see as much.

 

Being Thanksgiving and with no family to speak of, there was no way I could ask my mother to cook us a turkey, though she had offered, also knowing it wouldn’t make any sense to do so. I told her that the bare minimum was fine, sandwiches were more than I felt I deserved. She would have agreed, though with context added.

 

I thought the photo would be funny, a comical moment captioned: “Haha lunchmeat,” and I’m sure my mother felt the same. I had no idea how sad it would look all these years later.

 

As for my mother, she was very stressed out at the time and I, too, was a complete basket case. We’re a lot alike, both incredibly dorky, and we both think we’re so cool and so smart. However, some of our differences could hold oceans between them. 

 **

Sparkleweather Substack Now Launched

 Launched my Sparkleweather Substack today: https://sparkleweather.substack.com/p/drawing-cats-is-hard 

I hope to continue to share quirky stories, funny videos, and not-awful memes on substack all related to my drawing and art brand: Sparkleweather 

 

 

What Does Your Midlife Crisis Look Like? (Medium)

 

What Does Your Midlife Crisis Look Like?

Photo by Julz on Pexels

If you grew up during the 80’s and 90’s, your idea of a midlife crisis might be going out and buying a fancy, fast sports car. It might look like a man marrying a younger woman, dressing in garish, silk shirts, and going out clubbing until 3AM with a bunch of 20-somethings. It might consist of a long string of poorly thought-out financial decisions all in the hopes of reinventing the self into a younger, cooler version.

I guess I’m around the age of midlife crisis. I’m not quite 40, but I’m close, way closer than I ever thought I’d be.

However, I’m not sure if the term midlife crisis could adequately describe what I’m up to, even though it is tied to a feeling of reinvention. My entire upbringing was like a crisis on steroids. I grew up and faced tidal waves of abuse, so much so that I had gray hair growing from my scalp at age 12. I had poor emotional regulation, never felt safe, and was never given emotional support.

Also, shadows and echoes from my past still linger. I never had good hand-eye coordination or balance. I was forbidden from playing sports as a child, despite repeated begging. My parents were cool with buying me a new toy or leaving me to my own devices for days on end, but they weren’t down with letting me participate in the physical or social activities I was drawn to. I was that kid in gym class who was always last in races, couldn’t do a cartwheel, and couldn’t even bounce a ball against a wall correctly. I was afraid of getting hurt. When I was injured at home, I was punished or simply ignored.

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Pexels

Don’t know what I mean? Here’s a story from my youth that perfectly sums up the approach my family took to my injuries.

I badly twisted my ankle when I was 12 (back when I was growing those gray hairs!) and it was either sprained or broken. It hurt so badly, I hobbled. Of course, my father said I was faking it.

Now, I know most 12 year olds can’t walk on a broken ankle, but I wasn’t most 12 year olds. I had really bad depression from the abuse and emotional neglect at the time. I was in constant emotional pain, which led to a higher physical pain tolerance. Another example of this was my ability to burn myself with cigarettes at age 19 and barely feel it. For anyone wondering, I’m much better now.

On the first day of that vacation, I had severely messed up my ankle and neither my father nor stepmother gave a care in the world. When I got home from spending a week being bullied, harassed, and neglected by them, my ankle was twice the size it was normally and my skin had turned deep purple.

I tried to hide it from my mother, but she instantly snapped at me for limping. Then she ripped my shoe off and peeled off the socks. I was wearing multiple pairs on the one foot, trying to cushion the pain.

My mother thought I colored myself with permanent marker for attention and tried to rub it clean. I screamed and she realized I was seriously hurt.

No, she didn’t take me to the doctor or hospital either. No, she was just annoyed I was hurt, but at least she acknowledged it. Yes, it was normal that anytime I was injured around her, she took it as a personal offense.

Back to when I injured the ankle in the first place, I was on a vacation with my father and stepfamily. We were in the mountains of North Carolina at a dude ranch. It was awful.

No one told me the itinerary and they woke me up at 8AM the morning after it happened because we were going to hike a mountain that day. I remember sitting in the car, driving to the parking lot with this huge, sinking stone in my stomach. It hurt so bad, just sitting in the car.

But no, we started hiking. Again, much like gym class, I was last, very last. Keeping as much weight off my right ankle as possible, I walked my way up and down that trail, while my stepsister jogged the whole thing, with her brother trailing behind her, and whilst my father and his wife hiked together. I was late to the lunch spot and once I made it to the top, turned around, leaving my father and his wife up there to make out undisturbed.

At one point on the way down, I was in agony. Electric jolts of pain shot through my entire body. Silent tears streamed down my face. I began truly one-foot hopping my way down the trail and my water bottle shot out of my ugly overalls.

I was so upset. Wouldn’t anyone be upset? The entire time I was treated like a liar, I was left to walk on the trail entirely by myself, and the stepfamily was up to their usual meanness since the trip had begun. I didn’t pick up the water bottle. Any extra movement was too painful.

Of course, my father and his second wife were behind me on the trail, since I turned around basically the moment I made it to the lookout platform at the top. My father found the water bottle and when we were all back at the car, he yelled at me in front of the entire parking lot about my disrespect for the environment.

This is a man who threw garbage out his car window during my entire childhood, but okay.

Also on this trip, my stepbrother got angry with me and strangled me in front of a bunch of people and my father again yelled at me for starting the argument. I still remember the fire I felt with my throbbing ankle and his hands on my throat, as I picked his fingers off one by one and pulled his index finger backwards. I could have killed him in that moment and felt nothing. His and his family’s bullying and physical attacks had worn me down to nothingness.

My father was drinking Merlot with his wife on a picnic blanket nearby. Instead of saying anything to the physically abusive stepbrother, as I mentioned previously, I was loudly berated instead.

So, although those were two of the worst experiences I had with getting injured and then being punished for being injured, no wonder I was such a chicken in gym class. No wonder my midlife crisis or midlife crisis adjacent wouldn’t be a fancy new car, lip filler, or trying to date a 22 year old man-boy.

No, I’m trying to learn how to ride a unicycle. Why? We had bicycle and unicycle unit in my gym class. I was horrible, but I’m picking up where I left off. Also, there are times when my uncoordinated butt rides a skateboard through my kitchen to practice. One day, I’ll be brave enough to ride on the street. Maybe.

So, enjoy your midlife crises, whatever they may be. Know that you can’t change the painful experiences of your past, but know you can treat yourself better than other people treated you. If there’s unfinished business in your life, like a unicycle, you can finish it if it will give you happiness. You can also cut contact with anyone who abused you or treated you like garbage, in fact, it makes a great first step into freeing yourself.

Photo by Jill Wellington on Pexels