“All I got was the washer and dryer and the bed, and he won’t sleep in the bed, says it’s too weird.” It always bothers me every time she tells this story, but tonight more so, for two reasons. Reason one, she got that cool pots and pans hanger that they’re about to install in their kitchen. Reason two, she has custody of her children. Why does she focus so much on that stupid washer/dryer/bed bundle? They gave the bed to his teenage daughter. And the dryer is on the fritz. He hung a clothesline for her in the backyard.
——-
She was crazy. Lots of people tried to warn him. We still do not know what he saw in her. Took him over five years to leave. They didn’t have children together, only separately, but still he loved them all. I don’t think she ever loved anyone. She tried to lay claim to his farm and the truck he bought when his daughter was an infant, fifteen years ago. “I’m officially divorced,” he says with relief. But still she’s suing him: lost wages, a cow, the farm, and the truck still. Almost freedom, but still so far to go.
——-
He had been gone for nearly fifteen years when the judge granted my mother’s divorce. Five children, three now grown, who could now officially be the step-children to the man who had been raising them since 1984 and their littlest brother and littlest sister could now have married parents. But what good did it do her? I’ll let you know if I figure it out.
——-
Perhaps married in a drug-induced-haze, perhaps not, it didn’t last long and he went on to marry three more women. I don’t know the stories because my dad’s life is none of my business and I hate how he talks of all the fucked up stuff he’s done and laughs, as if it does not matter that he hurt so many people along the way. But when it comes to those who hurt him, we should all respect his right to hate them and treat us with bitterness and spite. If not for the demise of three marriages, the fourth would not have began. The legality of it was never necessary, but that they met was. In 1988 my dad died the day his daughter Melisa was murdered. His first biological daughter, birthed by his third wife. Born thirteen months later, I’ve only ever known this shell of a human we call Dad, sometimes I think it’s only to be nice.
——-
Two days after, I was sitting down crying, it was Easter. A sister sits next to me, I don’t remember if I had shared the story yet and I don’t remember who was holding my ten day old son, a sister sits next to me. “Do you wanna hear something cool?” I gave some sort of acknowledgement that I did. “I’m gonna have a baby!” She hadn’t told the brothers or Mom and Dad yet. I had the privilege of hearing the news first. It was the first step she took toward becoming my real sister, not just someone who shares some DNA with me. In turn, each of my siblings (well most of them, but MK is a story of her own) would reach out in an effort to distract me from my pain. It was all they knew how to do because they had no idea who I was. Months later at a family gathering, the oldest of my mother’s daughters says to my mother, “B is actually really funny.” Mom smiles, she’s known this for a while and I think she had been hoping her children would notice. It’s not that I couldn’t have formed bonds while still married; it’s that I thought I would never lose what I had, so I didn’t bother to have anything else in my life, well that was only the reason at first, later it was because I was too tired to care and too anxious to interact. MR was the first of them who I told the most painful chapters too; we were never close, but he’s always loved his baby sister and now he knows I’m human, not the angel some tried to pretend I was.
Anonymous in Cali 