So Angry at You

It’s weird; being alive is weird.

People end up as the antagonists in your story and without even meaning to you end up the antagonist in other peoples’ stories.

The way that I tried to make one last attempt to fix thing with Carly, my mom made one last attempt to fix things with me.

Beofe that, there was the fall out with Mary.

I couldn’t believe that everything went wrong with Mary.

Mary was my baby. Because Mom and Jose always left in the closet and didn’t feed or change her, so I did it. When there were no baby wipes, I used paper towels or toilet paper. This was when I was seven and had no idea how babies worked, except that I knew she couldn’t sit in a filthy diaper and I knew she had to eat.

There was one somewhat notable event that I’m not going to talk about in detail. I’ll mention it, because it seems like I should. There was an incident with boiling the nipples of the baby bottles. They have to be boiled to clean them. There was a fire. The house didn’t burn down, but all of the pets died and that’s all I really want to say about that.

There was a big black burn mark on the ceiling above the stove for years after. Until Mom decided to renovate the kitchen when I was 15. Every once in a while, I looked up at that big black circle on the white ceiling and I remembered that all of the animals had died of smoke inhalation.

Anyway, Mary doesn’t remember that. Carly barely does.

When Mary was a baby and a toddler, she came to me for everything.

“Jen, can I have cheerios?”

“Jen, can we play outside?”

“Jen, I peed my pants.”

Toilet training was a nightmare with Mary. Not that I have anything to compare it to, because I only ever toilet trained one kid and I did it when I was nine…ten…eleven years old. Fuck, that kid did not want to use the toilet.

It stressed me out so much, because if she peed herself while we were out doing something, Mom would lose her shit. Mom also wouldn’t buy anymore pull-ups.

How does a fourth-grader toilet train her younger sister? With bribes.

But they didn’t really work. I didn’t have a lot to bribe her with.

I lavished praise on her whenever she did use the toilet.

Let me get right to the crux of it, I loved Mary but I also resented the fuck out of her. She needed so much all the time and she was so exhausting and always doing things to set Mom off and it was my job to keep her safe from that, but she was so incredibly bad at just keeping her head down, doing what she should, and staying out of trouble.

Mary was very quiet and for the first few months she talked all she did was repeat things. She would repeat whole phrases from television shows, badly butchered of course.Eventually she started actually communicating.

Mary was always very sensitive. More sensitive than me. Can you believe that? What a feat. Give the woman a prize.

Mary loved organizing things. If I sat her down in front of the VHS cabinet and helped her make piles, she could stay happy for hours. Her system always made some degree of sense. Which was amazing, because she did this when she was like 2.

When she got older, Mary never believed me that she was smart, that she must be very smart because she did such weird stuff like that. Mary is dyslexic and went undiagnosed for many years. She struggled to learn to read and was always below grade level. She was very nearly placed into a special ed program. Mom used to always snap “I think Mary is special. She has some kind of learning disability.”

There is nothing wrong with having a learning disability or being special needs. But the way our mom used to say it with such disgust and derision. It’s no wonder Mary always said things like “I’m not good at school. I’m not smart that way.”

In elementary school, Mary didn’t make friends. She didn’t have her first friend until middle school. All through elementary school, she was terrified to open her mouth in school. She would hide in the bathroom at recess. She was called names constantly.

This is all an important part of why I am the villain in Mary’s story.

If we compare Mary’s early childhood to mine, hers is objectively worse.

As a baby and toddler, my grandmother took care of me. She spoiled me with lots of toys and dresses and sent me to a fancy preschool. She held me and sang to me every night.

Mary sat in a closet all day until I came home from school. I don’t think Jose looked in on her once. I don’t think this because she broke her diaper open once and it was smeared all over the crib and walls and all over her. It seemed like she’d been sitting that way for a long time.

Mary was burned very badly when she was two years old.

Mary was picked up and hurled into a wall so hard the wall broke, again when she was only two.

The first time Mary tried to run away she was four and she was alone. A neighbor found her toddling down the road in her underwear.

I was at school.

I had no idea where she was going, because when I asked she just shrugged.

Mary’s earliest years were lonely, sad, violent, filthy.

But she had me.

She explained it to me, one of the very last times we were together. Because she didn’t up and drop me like Carly did. She did a slow fade. Her fade was completed years ago and everything has been hard enough for Mary. I won’t stress her out more by demanding attention from her. She’s been through so much more than I have and if she ever wants to talk to me again, I know she knows where to find me. Maybe she never will reach out to me again and I have to be okay with that.

So here is how she explained it to me, why she’s so angry and resentful towards me.

I’m not going to be able to remember it word for word. But I will retell it as best I can.

“You took care of me, Jen. Everyone was mean except for you. I loved spending time with you. I remember you read me all of those stories and you let me sleep in your bed whenever I wanted. And you protected me. You always knew what to do. I think I thought you were a grown-up. I dunno. I just knew you were the person to go to if I needed something.

Then suddenly, you weren’t.

You started spending all that time in your room, playing No doubt really loud and reading books and taping all those weird pictures up all over your walls.

I missed you and was really sad that you didn’t like me anymore. If I tried to come talk to you, you yelled and slammed the door in my face. You yelled a few times before that. I know you hit me a few times when I was little. But you were always really sorry after and it always seemed like you were sad you did it. Then you were completely different and it wasn’t like you were just annoyed for a second. It was like you really hated me and wanted me to go away forever.

I stopped trying to come to your room. even though I was really upset. And you never went back to normal. you never did.

You started going crazy and fighting mom all the time.

I was afraid of you.

Mom was always like that and you never were. But then you were just like her.

There was one day you really lost it and I’ve never seen anyone lose it like that. You were on the ground screaming, with your face all red. Carly pulled me into the bedroom and Carly was never nice to me back then, but it was like she was trying to be you, since you weren’t you anymore.

And I feel like you haven’t been you since.

So many bad things happened. You kept going to the hospital. You forgot all about me and I was almost glad you forgot me, because you were so scary.

It’s hard not to be angry at you, because I loved you a lot and I thought you loved me. And nothing ever hurt so much as when you forgot all about me and went crazy like that.

I try to forgive you. I try to hang out with you.

I don’t like being around you.

You’re my sister, but I don’t know how to deal with you.

Thanks for taking care of me when I was really little. I have a lot of nice memories with you. Like when we’d sit behind the shed and you’d sing “You are My Sunshine.” That’s still my favorite song, Jen.

I love you, okay?

I’m so angry at you though.

I do the best I can with it all…”

It was something like that. I’m paraphrasing. This happened in my apartment in New Hampshire, when I’d been living with Ernie for about a year. We sat on the floor of my living room and I told her how I wished we were closer, how I wish she didn’t ignore my texts half the time.

And over the course of maybe an hour, she explained that to me. With tearful interjections from me, of course.

That’s it then.

My relationships with both of my sisters are destroyed for all of time because of me. Mostly because of how shitty and emotional I was as a teenager. But that’s not all of it.

My mom fed this. I know she did. She talked so much shit about me to both my sisters. She was in both their ears talking about how emotional and dramatic I am.

I am emotional and dramatic.

Yes.

I enter a guilty plea.

It’s not that my mom was wrong to say “Jen is so crazy and emotional and dramatic.” It’s just that it stings a little more because of it. She’s done a lot of awful stuff to all of us. Did she have to also facilitate the estrangement we now all have with each other?

You know back when I still talked to my mom, she talked shit about both of them to me too. I ignored it. Because she would literally talk shit about Mary having an eating disorder and talk about how stressful the whole situation was FOR HER. She would vent like Mary had struggled with anorexia just to get attention, just to mess up HER life. I ignored it all.

I don’t know why my sisters couldn’t have done the same for me.

Then again, I mean, both of them have enough good reasons not to want to be around me even without that.

I suck. I did shitty things. I won’t even tell you half the shitty things. I already said I’m an unreliable narrator.

I’m bitter and sad and mad and wish I could fix it. But I know I can’t and I know that sometimes actions have consequences. I’m dealing with the consequences of my own actions. So it hurts. Consequences do sometimes. I have to figure out a way to be okay with this.

Every time I’m upset about anything, I end up crying about the fact that my sisters won’t talk to me. Or crying about all the shitty stuff my mom did.

So people keep telling me “Shut up about all the nonsense you carry on about. All of THAT is the real issue.”

Cool. Well. I have no idea how to resolve that.

Because there will be no happy ending.

And to pivot, another conversation was had three years after that conversation.

I am the antagonist in Mary’s story. I was the steady loving not-always perfect-but-mostly-there-for-her older sister and then suddenly, I wasn’t that anymore. I was the screaming, hysterical, physically fighting our mom and destroying the house scary older sister. I took away her only source of love, comfort, and stability.

And by the time she was twelve, she had a serious eating disorder.

She painted constantly. She drew and put the drawings up all over her walls. She would go out by herself and walk to yard sales and thrift stores. She started collecting porcelain dolls. She had hundreds the last time I saw her. She became very interested in Victorian post-moderm photography. As a teenager, she would take the money she earned from her part-time job and order post-moderm photographs off the internet. That worried me a little. The dead bodies she had on the walls by her bed. But then I spent years obsessed with Columbine. I understand why it’s nice to just think about death sometimes. Even if you’ll never have the nerve to do a An Hero. It’s nice to think that one day you won’t be thinking and living and feeling and no matter what happens, all of it will end at some point. Or maybe the post-moderm photographs weren’t really about that. When I asked Mary about them she would say, “I like how they look. Creepy, but also beautiful. It’s art.”

So fine, maybe it was just art.

Well…let’s keep going.

The conversation that was had three years after Mary told me all of that happened in a different apartment in a different state.

This was when my mom made her last ditch effort to fix things with me.

She didn’t come herself. She sent her wife.

I mean, yes, she did try to reach out to me many times. Like Carly ignored me, I ignored Mom.

Then her wife texted me. I’d only met her wife a couple of times. They’d been married for maybe…3 years? something like that…when this woman reached out to me. I thought she was okay. Kind of funny and very easy-going.

Mom’s very obvious ploy worked. Even with me knowing this was tactical and Mom had sent Chelsea to talk to me, even knowing that I told Chelsea I’d love to see her.

She drove hours to come to my house.

She was very chatty and talked to me for hours at my dining room table.

Chelsea is a very butch lesbian. Very masc. She works a very traditionally-masculine job. She talked to me about her work and what it was like being the only woman at her workplace. We had fun talking.

Then she broached the subject that I knew she would.

“She’s your mom. You only have one.”

I resented that statement, but I still tried to explain my side of it.

“I don’t trust her not to hurt me. She always talks about me behind my back. She goes around saying I’m crazy.”

What Chelsea said next made me so livid that I kicked the woman out of my house. She stood outside, called my mom and cried right there on the sidewalk.

Oh well…who cares what she said?

Who cares about any of it?

Me obviously.