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aleatoryalarmalligator · 7 years

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my life story continued..

In the winter of 1999, our hot water heater broke, and we had to heat water in a bucket on the wood stove. Which was also our only means of heat, so we all got bunk beds – except him and we all slept around the wood stove in our bunk beds. When my mother left, she also took every one of the antique toys I played with growing up and cherished, and also all my antique golden books that are worth hundreds, my specialty 80's toys, my goosebumps collection and she had my uncle Rusty who owns a successful second-hand store in Kellogg Idaho, pawn them for her so she could take the money and spend it on meth. So from then on until I was about fourteen, I didn't have many things. I ended up just keeping every piece of homework I got back from the teachers, and I collected rocks at the creek. Those were my things. My friends would come in my room sometimes, and they would be absolutely baffled because unlike them, I didn't have things. I just had boring rocks and sticks on my shelves. My father bought me a learners guitar that Christmas, but I made the mistake of taking it to my mother's house where her boyfriend went and traded it for something and I never saw it again.

So when I wasn't at my mom's horrible place, I was freezing to death at home, or suffering from anxiety death in school. This kind of pressure was probably good for me, but I will never know because I've only done it once and do not care to do it again.

Mrs. Brammer, my 4th grade teacher, probably getting the let-in from my 3rd grade teacher, that I was an exceptionally 'stupid' child decided that I was a slow learner. So in fourth grade, they got me started on reading Dr. Seuss books. It was kind of made known to me that I would never evolve past children's books. It didn't help that my nose was constantly bleeding out of nowhere or that my hair was super frizzy. Sometimes in class I would push my eyes as hard as I could till I saw really great colors. I would do this for most of classes sometimes, just to avoid having to be where I was, or be who I was.

My reading score was atrociously low, I will admit that. I am not sure why that was. Years later when I went to college for a brief time, they skipped me past English I to English II because I when they gave me my aptitude test I tested perfectly. Anyway, I am in a sense not sorry I appeared so unintelligent, because I ended up reading all the Shel Silverstein books, and I read The Lorax, which is such a progressive book, it probably taught me more than three years in class at my dumb elementary did.

That winter I had the misfortune of permanently fucking up my knee pretty good. I didn't break it or anything, but I had a real crash with my bike that fall. Then when it just started to heal, I fell down a flight of stairs, which reopened the scab and made it even worse and infected. And just when I thought I was done with the misfortune, I ended up slipping as I walked down the hill to go home after school, and I fell knee first into hard cement that was graciously sprinkled with monstrous hard little pieces of spiky basalt, and there was a strange burning tickling sensation like no other, and when that knee finally healed, the skin looked pretty awful and to this day it's kind of shimmery.

Because I talked to myself a lot, I guess someone reported me to the counselor. So for a short period of time I saw a counselor named Mrs. Friedburger? Something like that. Doesn't seem right but that's what I remember her name being. She came from Arkansas for some reason, just to be a counselor in this tiny little elementary school in north Idaho for some reason that I will never know the reason for, and she had a very thick accent. She was actually a really nice lady. But sometimes she would ask me these amazingly frustrating questions that nobody could answer, especially a 4th grader. She would ask me how I felt, and I would tell her. And then she would ask me what I felt underneath that. And I didn't know what on earth she meant. I was not aware that there were two or more feelings going on at the same time. I tried to explain to her that I didn't have any other feelings, but she persisted till I gave her what she wanted to hear. But then she would ask me for another feeling underneath that, which, if the second one had any grain of truth to it, the third feeling was a complete and total fabrication. I was not sure what she wanted.

She ended up assembling me, and two other girls in my age group, a girl named Nicole, who would end up having a reputation as being a pretty loose girl who was always drunk – even in school and now lives in a camper in a North Dakota oil field, and a girl named Casey, who always seemed frightened and always dated druggy rednecks who treated her rudely even though she seemed very nice herself, though a bit dull. She now is a waitress, and if for some silly reason you ever want to go visit the small pointless town of Kendrick Idaho, you can surely be guaranteed to be served by her if you so fancy.

Mrs. Friedburger called this group The Children Of Divorce. We played this board game based on divorce. Which was like bingo and candy land mixed together kind of. Then we would go around the room and we were forced to answer questions and open up about our feelings about our parents divorcing. Listening to these other girls talk, I really got the sense that, as bad as my life was, I felt like I had something else within myself I could turn to. These girls were very much like sponges. They just openly figured they would do exactly what their mothers did. They had no opinions, and their lives actually seemed rougher than mine. Both of them had rotten stepfathers for instance. They had to worry about these stepfathers in a way that I didn't have to worry at home. And I didn't even have it good at home.

I got the feeling that this wasn't really helping me at all. It probably wasn't. I got frustrated too, because Mrs. Friedburger really wanted to believe that the source of my instability and eccentricity was due to the sorrows of my parents divorce. I tried to explain to her that I just didn't like going to my mother's house, but my parent's separation was a huge relief. She just didn't buy it. In her mind, I think she really believed that all children react the same way, which they do not.

My father wasn't all that great to me though after awhile. Still didn't compare to what these girls had to go home to, but it wasn't good either. My father is incredibly talkative. He often times will talk to someone for three straight hours. Many people have said it is somewhat abrasive. He doesn't really like listening. He gets this openly annoyed look on his face if you pipe in at all. So, him going through a divorce and whathaveyou, he had a lot to say about my mother and about life in general, and I was there to hear the whole thing, but I never learned how to have an actual real conversation from him. He would talk to me until I was exhausted. I was happy to be getting so much of my father's focus, but there was a large element of this that simply wasn't fair. I had no voice, and he was making up in his mind who he thought I was. I don't think my dad can help this, but if something isn't all about something he can be doing, he really doesn't seem to genuinely understand it. I mean, he's a smart guy, and curious.

He listens to people more now that he is older, and he reads a lot and I think in his way tries very hard to understand other people. But he fails in many regards. He really just doesn't get anyone he has ever known, never had a single friend who stuck, girlfriend, and he rarely talks to his family, and this is partially because he's a total sucker. And partially because he talks and talks to people and doesn't really empathize with them. He means well most of the time. He's capable of empathy, but this empathy has to be spelled out so clearly in the sky, being broadcast from speakers repetitively, that it made him a very difficult parent for someone like me to have. He also has something kind of off about his memory. Every single day, he will kind of repeat what he said yesterday, or even a few hours ago. Growing up with it, I got used to it. But when I got older, I realized there was something kind of weird going on.

Anyway, once a month too, he flies into a rage and has to take it out on someone aggressively and with complete hatred. It's something you can mostly always count on. And that someone was generally always me. He would randomly be very cruel to me. I became extremely mistrustful of him. Because he would be very nice to me, and very focused, and then he would yell at me, call me stupid, demand things from me, scare me, shame me. And when he had me to the point where I was crying and could barely breath and didn't know up from down, he would get in my face and mock me till I felt like I was nothing. This must have made him feel better. For the life of me, I don't know what he did this for, but it had to have served some kind of purpose. After crying myself to sleep, my face stung from the salt of tears, I would go to school, be treated like nothing by my friends and teachers, go to my mother's for the weekend, be treated like nothing, and then by the next week, my father, my one and only friend would have mysteriously lost his anger and be very chipper and want to talk to me. And I think my younger siblings would watch these fights happen, and they in a way would grow to look down at me at times, internalizing the concept that I was somehow a polarizing human being. Because they were very little and did not understand what I had done wrong, but they knew it was bad.

I remember one time he repeated to me over and over that I was stupid just like my mother. And I was ugly. I was having some troubles with spelling. Which is funny because my father can't spell

apple' and I actually nearly won the spelling bee twice. He ended up throwing the spelling book at me and told me he couldn't stand looking at me anymore.

Everything is moving towards it's end, and to a new beginning, kind of. At school, I just could not keep following ten feet behind Samantha and Sarah Mae as they pretended to be Spice Girls on the playground anymore. I wrote a letter telling Samantha that I didn't want to be friends with them anymore and that neither one of them cared about me. Of course this became GIRLFIGHT! And Sarah and Samantha would gossip and look over at me. I was told that I didn't do enough to hang out with them, and I was actually the one that was isolating myself by being such a weirdo, returned in a letter under more fourth grade girl terms. Then Catherine, who I had never liked, but who was also being left out by them decided to jump on my bandwagon and separate from them as well. She then decided that I would be her new best friend.

I was sitting by myself under the shade in the corner of the playground, when Catherine started throwing rocks at me. This was always the kind of thing that I didn't like about her. She demanded that she would not stop until I became her best friend. So, I meekly agreed to be her best friend eventually. Which I hated saying. I didn't want to be her friend, but it was kind of hard for me to feel comfortable sitting in the lunch room by myself, so I took her up on terms of convenience. She then told the school counselor, Mrs. Friedburger, who was happy to see I had made a new friend and we were both sent to the counselor's room to tell her what good friends we were. But it felt like I was getting married with someone I could barely stand. I wanted her to go away, but she wouldn't.

Then, in the midst of this whole thing, Mrs. Brammer randomly assigned everyone in the class with a planet, and we had to be randomly teamed up with another student. And low and behold, they teamed me up with precious Sarah-Mae. We had never really formally hung out. She was always either hanging out with Catherine, or Samantha even though we were in the same group. It was pretty awkward to be teamed up with her while I was hashing it out with Samantha, and having an involuntary marriage to Catherine. I was great at not doing homework, but I wasn't so good at throwing other people under the bus if I could help it.

Then, that same week, my father met Sarah-Mae's mom at the store, Carol. Carol had been my dad's first serious girlfriend. He dated her when he was in the rock band for three years. Then he cheated on her, twice. And it broke her heart, and then she moved to Hawaii and New York City and Seattle where she had really interesting jobs, and she got a few degrees in college that she had trouble ever applying, and eventually she had Sarah-Mae, but then Sarah-Mae's dad went crazy, and they moved to Kendrick, which was where of course I lived. Sarah and I had actually met once before, in Zany Graze when we were three years old. I have no memory of it. But she had randomly came over and sat next to me, which was unlike her since she was a shy child.

So my father found out I had this project, and as he saw Carol as someone he could talk and talk and talk and talk at, he decided to bring me over so she and I could work on it. There was no way for me to avoid her, much as I wanted to. We were destined to be friends.

It turned out that Sarah-Mae and I had a lot in common. We were both really invested in drawing. We liked the same shows. I thought Sarah's room was really neat. She had a fish tank in her room. Her mother had built her a giant dollhouse for her barbies. She had a dog named Bear Dog and a cat named Precious, who hissed at me when she saw me in the house. Carol made us popcorn, and she listened to the radio. I thought she was definitely a cool mom. Their home was cluttered, but in a neat orderly way. Like, the fridge was covered in magnets and there was a lot of antique things and plants about, but everything was where it should be just the same. Sarah had a lot of knick knacks. She liked to skateboard, and play super Nintendo.

I will admit, we didn't hit it off as well as Rachelle and I did. Rachelle and I had been almost too good of friends. We just sort of became the same person after awhile. We were inseparable and we tended to cause damage and chaos everywhere we went. She had the same inner wildness as me, only Rachelle could actually show it, where as I have always been a secretly wild person who has trouble finding outlets. Sarah and my friendship has always been different because even while we are close and very similar, there is always a distance and a strong sense that she is she and I am me. It's not a bad thing, it actually kind of fosters an appreciation you might not be able to have if you were to not have boundaries, but it makes for a completely different kind of friendship. There were rules with Sarah-Mae that you had to kind of go by. Which made me feel awkward because I didn't have any rules at all. She was a much more existential friend than Rachelle had been.

She didn't have rules to be mean most of the time, it was just part of her nature. She had stomach issues so she could not eat certain things or she would become horribly nauseated. She had to carry around crackers all the time in case she would get sick. This was I think something that burdened her life so much it actually became part of her personality. Till well into junior high, she rarely ever went to her friend's house, with a few exceptions. We all had to visit her. Part of it early on was that she was so attached to her mother that she felt bad if she stayed the night somewhere else. This always baffled me. I was always looking for an excuse to get away from those lunatics at home. But even so, after her mom wasn't the reason anymore, that's just kind of how she is most of the time. You have to kind of work around her a bit. It's something you get used to. She has to gauge everything cautiously before she jumps. And I have occasionally had to push her out of her comfort zone I think.

Her room had to stay in a certain order. When you stayed the night, you had to make sure your feet were clean, I have always felt weird if I overate in front of Sarah too, even though I am sure she doesn't actually care – especially now. In a way, for me at least, I always kind of wanted to make her a Rachelle. There is something a little bit lonely at times about being Sarah's friend. But we really just love each other a lot. Sarah was actually a very nice person at home. She was always a fantastic listener. She didn't have the same taste in destruction that I did. So I learned to kind of suppress my inner anguish and delightful need for chaos at least a little bit, though she seemed to appreciate, at least in theory that I was that way. I wouldn't say that Sarah isn't that way herself. It's just different somehow. She is a very pleasant gentle person who harmonizes with people, and studies them in a way that is very pleasant to be around. There is a level of thought to things she does that most people put no thought into whatsoever. I think that being around her probably offset a lot of traits I would have otherwise picked up from my family that I would have been a lot worse off for having.

So after learning that doing the Venus project wasn't so bad after all, we just started hanging out everyday we could. It became almost a daily routine. We would get off after school, go to her house, share a bag of popcorn, watch Pokemon, and then we would both draw alien girls together. We bonded over this. Sarah for the first few years lied and said that somehow she had come up with alien girls first, though she later admitted to me that this wasn't true. She just was envious of them and wanted to draw them without feeling like she was copying me.

This made my life a lot better overall. Catherine was not too happy about it. There was this big fight over who get's to have 'The Renee' in the playground. Sarah grabbed one of my arms and Catherine grabbed the other. I remember both of them were tugging on me. I felt pretty annoyed. I had told Catherine to go away. She was crying, and saying I broke my promise. And she's right, I did. I had forged a friendship with Sarah-Mae, which made me an in-disposable member of 'the group' again. Catherine was kind of mean. I know she was just a little girl who's family was messed up. And she's grown up to be a pretty nice person from what I can tell. She avoids most of her family. She's married to this guy who I actually work with. They are both kind of dullards by my standards. But they seem to really love each other and they have some kids. So I am glad that Catherine went on to have a somewhat good life.

By the end of the school year, I still had a lot of issues. But I was sort of adjusting to Rachelle not being around anymore.

Then I had another really horrible worst day of my life – at least to me back then. We were going to have picture day at school, and my father, in a rare moment of empathetic realization thought that perhaps I might like something to wear for picture day that year.. He talked to Carol – who had already grown weary of him (and probably still didn't like him from the times he cheated on her when they were young), and she was going to take Sarah-Mae down to the really atrociously horrible clothing store that was in Kendrick. Basically, it was a store that had overpriced 80's clothes in it, before it was realized in the 2010's that 80's was actually fucking awesome and we had forgotten. So Sarah and I went together to this dumb store, where years ago my sister Maria had the cops called for shoplifting.

Sarah and I both struggled to find something acceptable for school, but we eventually both wanted the same shirt. I was a lot heavier than Sarah. The shirt fit me, but not spectacularly well. It fit Sarah very well. I remember going into their changing area, which was basically part of the room, and for some reason I will never understand, Carol started talking about how much prettier and more petite her own daughter was than me with the snotty woman in the store. I had up to that point, not really compared myself to Sarah in that way. But it became obvious to me that in that moment when most people saw us hanging out in town, they probably just saw a cute skinny girl hanging out with a fat scraggly girl who's clothes didn't fit.

It really was too much. Me now – I would have said something snarky and made everyone uncomfortable. Or I just might not care. I have an extremely exquisite sense of aesthetic. I also don't value life in this way. But to have an adult ultimately talking about how fat I was, was really hard for me to take. To be fair, I think the store lady was the one who really was emphasizing my weight per say, but Carol was using it as a launching pad to talk about how lovely her daughter was compared to other girls. I was too afraid to come out of the dressing room at that point because my entire body was shaking and I was weeping silently. Eventually I found the strength and held it in and came out. Sarah looked extremely guilty. I don't think she really liked what they were saying about me, but didn't know what to say. She was trying to pretend it didn't happen. She certainly wasn't going to go against her mother. Carol then superseded my decision to get the shirt that I wanted, and instead I ended up buying nothing and I felt totally horrible. Sarah got the shirt, and she wore it for picture day. Looking back at the pictures, I wasn't all that fat at all. It was just that Sarah was still 70 lbs. I was probably 105 lbs. And I was pudgy. I was at that stage where you have to stop shopping in the kids section, but I didn't know it yet. And actually, that shirt sucked. The shirt I ended up having to wear was way cooler.

I held my breakdown in somehow for the rest of the evening, even though it felt like a golf ball was jammed in my throat. When my father picked me up after work later that evening, even though it's a bad idea to cry in front of him, I did so anyway. I lost control and started wailing. I couldn't hold it in anymore. I think the outburst shocked him to at first have sympathy. He tried to comfort me. But then I think the notion that other adults saw me as less started making him feel insecure as well. Like, in his dumb little head it was like I had lost him an award. I could not stop crying. Eventually after twenty minutes of this at home. He began screaming at me. He told me I was fat and ugly and that everything Carol said about me was true. I wasn’t like other girls. I was an ugly freak. He told me to shut up. He told me to shut up a lot growing up.

I cried until three in the morning or so. Before finally mercifully passing out from exhaustion.

In case you want to read the first parts of my personal tale here are the links to the first, second, third and fourth parts.

PART 4

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/160729982054/being-10-in-1999

PART 3

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/160399693214/about-me-the-third-part-i-did-it-after-all

PART 2

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/160333575899/life-story-part-2

PART 1

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/160186590059/about-me-life-story-part-1

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