Friday's Child - Water Under The Bridge

Sometimes the water under the bridge stays turbulent awhile.

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From Monday November 5

Still Taking Calls

I still take my sister’s calls because we’re in the midst of probate of our dad’s will. I need to maintain contact so when the matter is concluded I can pay out the remainder of the estate. That’ll be next spring sometime. Until then I will speak to her.
She is a vulnerable and needs help. I recognize that, but there’s nothing I can legally do to get her the kind of help I suspect she needs.
Listening to her paranoia and blame serves no purpose. It does not help her situation and it leaves me feeling used.
I stay on the phone long enough to determine what she wants. That’s all.
Once the legal matters are completed I may well not accept her calls anymore. I do not know.
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Update June 20/08

We didn’t have to go through Probate after all.
I signed some papers a few months ago instead.
No payout yet, but I am sure it will arrive at top government speed sometime during the current epoch.

Friday's Child - Asking For It

Was pain ever welcome? Did I ever want to be hit?
Yes.
In all honesty I did quite literally ask for it a few times because pain made me feel alive.
Nothing else seemed to touch me and neither did anyone else for that matter. Pain and blood was my way of confirming that I was there.
I reasoned out what to do and I did it.
It’s easy to pick a fight with someone who is violent and insane. What I did was simple, brutal, and frankly, satisfying. I’d ambush my sister. I’d walk up behind her and punch her hard between the shoulder blades.
I’ll be honest. It felt good. I was causing her pain just like she’d done to me so many times.
Of course she’d return the favor. She’d hit me a few times, maybe scratch or gouge an arm for good measure.
Sure it hurt. That’s the point. Acute physical pain took my mind off the dull ache in my chest that was my constant, nagging companion. It served to remind me that when I wasn’t being hit I was being ignored.
I did this when I was eight or nine. I don’t recall how often I did it. I like to think it was only 2-3 times, but it was likely closer to a dozen.
It wasn’t right, it wasn’t good and it really didn’t help. I felt awake and alive briefly, but the dull ache always came back.

Friday’s Child - Questioning My Existence

From Wednesday, June 13, 2007

I didn’t say anything when I was young about Dawn hitting me.
“Dawn? Do that? Nah. She’s smart and popular." I’d imagine them saying.
I’d look a around my life and see that my parents ignored it. If it ever did come up it was laughed off.
"These kids never get along," I remember my dad saying once.

Dawn was very smart, no question about it. She was top of her class each year and popular, too.
I was withdrawn, my shoulders were hunched up, and I was quiet and managed average marks in school. Today that might be a signal that’s there’s something wrong. Forty years ago sibling abuse didn’t happen.

I could have done better in school but I didn’t try. It’s a small Gr.1-12 school and we had many of the same teachers. I had an irrational fear of being compared to my sister. No teacher ever said it to me, but I still thought it.
The last thing I ever wanted was to be anything like her. So I was an average student, didn’t have many friends, and I was a tomboy. But more than anything I was a virtual non-entity.
Despite being social opposites, I’d go to family reunions and she’d stay home. Some family member would greet me by her name, as happens to everyone with a sibling, and I’d correct them.

Their response?

"Oh, how is Dawn?"

So I’d say she’s okay and that would be it. Unless I asked, “How are you?” or something the conversation would end.
No “Oh, I’m sorry Leah. How are you?” or anything. No acknowledgement of my existence. Just a question about Dawn.

It wore me down. My parents ignored what was happening which made me feel like it didn’t matter. Outsiders mistook me for Dawn and then just wanted to know about her. I felt like a non-entity. I was sure I wasn’t Dawn, and I made sure I didn’t act like her, but beyond that, nothing.

Which brings me to my point: Why would anyone believe someone who doesn’t exist?

Friday’s Child - A Lesson For Unlearning

I’ve been re-running these Prozac Palace posts with the hope that anyone who needs to read this sort of thing will find them.
It’s occurred to me that readers may wish to comment, but not know what to say.
This is understandable.
You’re under no obligation to say anything. If you want to, but are at a loss, may I suggest this simple phrase: I read it.

#
Originally posted Monday, April 30, 2007

Were my parents any help against my sister's bullying? A commenter asked this and I gave the short, easy answer of no. But it’s not entirely correct.

Mom stepped in once. I was about eight and we’d gotten into a fight in the living room that wound up in Dawn’s bedroom. It’s been 40 years so I can’t recall exactly how it happened, but I remember clearly that I was winning.

My sister and I were about an arm’s length apart when mom came in and said we’d better stop. At first I was relieved. She’d stopped a fight. Then I got scared because I knew wasn’t really over and that Dawn was just going to finish the fight later on.

Then I realized something that proved true all through our lives. The only time mom ever stepped in was when I had the upper hand.
I learned that day to not stand up for myself. It’s quicker and more efficient to let Dawn win.
I still fought back to a minor degree. I wasn’t a total doormat, I simply had sense enough to take it.

Physical pain is transient. Gouges and scratches stop bleeding. Emotional hurt endures, though, and stopping a fight because the wrong kid was winning was an experience I only needed once.

For background on my sister and her mental illness please see this post at The Goat's Lunch Pail and this Goat's Lunch Pail post and Talia’s post on it at the Centre for Emotional Well-Being.

Friday’s Child – Defending My Self

I’m re-running several of my posts from the defunct Prozac Palace blog. I decided to run them on successive Fridays and then remembered the old poem “Monday’s Child.”
In it, Friday’s Child is full of woe. I’m not filled with woe, or anything of that nature. I simply like the way it matches the subject at hand.

(From Thursday, April 26, 2007)

Kick Back

My sister and I fought 2-3 three times week until I was about 10 years old and commonly over nothing.

She’s four years older and had been the center of attention during those four years. To hear her tell the story I started it. Apparently, back in the crib I wouldn’t let her near me. I’d kicked my legs at her to keep her away.

Later it became a good defense.

When I was about seven or eight I did the same thing. She’d start hitting me for whatever reason came to her mind and then I’d run. She’d be right behind me, hammering on me with her angry red fists and screaming. Getting away from her wasn’t the point; I needed to get on my back so I could use my legs.

My arms may as well have been useless. I might have put them up to guard my face, but mostly they hung by my sides. It came naturally. I never thought about doing this. The defensive move simply happened and it kept the jackhammers away from the softer areas of my body.

We kept it up for several minutes with both of us yelling for mom. When it was over, no matter what had happened, she always whined and stomped to mom, “She hit me!”

Emotional Vivisection

Memoirs are difficult. Writing a memoir means cutting deeply into the layered tissues of your life and exposing what you’ve found there.

If it was just resurrecting moments and dispassionately rendering them on to the screen or the page, then it wouldn’t be a painful, exhilarating exercise. It would be dry and boring and unsellable.
A dry rendering of the facts of a life works in some arenas; memoir writing is not one of them.

I’ve got a hand-written journal I wrote over the course of a summer more than a decade ago. Events were fresher in my mind then than they are today so it’s a great resource. My readership was me and that made noting the private, painful moments easier.

A few years back I tried to do a memoir, but it was restricted to the odd moments of my life. For instance, I used to see a drawing of a scary clown on a wall in the barn and I remember clearly being three years old and watching a beautiful being draw it.
But I can’t do one without the other. I have to write about growing up with a mentally unbalanced, violent sibling.
The two sides of my life, violence in one world, beautiful beings looking after me in another, go together.
Both sides have to be cut into and examined for a proper emotional vivisection.
I’ve started. I wonder if I have the courage to see it through?

A Violent, Insane Sister

My sister, whom I wrote of in an earlier post, is violent. She dedicated her young life to hitting and scratching me. By the time she was 12 she had long, sharp, pointed fingernails and she took great delight in using them as talons.
She liked to dig into the soft flesh of my arms just below the elbows and rake her way down.
Yeah, she drew blood.

Sometimes I hit back even though I knew it would just make it worse. At least I got to inflict some pain back.

She’s four years older than me. When we were young she was bigger and stronger. And she was the favorite.
Near as I could figure it, she was the favorite because my parents first child, a boy, died after a few months. Dawn came along a few years later and lived.

By the time I got here the novelty had worn off. If memory serves my mom had a miscarriage back when I was seven. It did not have an impact on how I was viewed.

Dawn is, or was, very smart. Book-learning smart I called it because she doesn’t seem to be able to apply what she’s learned to actual, real life situations. I don’t for a moment believe she has a lick of common sense.
So there she was smart, popular and could get away with doing or saying just about anything. If I spoke up around company my mom would turn to me and ask, “How do you know so much?”
Dawn would come out with some ridiculous torn-from-the tabloid-headlines comment and the conversation turned to it.

She beat me quite regularly. I figured it out once to an average of 2-3 times a week until I was 10 years old. We moved into a larger house when I was ten and I had room to avoid her.
Sometimes she pounded me with her fists, but for the last few years I was raked or gouged by her fingernails. The scratches and gouges were deep and lasted several days. I’d get a fresh batch before any had a chance to heal.

I was ashamed of them. I thought if anyone could see them they’d know I deserved them so I covered them up.
In Gr. 4, irrespective of the weather I wore three layers, a turtleneck, a shirt over it and a sweater over the shirt. I was scared that everyone could still the long hideous scratches on my arms.
I’m no longer ashamed of this and haven’t been for many years now. Her anger, jealousy and inability to deal with me, or almost anyone for that matter, are her problems, not mine.

She is insane. It wasn’t discovered until her teen years, but if you ask me, she was nuts from birth. Oh, if anyone out there has a problem with my use of the slang term “nuts,” feel free to call me out on it.

I lived as the preferred target of a violent, mentally ill sibling. I’ve got a right to say what I like about mental illness, and there’s not much anyone can do or say to me that’ll bother me.
If you want mental illness treated with sensitivity, you won’t get much of it here. I’m speaking for the sane ones like me out there that no one thinks about.

More information about sibling abuse here
https://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/yourchild/sibabuse.htm

and here
http://www.sasian.org/papers/rivabuse.htm

and here’s a news article about an abused sibling:
http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060228/NEWS/602280429/1039