Adult Supervision Required-
We moved to a very quirky town in Indiana in the summer of 1988. It was the first time I had ever lived away from my grandparents. It was the farthest east I had ever travelled.
Everything was SO green, and green was my mom’s favorite color. She loved to grow things and the rainy climate made for a LOT of vegetation.
It was also cloudy almost every single day. Mom didn’t do as well without sunshine. She couldn’t soak up enough of it with the clouds in the way.
I saw so many rainbows, and the creek just by our house would rise and flood the yard. We were only allowed to go down to the creek once. It was easier to forbid us than to go with us. Problem solved. No need to educate us about creeks or teach us how to get out if we ever do fall in because she said “no,” and that’s all there was to it.
I did not go down to the creek.
We only stayed in that first house a year. I learned to ride my bike there though. Our driveway opened into the parking lot of the church next door. I wasn’t necessarily stuck between a rock and a hard place but I was located between the rising creek and a baptismal pool.
I learned to ride a bike, but I never got good at it. I was almost 10 by the time I learned, and I was grateful that they wouldn’t be able to make fun of me for not being able to anymore. My cousins didn’t move out there with us, but they were still in my head, judging me, sorting me into my place.
I was only allowed to ride my bike in the church parking lot. The parking lot’s only exit was to the highway that led out of town. There was no outlet on the opposite side because a train track ran just behind the landlord’s house.
I can remember one time that my brother and I walked down to the train tracks. The tracks were lined with chokecherries. Mom had told us we wouldn’t like them because they’re bitter, but she didn’t say we couldn’t eat them. I liked the bitterness, and enjoyed quite a few of them during the excursion.
My brother kept pointing out how dangerous it was, and trying to increase the risk. Walking on the rails like a balance beam. Pretending he was going to fall and laughing when I would cry. He talked about how little time you would have to get off of the track because of how fast the train was. He said if the train hit me, there wouldn’t be anything left for them to find. He laughed. He held me on the tracks, and asked me if I thought he could let go in time to hop back so the train wouldn’t get him too.
There was no train that day. As he pointed out on the walk back, I was never in any danger, he was just talking. “Don’t be such a baby.”
“And don’t you dare tell Mom. Or else.”
Latch Key Kids
Mom and Dad both worked, and mom didn’t get home until 5pm. The shop they worked at was about 5 houses farther down the highway, so they were “right there if we needed anything.” I wasn’t allowed to walk there by myself because it was too dangerous, but I was welcome to come hang out in the shop IF my brother wanted to walk me over. Otherwise, my brother was in charge.
My brother liked being in charge. He liked making the rules. He liked knowing that Mom would be on his side no matter what. He liked knowing that Dad would defer to Mom about everything regarding us kids. He liked knowing that it was his time to get payback for all the favoritism I had received.
I was never taught how to wash dishes. In Grandma’s house Grandma had always done the dishes and I never thought anything about it. Now the expectation was that my brother and I would do the dishes.
I got in trouble for the pans not being clean, and getting the cabinets greasy. Dishes were pulled out of cabinets and inspected then thrown back in the sink to do them again. “It’s not that hard.”
I got in trouble for not using hot water. I had never really dealt with hot water before that. Even my showers were started by someone else, until we moved. My hands were so red, and I had to force them to dart into the water quickly for each dish. Mom hated plastic so all of our cups and plates were glass, which retained the heat from the water. The plates specifically were Corelle, which are incredibly durable, but when they do break they shatter into a million tiny shards.
We had this very worn, thin carpet in the kitchen. (Who the heck carpets a kitchen?) If I dropped a plate and it broke mom would get madder. Then I’d have to clean up the glass which was impossible with the garage sale vacuum mom acquired for us. It was just never good enough.
I asked for gloves, like they show in the commercials and Mom got mad. We didn’t need to waste money on me being a baby. I just needed to stop thinking I was better than everyone else and just do the chore.
She’d get so angry if I cried. She frequently complained about me being too emotional and crying over everything all of the time. “Life’s full of pain. If you can’t handle this, you’re not going to make it.”
(She had a point, and from her perspective she was doing me a favor and preparing me for the world. She’d had to work hard her entire life, and stuff down her pain the entire time. There was no space for it.
We had a culture of toughness. We could take it. It was in our bones. We all told stories of how much pain we could endure. Pain was a proving ground.
Mom didn’t know that she had Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. She didn’t know why her own life was so painful. She just knew that the world didn’t stop for it.
She had been a foreman at Brown and Root, a construction company, running a crew of men without a problem, masking her own pain every single day, and she couldn’t get her own 8-year-old to wash a dish.)
I got in trouble for using too much soap. I was told I was wasteful and just playing around.
I got in trouble if I whined because my arms were getting tired. I got in trouble if I got sidetracked by the bubbles. I got in trouble if I put the dishes in the rack wrong.
My brother would put them away. It took him 5 minutes to do so. He would get in trouble if he didn’t throw it back into the sink to make me do over and the dirty dishes made it into the cabinets.
Dirty dishes didn’t make it into the cabinets after that. I can’t even feel hot water now. I worked as a dishwasher for years without gloves using only hot water. It kept people from messing with my dish pit because they would scald themselves. I can’t feel my fingertips.
In a magnanimous move, Mom found us a used dishwasher. It was the kind that stood alone and had the long hose that attached to the sink. She was not going to live without a dishwasher any more.
She showed us how to hook it to the faucet. I doubt that I’d have figured out the connector on my own. I’m grateful I didn’t have to experience my brother trying to figure it out. He had a habit of taking everything apart.
I was not aware that it used different soap. I did not feel like it was safe to ask questions, and I guess I believed that if I needed to know something they would tell me, and if they didn’t tell me then I should’ve already known. I didn’t make that up on my own, they frequently told me that I should have known something.
So I used the dish soap- the liquid, handwashing, dish soap. I knew I had seen liquid soap being poured into dishwashers on TV. I had no clue that it was formulated differently to avoid the same sudsing that makes us feel like it’s doing something when we hand wash our dishes. I was 8, and was not raised doing dishes.
I was grateful the damn thing was loaded, and we got it running. My brother wanted to be the one to turn it on. I didn’t want to get hit. We each played our role. Then we walked away, probably to go watch TV.
Each evening, about 5 minutes before Mom would get home we would run around and do most of the rest of our list that Mom made to keep us busy. My brother knew he could pull his off in 5 minutes. I had no time management skills, so Mom would come home and nitpick everything that didn’t get done and everything that I did wrong, which was everything. (I can hear her now in the back of my mind telling me to stop feeling sorry for myself.)
When the five-minute-scramble came, we went out to the kitchen we found it flooded with bubbles. I was so scared. My brother was clearly scared too because he joined me scooping up double handfuls of bubbles to carry to the sink, which just stacked on each other.
We didn’t have a mop. My brother tried to vacuum it.
Mom came in and laughed. She thought it was hilarious that we screwed it up. (I was so confused).
She did NOT find it hilarious that we used the vacuum, but she was actually chill about that part too. She bought a shop vac the next day to get the water up, and we just used the shop vac for all of our vacuuming needs for a while.
She did ask my why I was acting so nervous, and why I have to make such a big deal out of everything. She let me know that tolerating me was quite a job.
Time Alone
My brother and I spent a lot of time alone together. We both had keys, and I arrived to the house 10 glorious minutes before he did. When I got home, I was supposed to call Mom over at the shop and let her know I made it. We had to call when my brother made it too. Then she would give us the list.
The chores were no big deal to my brother, but to me they seemed an impossible mountain. Laundry baskets seemed bottomless. The floor would respeckle immediately after vacuuming, or somehow I missed the whole floor. My brother loved pointing out every single visible fleck.
It was like making his own little monkey dance for him.
If I made him angry, he would twist my arms, or hit me. (As I wrote that, I swear I could hear him in my head say “I didn’t even hit you that hard.”) He loved to pin me down and get eye-to-eye with me. He’d lower his voice and make threats. He’d tell me my place and how much I didn’t matter. He would remind me that Mom never believes me. He would let me in on lies he intended to tell, so proud of himself for wrapping Mom and Dad around his fingers. He delighted that I could never outreason him. He was so much smarter than me.
So I did what my brother told me to, albeit never good enough. He’d leave marks, but nobody ever noticed. I learned very quickly not to tattle. He would get very creative with his responses if I did. Mom wouldn’t believe me anyhow. I don’t think any of this even existed to Dad.
Things didn’t always get to make sense.
Our rooms were upstairs separated by a large open room with a bathroom at the end that was questionably stocked. We didn’t use it much. I think it had plumbing issues, but I’m not sure. I know we showered downstairs.
My brother’s room was big with room for the bed near the window then another space big enough to be a little living room before reaching his door.
My room had an A-frame ceiling, and you had to duck to get to the sides. There was room for my single sized waterbed, and about two foot extra on one side. Mom even got me a little dresser that she refinished for me. I felt so special, and loved. I loved watching her work on it. She was disappointed that I didn’t show more gratitude.
One time, on the weekend, Mom called us downstairs. We made our descent down the circular staircase (which was a spacial nightmare), and found her seated in the living room holding a belt.
She instructed us to sit on the floor in front of her, while she menacingly displayed the belt.
She said that one of us watered down the shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom, and that if we just fess up, we would only get two swats, and the sibling would be off the hook. We would go back to our night.
If we didn’t confess, she would start spanking and asking in rounds, increasing the number of swats every time until the culprit owned up.
I didn’t do it, so I said so.
My brother said he didn’t do it either. I was horrified that he would make us both be spanked just to not own it.
I don’t remember how many rounds we got to. It was a lot. I remember when we hit round six I was in absolute shock that it was happening, and believed my brother would fess up soon. When we hit round ten, I realized it wasn’t going to end.
I struggled for several rounds after that, because I knew I didn’t do it. I knew that if I took the blame, there would be further punishment for me. I knew that my brother was going to hold this against me.
It was finally me that said I did it. Mom told me how much of a monster I was for making my brother go through that, and she wasn’t going to save me from his anger. She said I should have thought about that before I lied. It’s not ok to throw your sibling under the bus like that.
I crawled up the stairs, and into my room. I didn’t come back out that night.
The next day after school when my brother got home, I pleaded with him to believe that I didn’t do it. He said he didn’t do it either. We were both too hurt to do anything but the list.
I still don’t think there was any water in the shampoo.
Survivor Literacy 
Leave a reply to 1) Stronger Than My Collagen – Survivor Literacy Cancel reply