drownedinlight (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
drownedinlight) wrote2011-04-06 11:13 pm
drownedinlight) wrote2011-04-06 11:13 pm
Entry tags:
More Memoir
Yeah, this is kind of heavy. Just as a warning.
Violent and Terrible (or, Have You Met My Siblings?)
I don’t necessarily remember this, but we have a video of it on an old cassette tape, probably somewhere in our garage collecting dust instead of memories. I was not yet four, so the year would have been nineteen ninety-five, and the day was December twenty-fifth. My parents had the video camera set up to stare directly at us, so the three was in frame while we opened our presents on the floor of our living room.
Mom says, “Okay girls, we have one more present for you, but it won’t be here until July.” Alizza jumps up for joy and exclaims,
“Is it a pony?!” Mom and Dad stop laughing long enough to explain that no, it was not a pony, but we were getting a little brother. For years, we would joke that we wanted the pony instead. We’re mean big sisters, but only when Daniel deserves it.
I don’t remember this either, but when I was born, my sister decided that the small crying thing, which took Mom and Dad’s attention away from her, was unnecessary in their lives, and thought she would simultaneously crush and smother me. Mom came to investigate the crying in the Turkish living room (we were living in Turkey when I was born), and found my sister had placed a pillow on top of me, and was sitting on me. She pulled Alizza off and told her not to do it again. Five minutes later she heard me crying again. It’s okay, I guess, she was only four, and I did try to pay her back when I was six by way of strangulation.
When my brother was born, I only have a few memories of what went on. I remember reaching up to grab the rough, textured hand rails on the hospital walls, and trailing along them, even though I was told repeatedly not to. I also remember seeing my mom for the first time after what must have been a few days, because I wanted to run and hug her, so much so my dad had to warn us,
“Mommy’s stomach isn’t feeling so good, so you can’t hug her tight.” I wanted to hug my mom though, and I think she might have tried as long as we were gentle. When I grew up, I learned what a caesarian section was, and how my brother had to be cut out of my mother’s womb.
When my sister was born, I was about three years away from even being thought of, but Dad tells it like this,
“It’s a good thing we got to the hospital when we did, because your sister was trying to strangle herself with her own umbilical cord.”
I was born two weeks late, and Mom tells it like this,
“When you were ready, you were ready, Honey. I got to the hospital and the doctor told us it would be at least a few more hours until I was ready. And so he left the hospital to go get dinner. And then you started coming out—it was your Dad who noticed—and you were waving to the world. Naturally, your father runs into the waiting room yelling, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ because the nurse we called in didn’t know what she was doing, and barely raised her voice to say, ‘Oh, we need a doctor in here.’” She would go on to tell me I was delivered by Dr. MacDonald. “I did not want him to deliver you though, I specifically asked for someone else. He just, I don’t know what it was, Kacee, but he sent shivers down my spine.”
Alizza, my older sister has always had to be there for me, and then for Daniel. Daniel and I would always have to tag after her, and stay close to her, and she would always have to take us to the bathroom. My parents depended on her a lot to look out for me especially (for a lot of the time, when he was younger, Daniel went to daycare, so Alizza did not look after him as much as she looked after me), and it was a blast hanging out with my sister most summer days. We would eat Ramen and Pringles for lunch, or maybe Chef Boy R D, or just whatever was in the pantry. We liked to watch most of the same shows on the TV (because we weren’t allowed out when Mom and dad were not home, after we moved off base).
Sometimes together, we would play games in our room with our many Barbies, making them act out our own stories, somehow making them more than plastic. We would build forts, hanging sheets from the ceiling fan and tying them off on our beds, and we would make up stories there too. Some nights when we were going to sleep she would take about wolves or horses (Alizza liked the magic of horses then, and she still has all of her figurines in her room). Once, she made me sing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Pop on the Wall,” until she fell asleep. I think I finished the whole song.
But she would scare me sometimes. She was my big sister, and their something in the contract of being the oldest child that says you get to scare the living daylights out of your siblings. Once she chased me around the house saying how she was going to kill me. I got to the phone several times, and repeatedly dialed the operator, only to hang up. This caused a cop to show up at our house, but Mom was still dressed in her BDUs when he did, so he just explained to her how calling the operator could be a serious offence, but he could let it go this time. I hid in a dark room, praying not to be punished.
I think Alizza was the one who first told me about Bloody Mary, and she would read me ghost stories, and we would rough and tumble, where she would start it, but when I was a little bit rougher, she would always back down, telling me I couldn’t do that.
When she started getting into high school, she didn’t want me to follow her around anymore, to hang out with her and her few friends, though I rarely had many real friends to call my own either, but once I got made at her for doing it, and repeated a very poor joke she and a male friend made to my dad, and he stormed her room, and demanded that the door be left open at all times.
Alizza started crying more in high school, about how she didn’t have friends, how she didn’t feel loved, or she felt depressed or fat, or how Dad might not have cared about her the way he should. She fought with him one night, a night I try to erase from my mind, but is burned there, actually standing up to him instead of crying in a corner like she normally would.
Once I was taller than she was, she also became fond of saying how much better I had it. How many more things I got to do, and opportunities I had (how much more Dad loved me, and I think, unfortunately, it might be true). Mom and I talk about that sometimes, and she assures me it’s because of work that I have done and chances I have taken. Except for the whole height thing. But I think it was because Alizza always had to be the responsible one, she never got much of a chance to look at herself. She was always too grown up, the eternal big sister. She still surrounds herself with people who fail themselves, becoming frustrated with them, and crying about how they hurt her.
There’s probably more to her than this, but I feel like four years was a big enough gap for me not to see some things.
Daniel was probably the sibling I had the most contact with. Physically mostly. He was as a child, a little rambunctious. Right before we moved to Colorado, he escaped his crib, and went out front to play in the storm drain off of our gutters. Once, my dad was lying on the floor playing video games with my sister and I, and Daniel thought it would be a fun idea to get up on the couch and jump on my Dad’s stomach. Shortly after we moved to Colorado and where living in the temporary base housing, Daniel discovered detergent, spilled it on the floor and proceeded to swirl it around. I was the one who found him and told Dad, who spanked him, cleaned him off and then probably spent a good hour trying to soak most of it out of the carpet with our carpet shampooer.
He broke my glasses when I was seven when he began to rough house and I didn’t have enough time to take them off. He was prone to tantrums of the worst sort, the kind you see and thank God that he’s not your child or brother.
When he was four, the doctor diagnosed him with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). So not only was there going to be more of the punching, jumping and running away, he was going to have trouble focusing too. He would do poorly in school, not because he wasn’t smart (oh no, they tested him a few years ago, and he’s very nearly a genius), but because he couldn’t understand why it was wrong not to focus and to react in ways that people did not expect. He would also have few friends because of it, and little trust with our parents and his teachers. When he was about twelve or thirteen, we found out he was bi-polar too.
Once, when I was alone with him during the summer, he threatened me, and I grabbed his shirt, spun him around, yanking his head back by the hair, and hissed, “You…do not…talk to ME like that.” When he was six, he bit me, because I would not give him an umbrella so he could hit me with it.
I remember at a certain age, the meds would really kick in most of the time. Even when he slowly grew out of being volatile, my little brother was still physical, wanting to kiss or hug a lot of the time. He did not understand why I did not want him to hug me, because I was so used to him being violent (and also because for a long time, his face landed right in the center of my breasts when he hugged me), and why I didn’t want him to kiss me so frequently, and so close to my lips.
“What about when you get a boyfriend or get married?” he would ask. “Are you going to let him kiss and hug you all the time?” I not sure if he understand how exactly this argument worked against him.
One time, he threw up, because he forgot to take his medicine, so he had been eating all day and literally bouncing off of the walls. I made him go to his room after I cleaned it up. Another time, he refused to do a chore my mother had left written on the white board, claiming it hurt to move because he was sunburned. I called Mom at work, because I knew it was wrong to erase it, and I had to abide by the rules, I had to, and she tried to convince him to do it, but when Dad came home, it wasn’t done. And Dad yelled at him as I tried to have my music up as loud as I could.
When Mom got home, she came up to my room and informed me, “Daniel did not take his medicine today, and now he feels offal.” She said it in a way that said, “How could you let this happen, Kacee Danielle, you are nearly sixteen.”
“Why is that my fault?” I think I asked.
“You had to know that something was wrong, Kacee. You called me—”
“I called you, because you wrote up on the board for Dad to see, what you wanted him to do,” I explained. “And I knew when it wasn’t done, Dad was going to come home and yell at him, and I hate what that does to the atmosphere of the house. He acts like that all the time, so of course I couldn’t tell if he took it or not.” Mom said something about changing his dose and left my room.
I’m kind of realizing that either I’m an insensitive bitch or my family is way messed up, because I can still feel now that we all love each other, as best as we can. And even though this is all in the past, I can’t help but wonder why many of my memories with these two people are violent or terrible.
Violent and Terrible (or, Have You Met My Siblings?)
I don’t necessarily remember this, but we have a video of it on an old cassette tape, probably somewhere in our garage collecting dust instead of memories. I was not yet four, so the year would have been nineteen ninety-five, and the day was December twenty-fifth. My parents had the video camera set up to stare directly at us, so the three was in frame while we opened our presents on the floor of our living room.
Mom says, “Okay girls, we have one more present for you, but it won’t be here until July.” Alizza jumps up for joy and exclaims,
“Is it a pony?!” Mom and Dad stop laughing long enough to explain that no, it was not a pony, but we were getting a little brother. For years, we would joke that we wanted the pony instead. We’re mean big sisters, but only when Daniel deserves it.
I don’t remember this either, but when I was born, my sister decided that the small crying thing, which took Mom and Dad’s attention away from her, was unnecessary in their lives, and thought she would simultaneously crush and smother me. Mom came to investigate the crying in the Turkish living room (we were living in Turkey when I was born), and found my sister had placed a pillow on top of me, and was sitting on me. She pulled Alizza off and told her not to do it again. Five minutes later she heard me crying again. It’s okay, I guess, she was only four, and I did try to pay her back when I was six by way of strangulation.
When my brother was born, I only have a few memories of what went on. I remember reaching up to grab the rough, textured hand rails on the hospital walls, and trailing along them, even though I was told repeatedly not to. I also remember seeing my mom for the first time after what must have been a few days, because I wanted to run and hug her, so much so my dad had to warn us,
“Mommy’s stomach isn’t feeling so good, so you can’t hug her tight.” I wanted to hug my mom though, and I think she might have tried as long as we were gentle. When I grew up, I learned what a caesarian section was, and how my brother had to be cut out of my mother’s womb.
When my sister was born, I was about three years away from even being thought of, but Dad tells it like this,
“It’s a good thing we got to the hospital when we did, because your sister was trying to strangle herself with her own umbilical cord.”
I was born two weeks late, and Mom tells it like this,
“When you were ready, you were ready, Honey. I got to the hospital and the doctor told us it would be at least a few more hours until I was ready. And so he left the hospital to go get dinner. And then you started coming out—it was your Dad who noticed—and you were waving to the world. Naturally, your father runs into the waiting room yelling, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ because the nurse we called in didn’t know what she was doing, and barely raised her voice to say, ‘Oh, we need a doctor in here.’” She would go on to tell me I was delivered by Dr. MacDonald. “I did not want him to deliver you though, I specifically asked for someone else. He just, I don’t know what it was, Kacee, but he sent shivers down my spine.”
Alizza, my older sister has always had to be there for me, and then for Daniel. Daniel and I would always have to tag after her, and stay close to her, and she would always have to take us to the bathroom. My parents depended on her a lot to look out for me especially (for a lot of the time, when he was younger, Daniel went to daycare, so Alizza did not look after him as much as she looked after me), and it was a blast hanging out with my sister most summer days. We would eat Ramen and Pringles for lunch, or maybe Chef Boy R D, or just whatever was in the pantry. We liked to watch most of the same shows on the TV (because we weren’t allowed out when Mom and dad were not home, after we moved off base).
Sometimes together, we would play games in our room with our many Barbies, making them act out our own stories, somehow making them more than plastic. We would build forts, hanging sheets from the ceiling fan and tying them off on our beds, and we would make up stories there too. Some nights when we were going to sleep she would take about wolves or horses (Alizza liked the magic of horses then, and she still has all of her figurines in her room). Once, she made me sing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Pop on the Wall,” until she fell asleep. I think I finished the whole song.
But she would scare me sometimes. She was my big sister, and their something in the contract of being the oldest child that says you get to scare the living daylights out of your siblings. Once she chased me around the house saying how she was going to kill me. I got to the phone several times, and repeatedly dialed the operator, only to hang up. This caused a cop to show up at our house, but Mom was still dressed in her BDUs when he did, so he just explained to her how calling the operator could be a serious offence, but he could let it go this time. I hid in a dark room, praying not to be punished.
I think Alizza was the one who first told me about Bloody Mary, and she would read me ghost stories, and we would rough and tumble, where she would start it, but when I was a little bit rougher, she would always back down, telling me I couldn’t do that.
When she started getting into high school, she didn’t want me to follow her around anymore, to hang out with her and her few friends, though I rarely had many real friends to call my own either, but once I got made at her for doing it, and repeated a very poor joke she and a male friend made to my dad, and he stormed her room, and demanded that the door be left open at all times.
Alizza started crying more in high school, about how she didn’t have friends, how she didn’t feel loved, or she felt depressed or fat, or how Dad might not have cared about her the way he should. She fought with him one night, a night I try to erase from my mind, but is burned there, actually standing up to him instead of crying in a corner like she normally would.
Once I was taller than she was, she also became fond of saying how much better I had it. How many more things I got to do, and opportunities I had (how much more Dad loved me, and I think, unfortunately, it might be true). Mom and I talk about that sometimes, and she assures me it’s because of work that I have done and chances I have taken. Except for the whole height thing. But I think it was because Alizza always had to be the responsible one, she never got much of a chance to look at herself. She was always too grown up, the eternal big sister. She still surrounds herself with people who fail themselves, becoming frustrated with them, and crying about how they hurt her.
There’s probably more to her than this, but I feel like four years was a big enough gap for me not to see some things.
Daniel was probably the sibling I had the most contact with. Physically mostly. He was as a child, a little rambunctious. Right before we moved to Colorado, he escaped his crib, and went out front to play in the storm drain off of our gutters. Once, my dad was lying on the floor playing video games with my sister and I, and Daniel thought it would be a fun idea to get up on the couch and jump on my Dad’s stomach. Shortly after we moved to Colorado and where living in the temporary base housing, Daniel discovered detergent, spilled it on the floor and proceeded to swirl it around. I was the one who found him and told Dad, who spanked him, cleaned him off and then probably spent a good hour trying to soak most of it out of the carpet with our carpet shampooer.
He broke my glasses when I was seven when he began to rough house and I didn’t have enough time to take them off. He was prone to tantrums of the worst sort, the kind you see and thank God that he’s not your child or brother.
When he was four, the doctor diagnosed him with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). So not only was there going to be more of the punching, jumping and running away, he was going to have trouble focusing too. He would do poorly in school, not because he wasn’t smart (oh no, they tested him a few years ago, and he’s very nearly a genius), but because he couldn’t understand why it was wrong not to focus and to react in ways that people did not expect. He would also have few friends because of it, and little trust with our parents and his teachers. When he was about twelve or thirteen, we found out he was bi-polar too.
Once, when I was alone with him during the summer, he threatened me, and I grabbed his shirt, spun him around, yanking his head back by the hair, and hissed, “You…do not…talk to ME like that.” When he was six, he bit me, because I would not give him an umbrella so he could hit me with it.
I remember at a certain age, the meds would really kick in most of the time. Even when he slowly grew out of being volatile, my little brother was still physical, wanting to kiss or hug a lot of the time. He did not understand why I did not want him to hug me, because I was so used to him being violent (and also because for a long time, his face landed right in the center of my breasts when he hugged me), and why I didn’t want him to kiss me so frequently, and so close to my lips.
“What about when you get a boyfriend or get married?” he would ask. “Are you going to let him kiss and hug you all the time?” I not sure if he understand how exactly this argument worked against him.
One time, he threw up, because he forgot to take his medicine, so he had been eating all day and literally bouncing off of the walls. I made him go to his room after I cleaned it up. Another time, he refused to do a chore my mother had left written on the white board, claiming it hurt to move because he was sunburned. I called Mom at work, because I knew it was wrong to erase it, and I had to abide by the rules, I had to, and she tried to convince him to do it, but when Dad came home, it wasn’t done. And Dad yelled at him as I tried to have my music up as loud as I could.
When Mom got home, she came up to my room and informed me, “Daniel did not take his medicine today, and now he feels offal.” She said it in a way that said, “How could you let this happen, Kacee Danielle, you are nearly sixteen.”
“Why is that my fault?” I think I asked.
“You had to know that something was wrong, Kacee. You called me—”
“I called you, because you wrote up on the board for Dad to see, what you wanted him to do,” I explained. “And I knew when it wasn’t done, Dad was going to come home and yell at him, and I hate what that does to the atmosphere of the house. He acts like that all the time, so of course I couldn’t tell if he took it or not.” Mom said something about changing his dose and left my room.
I’m kind of realizing that either I’m an insensitive bitch or my family is way messed up, because I can still feel now that we all love each other, as best as we can. And even though this is all in the past, I can’t help but wonder why many of my memories with these two people are violent or terrible.