Chapter Text
A house filled with anger and resentment is the home of every American family. Words are left unspoken, yet they are still heard. They are still felt. You walk into a room and you feel the anger of the relative inside it, like the shiver of a ghost walking through you. My family isn’t an abusive one, don’t mistake me, I don’t mean any of this as a critique on the people who raised me. This is only a history of my emotions and my life, and what happened is just what happened. I don’t hate my family, I care for most of them, even love them, but the grief I have felt because of them is undeniable, so I wish to tell my story here, through my eyes and how I experienced it.
My mom became pregnant with me when she was 19 years old, she had turned 20 by the time of my birth. We had evacuated our state due to a terrible hurricane (that knocked down a tree onto my aunt’s house!), and due to the stress (I assume), my mom went into labor and gave birth to me. The first nights of my life were spent in a Catholic hospital, a tiny trailer, and the backseat of a truck. My biological father had escaped to Michigan long before I was born, and he only visited me during my first Christmas. That was the first and last time I ever saw him.
I come from a Roman Catholic family, and although none of them regularly attend church, they still have the attitude of a stuck-up nun. When my extended family discovered my mom was carrying me, they treated her like she was some kind of harlot (even though my great grandmother had her first child at 19 years old as well). To this day, they still seem to distance themselves from her, maybe that’s why she decided to renounce religion and became an unapologetic feminist.
This family always treated me as an extension of my mother, as if I’m more of a clone than my own person. I wish to get one thing straight with these people: I am nothing like my mom. Yes, we look eerily similar, we share a dark sense of humor, and have many of the same political views, but that’s where our similarities end. My mom has always been an outgoing, hardworking, well-liked extrovert, through and through. I, on the other hand, have always been anxious, lazy, shy, and very much an introvert. I’ve never understood other people, unlike my mother, who seems to have a master’s degree in socialization. She’s always had a gift for approaching people she’s never met and speaking with them as if she’s known them her whole life. I struggle to even talk to people I already know, I just have nothing to say. All in all, she’s always been the center of attention at every social event, always been a natural born leader, and she’s talented in any art she tries.
If I’m similar to either of my parents, I probably would relate closest to my dad. He’s not my biological father, but I would never consider him a stepfather. Having a stepfather implies that you had a father beforehand, and as far as I’m concerned, my dad is the only father I’ve ever truly had. My dad has always been somewhat solitary. He only wants to give high fives when the occasion calls for it, and he only says he’s proud of me when he actually means it. Car rides are eerily quiet, except for when one of us actually has something we wish to say. He’s never forced me to communicate with him when I have nothing I want to share, unlike my mom, who wishes I would use her as my personal diary. There was a long time when I was around 12-13 where me and my dad did not get along. My mom said that we were simply “so similar that we clashed with each other”. I still don’t quite understand how two can be so similar that it makes it impossible for them to understand each other, but I understand me and my dad’s similarities. My dad is very introverted, I’m very introverted. My dad can often be blunt, I, too, am often blunt with people. Me and my father could be described as like poles of a magnet. Maybe that’s why we used to repel each other when I was a tween, we reached a point where we were too similar and our magnetic fields pushed us apart.
My dad never treated me as a small child, rather as an equal person who is mature enough to make their own decisions, and understand complex topics. Some of my youngest memories with him are our discussions we used to have during the car ride to my elementary school. He would explain to me how economics or climate change or foreign politics works, and I would ask question after question after question. I loved our discussions, asking my dad how the world works, and him answering in his matter-of-fact tone, without dumbing it down for 7-year-old me. My dad has always regarded me as a very curious girl who will always question things I don’t understand, and is very proud of himself for indulging that part of me. He always taught me to think for myself and to research topics thoroughly before forming my own opinion. For this lesson, I have always been grateful.
I may have gotten off track there, but the point was to illustrate how I am most certainly not an extension of my mother. Sure, we may have some similarities, but at the end of the day, we are truly nothing alike. I love my mom, sometimes I even wish I was more like her, but that is simply not the reality. Despite how different I am from my mother, it doesn’t seem to matter, because my family never tried to get to know me better anyways. Actually, that’s an overexaggeration. When I was first born, and until I reached the age of around 5 years old (that’s around the time my younger cousin was welcomed into our family), I was the celebrity of my family. According to my mom, I was a very cute baby, and southern conservative families love nothing more than cute youngin’s that can eventually be molded into more southern conservatives. I had all the attention, and I got many presents for birthdays and Christmases. But as I got older, and attention shifted away from me onto younger relatives, I began to realize that not only did these people not care for me as an equal relative, they had never made any effort to actually get to know me. When you’re only gifted dolls, dresses, and toy tiara’s, it’s less noticeable, but when you’re a 12 year old tomboy who hates girly things and you’re constantly being gifted makeup of all things, it becomes quite obvious that these people have no idea who you really are, or they just don’t care enough to find something you’d actually want.
I was constantly nicknamed “City Girl” as a child. It’s probably just because they all lived in more rural areas while I grew up in an urban touristy city, but I’ve often wondered if it meant something different. If it was maybe more of a jab than a poke. That’s the way of Southern communication, they never say how they feel out loud, but rather in encrypted messages with double meanings. After my mom had me, she decided to move to the city so she would be closer to the college she attended. While there, she made friends with more liberal, less conservative people. She went to an arts school after all, and where there is art, there are progressives (in my experience at least). Because of my city upbringing, I was never used to being outside in the heat for long periods of time, or farm work, so when I would visit relatives at their farms I would complain or be resistant towards work. I think it’s important to mention here that I am also autistic, and that most of my meltdowns due to falling in dirty cow water and being afraid of horses could have just been early symptoms of said autism. Because of all these characteristics though, I was referred to as “City Girl”, in kind of a mocking way.
I believe my younger nickname was not only a way to mock the way my mom chose to raise me, but also as a way to isolate me from the rest of my cousins. I have always felt like a black sheep in my family, whether it has to do with the circumstances of my conception, where I live, or my political beliefs. No matter what I do, I have always stood out like a sore thumb. Even when I go to family gatherings, whether for Christmas or any other holidays, I always feel like I stand out, like I don’t belong. No one should feel that way when they’re with their family, right? Their own flesh and blood, the people they’ve grown up around, they should feel like they more than fit in, like they’re a part of the neutrons and protons that build up the atom, the family. Yet, at these gatherings, I feel as if I don’t even know these people. I feel more like a lonely electron, orbiting just outside the clump of protons and neutrons.
Me being a homosexual makes it all the more worse, the cherry on top of that fucking sundae of misery. I’m sure many in history can relate to this, holding a dark secret that you have to hide from the ones you love or else lose them forever, yadayada. I’m one of the lucky people who at least have parents who love them no matter who they are, and I feel very fortunate for that blessing. My extended relatives on the other hand, the ones who acted as if my mother was the Devil because she got pregnant before marriage, wouldn’t be so welcoming of my sexuality. I’ve never officially come out to them (most of them at least; I’ve told some of my cousins, but only a few), but I came close once. I used to visit my great uncle anytime I visited my grandmother, which was a pain in the ass, but I still did it. He would always ask me questions about school, about my friends, about if I still have interest in softball (a very common girl’s sport in the South), and, to my dismay, ask me if I have any boyfriends. My answer was always no, that I’m simply not interested in boys, that they’re smelly and I don’t like them. He would always argue with me on it, saying that I shouldn’t give up boys just because I don’t like a few guys, that I’m just not interested yet and that soon enough I’ll be boy crazy (which I still am not. Beat that, Gramps!).
One day we are arguing over me not liking boys again, and he decides to ask something unexpected. “Well, do you like girls?” I froze for a moment. At that point in time, I knew that I was attracted to girls, I was still young yet I knew already which direction I swung in. This question was odd though, out of character, and I didn’t know how to respond. It made me nervous, I felt like an acrobat balancing on a tightrope, one wrong move could throw me off balance. After a brief consideration, I decided to answer.
“Yes, I do.”
“But only as friends, of course?” I panicked for a moment. It seems I completely misread the situation, of course he wasn’t asking whether I was gay or not, how stupid am I?! I gave him a brief yeah, sure, and ran away back to my grandmother’s house. The interaction really unnerved me, I felt like I had almost been caught red-handed. You know that feeling when you’ve stayed up past your bedtime watching TV, and your parents open your bedroom door, so you have to pretend you were sleeping all along? Your heart races, fear filling your mind, you start thinking up millions of excuses for if you got caught, and then… your parents simply walk out and close the door. Your nerves still linger, it takes a while for them to really go away, but you still feel that sense of relief that you weren’t caught. You still decide to be more careful next time, a little quieter to avoid suspicion.
All my life, I’ve felt this way. That I’m constantly hiding– avoiding detection from possibly dangerous forces in my life. When I go to my grandparents’ house, I always make sure I behave especially well, lest I be spanked. I hate spankings, always have, even when they’re done in a joking manner. I’ve always found them to be quite painful and humiliating, and I believe they’re some of the worst kinds of punishment. In my family, spankings are how you get children to hear you, to obey you. I think they only really make children fear you. (here I just ramble about how I hate spankings and my family doesn’t respect my wishes to not be spanked, even in a joking manner, yada yada…)
Despite how I feel about anyone, I’ve always had a respect and utter admiration for my grandparents, my Pawpaw and Gammy. Through everything, through my mother’s pregnancy, through my infancy, through my entire life, they have always been a constant. My Gammy is a very strong woman, a force to be reckoned with, and the eldest of her siblings. We’ve always gotten along well, as she understands how it is to be an oldest daughter, how much responsibility it can bear on you. My Pawpaw has always been a blue-collar, hard working family man with an itchy grey beard and a strong sense of humor. As far as I can remember, my Pawpaw was always laughing, cracking jokes with me, making me laugh as well. Even though I was a “bastard child”, and I was un-baptized (meaning I was basically destined for Eternal Damnation), my grandparents never saw me as anything less than their first grandchild. And best of all, they never referred to me as “City Girl”, not once. No, my Pawpaw had a better nickname for me, one he used endearingly, one that made me frustrated with him for calling me such a ridiculous thing. First, I was a chicken. Then, he called me a monkey. Eventually, though, I was his Chicken Monkey Baby.