Trapped In My Own World

My early childhood:

I have spent my life never feeling like I am enough. I am not placing blame on any one person, because I know a lot of my feelings stem from some very deep-rooted internal issues; caused, admittedly, by many people, but to place the blame on one person would be a great injustice to the rest. I was born to parents who weren’t ready for such a title, a young woman who simply wanted to exist, and a young man who was only human. Just a few months after being born, my mother left my father in Colorado, to go home to her parents in Arkansas, and she took me with her. I grew up hearing stories of my mother leaving because she caught my father cheating on her with a woman who was in the same squadron as my Air-Force dad, a woman who had babysat me, gone to clubs with my mother, and seven years later, became my stepmother. My father, naturally, denies it, and claims my mom just wasn’t happy there anymore, and wanted to be back home. I don’t really believe either of them. I believe there’s elements of truth to both of their stories–my father became exclusive with my stepmother before the divorce was even finalized, and my mother has never liked to stay somewhere too long–but there was one thing that my father did not deny. He was noticeably happier when my mom and I had left.

After we left, my dad did very little to try and get me back. He would tell me he regretted not seeing me again until I was 7, but as he and my stepmom constantly told me, they were just young, dumb, and broke airmen. They told me they couldn’t have given me a life I deserved, but they were blind to the fact that my mother seemed to not even try. My mother and I moved in with her parents, the only people I have felt pure, unbounding love from. While my mother gave me benadryl so she could go out and party, my papa taught me magic, showed me cartoons, and how a daughter should be treated. My nana taught me what a mother was supposed to be, and gave me a sense of dream and wonder that could only be kindled though love. I lived with my nana and papa until I was six, sharing my weekdays with them, and my weekends with my father’s mother. I had a place in the world, a family that was my own, and nothing was going to take that away from me.

I wish that was where the story ended. I wish that I grew up as the world's most unassuming person; who’s worst experience was an awful first kiss on prom night. But I had no such luck. While I was with my grandparents, my mother met her second husband. It was my second birthday when my family and I met him for the first time. Even from the first meeting my family didn’t like him. He was a narcissist in every sense of the word, and viewed my mother as nothing but a body. He, like my father, was air force, so, when they eventually got married, she became more than a body. She became a pay jump, too. I have a few memories of staying with them, very few of them good. I remember when my brother was born; I was four years old, and my stepfather bought me a pair of fuzzy purple slippers on the way to the hospital. I don't remember him ever smiling or laughing, unless it was when someone got hurt. When I was just five years old, I remember spending the night at their apartment. I woke up to the sound of police sirens, and all I could think was “Please, please, please, let me look up and see them putting him in the back of the car…”.

No such luck.