There the darling goes; it’s magnetics that are pulling her down.

Ear Candy: “Parachutes (Funeral Song)” by Mates of State

I am so incredibly tired of being told that “no one can make you unhappy without your consent.” I’m sure that that is just a lovely theory for a person who is in no way affected by the world around them. However, for me, it is different. The people around me have an incredible effect on my life, and right now, none of that is a positive effect. I have been pretty much miserable this past year, and although it would be unfair to say that none of that is on me, I do not think it is fair to say that it all is.

Things with my family haven’t really been very good for as long as I remember. My mom was always the care taker and my father was the bread winner, and they were both really good at what they did. So when my mom got sick, it was a huge strain on all of us. And my father, for the first time of many, paid someone else to deal with his problems. He paid therapists to talk to my sister and I so that he didn’t have to listen to us, he paid a chef so he didn’t have to cook, he paid a cleaning lady to come keep the house clean, he even paid other people to drive my sister and I around so he didn’t have to. He only cut back at work when it became apparent that my mom was going to die, and even then it was only to spend time with her, not to learn how to take care of us. When she did die, he took back on some of his work hours, and my sister started coming home to an empty house where no one was there to feed us, or help us with our homework, or even just show an interest in our day. Kerry and I both handled the death differently; I became the adult, and adopted maturity beyond what I was emotionally capable of, and suppressed all of my feelings because everyone said that I had to be strong for the family. Kerry regressed to a little girl, and attention was lavished onto her and she was coddled and protected from everything. My dad continued to pay other people to take care of us so that he could wallow in his own pain, apparently unaware that anyone other than him was affected by this death, or at least not to the magnitude that he was. However, that did not stop him from beginning to date two and a half months later. And ever since then, there has never really been that much unification amongst the members of my family. My father put exceptionally high standards in place for me academically, and expected me to be able to excel at everything that I did, although he was not around to help me, or to recognize how much emotional healing I had to do on top of my school work. So again, feelings were repressed and I was expected to do well, he pushed me to be better than everyone else, and only seemed to be proud of me, or even care about me when I did.
Everything in my house directly correlated to how high our grades were, and Kerry and I were constantly put into competition with each other. I was forced to go see a therapist that I didn’t like, both alone and with my dad, but Kerry was allowed to quit therapy when she wanted to because “she did well in school”. He went to more of her track meets than my swim meets because she was a better runner than I was swimmer. When he did come to my swim meets, his comments after my races were almost always solely about how I could have/should have done better. He never came to see the plays I worked on, and he left half way through the ones I was in. He even compares us as far as physical appearances go, often telling both of us how we need more exercise, or could stand to lose a few pounds, or aren’t in as good of shape as we could be. As a result of those talks, my sister, and especially me are always convinced that we aren’t as pretty as we should be, or as thin as we should be.
This pressure has instilled in me the thought that if I am not the best at whatever it is that I am doing, I shouldn’t be doing it, or that I shouldn’t be proud of the work that I did, and that it wasn’t good enough. If I am going to swim, I have to win, and I have to be the fastest. If I am going to dance, I have to be the best dancer there. He didn’t think he needed to go see the plays I was in because I wasn’t the lead. If I am taking a class, I had better get an A, and my test grade needed to be the top grade always. And if I was going to go to college, which wasn’t an option, I couldn’t go to the JC, I had to go to a “real college”, and I had to go to the best “real college” I could get into. So even though I knew I wasn’t ready to leave home, and that I didn’t want to go to a four year right away, I had to because it was expected of me. And as a result, I have been in a situation that I don’t like doing work I don’t enjoy.

I look at my sister, and myself, and I don’t think that I would be too proud of either of us, if I were the parent. I am an emotionally crippled perfectionist with a constant need to please everyone around me, and at the same time, a desperate need to feel like I am better than the people I am trying to please. I have to be the best at everything. I have to be the prettiest, the smartest, the fastest, whatever… I just need to feel like I am at really good at everything. I was taught never to be proud of work that could have been better, even if I worked as hard as I could on it. And I can’t get close to people, and trust them as much as I would like to because I know that in the end, there is only me, and that the other people don’t care about me as much as I need them to. I put to much pressure on the people around me to love me, because I don’t feel that I get the love I need at home, at least not if I am just me and not super Erin.

Kerry, on the other hand, is a mean, selfish, rude individual who thinks that the rest of the world exists to cater to her. She intimidates and manipulates everyone around her to do whatever she wants, and has no remorse about it. I have watched her belittle and boss around my uncles, her friends, my dad’s girl friend, even my dad. But none of that compares to her favorite target: me. She loves to tell me how much she hates me, and that I don’t live in our house, so I have no right to be there anymore. She tells me how she doesn’t like when I am around, and that if I move home next year as I am planning to do, she will make my life miserable, because I am ruining her life, specifically because she does not get spoiled as much if I am there. She insults me, and constantly berates me for no reason. Completely unprovoked, she will come in, and start insulting everything about me, from the food I am eating, or the TV show I am watching to the clothes I am wearing, and how I look in general. I am routinely called fat, or ugly, and told that I “look like hell”, or that my clothes are ugly, and my outfit “doesn’t work.” Her newest thing is to tell me that I am a failure because I want to come home and go to the JC. In a word, she is a monster.

Being constantly told that my house is not my house makes me feel like I don’t belong there and I constantly feel unwanted. Being told that I am a failure makes me feel bad about my decisions and myself in general. She makes me feel like the ugly, awkward, unpopular little girl I was freshman year. She makes me feel two inches tall. And, with very few exceptions, my father stands there like none of this is happening. Now, in his defense, he is usually to busy with is job, or his girlfriend, or his bike, or his friends to pay attention to his children. And when he comes home from a long day of work, or hanging out with his girlfriend, why should he have to deal with us? He ignores it when I leave the room in tears, or when she hits me for nothing, or any of the insults. But he is suddenly very alert if I respond, and he has no problem with hitting me if I hit her. His logic is that “no one hurts his daughters.” So then what does that make me?

I know that thinking about myself this way is wrong, and that letting them have this kind of effect on me is also not a great idea, but when this is the only way I know how to be, it isn’t so easy to change things. My dad’s family tells me that it is not my dad’s fault, that he works really hard, and can’t be expected to also have to come home and make dinner or whatever. (He doesn’t cook, and if we want food, we either have to make our own dinner, or get take out.) My dad’s newest plan is to hire yet another family counselor to “fix” our “family”. His excuse for how things are now is that it was hard when my mom died, and that it is hard to be a single parent. Now, I understand both of those points, but I don’t think that they are valid excuses for letting things get this bad. When it actually happened, I could see being overwhelmed with everything. But now it is five and a half years later, and his excuses are looking really thin. But he is continuing to look to other people to fix things for us, and to refuse to take responsibility for all of this, especially for Kerry’s behavior.

I don’t feel like a part of my family. I feel excluded and unwanted. After my dad pushed me out of the house with the excuse of college (which he was too busy to even take me to, because he wanted to go on a trip with his girl friend that they planned after they knew when I was leaving), he began to focus his efforts onto Kerry. He buys her whatever she wants, and lets her do pretty much anything, most likely in an attempt to keep her from turning out as disappointingly as I did. They have made a total of three trips to Hawaii with Kerry, where I have stayed home. The entire Sweeney family went on a white water rafting trip in Oregon, without me. My dad, his girlfriend, my sister, and one of her lame friends recently went on a three day ski trip (in the middle of the week, which meant Kerry was allowed to miss school to go to the snow) without even telling me where they were, or that they were going anywhere, and my dad and sister are going to Germany without me this summer. Not only did they make their trips to Germany and Hawaii without including me, they did it without even telling me. They have frequently had diner with my dad’s girlfriend and her children, who also went on the trip to Hawaii. I, however, have never met her kids, even though they have been dating for almost two years, and have never even been invited to one of these dinners. And my father’s response to any of that is that it is my fault that I don’t feel like a part of the family. Sometimes I get the feeling that they would be happier if I wasn’t there. I would be one less hassle, one less thing to worry about. All I want is to feel like I matter to them, or like they at least made an effort to include me, or to care about me.

So now, I am almost 18, and I am supposed to be able to be an adult, and take care of myself, but I feel so broken, and unhappy and ill prepared that I can’t fathom me ever being able to take care of myself. But other than that, I am out of options, because my family sure as hell isn’t going to take care of me. I can’t remember a time when I was ever truly happy; everything has always just been a temporary distraction from how bad things really are, and how unhappy I really was.
All I really want is to be free. I want to have a day when my head and back don’t ache with stress, or a day when I cry for no reason. I want to feel wanted, and loved, like I belong wherever it is that I am. I don’t want to feel like a guest in my house, or a stranger in my family. And I don’t think that there is anyone I can pay to help me feel better. I think I am, once again, alone on this one.

~E