The Cats of My Life: Allie

I think I was in sixth grade when I got Allie. It was a big deal. Our previous cat (who I haven’t talked about yet) had died and I’m not sure if we had gotten Cleo yet or not. My mother had a friend at work who ran a rescue group, and for the first time I was to go and pick out a cat for me.

The place was just an apartment overcrowded with cats of every color. I do remember there was this big orange one my mother wanted, but I wasn’t sure, there were just so many! Then this big grey tabby tomcat jumped on a garbage can and called me over. He was the one. Being uncreative in the naming department at the time, he became “Allie” because he was an Alley cat.

When we took him home it turns out he was sick, so he had to stay in my room for a while. At the time I had a ‘big sister’ through the Big Brothers Big Sisters Program. We did somethings, but for the post part she just brought me stuff back from her travels, a lot of cat items because at the time my motto was “Animals are my favorite people.” One of the items that she had brought me from Italy was a hand-painted scarf that I used on top of my dresser. Of course, that was Allie’s favorite spot to lie as he drooled out his illness. All the inks ran.

Allie was a big boy, and just a glorious cat. My brother commented on how scared he was all the time. But our house wasn’t exactly quiet. I used to have this one Polaroid picture of Allie curled up in a ball surrounded by my dolls. He was just so beautiful.

Sometime later Allie had urinary blockage and was in the hospital. When he returned I read up on ash and magnesium and how to take care of him so the crystals didn’t build up.

I don’t have any pictures of Allie anymore, I don’t know what happened to them. The only ones I even remember is the one I mentioned above and one where he was, I think, in-between the screen door and main door. My brother used to lock him out on the back porch because Allie would jump up through the hole in the screen door and balance to get our attention.

Should I warn you now, this doesn’t have a happy ending? There is a lot I blank out on about Allie and the memory I do have was the first one I worked on with my current doctor. It’s called ‘Immersion Therapy’ and I have to close my eyes and keep going back into the memory and telling it and connecting to all the emotions and that whole unification process I talked about. I also have to recognize the situation and that what happened wasn’t my fault.

I think there was something to do with cat litter. There is a vague recollection of my mother throwing the litter box into my room, and I put up my hands or feet to deflect it and it spills all over. She’s yelling at me, screaming. I don’t even see her, just the darkness that is her in my memory and those piercing grey-blue thundercloud eyes. She’s raging. Something about not doing my chores, not cleaning the litter box, not being responsible.

The next part I remember is trying to hide Allie and myself. She had threatened to take him away, said I couldn’t take care of him. I know I could take care of him; I already had through two illnesses. But my mother is claiming I don’t deserve the cat.

In the next part I remember I’m screaming, crying. She has taken Allie away, said she was bringing him to the pound to teach me a lesson. I don’t let up all night. How could she do that? How could she take away my animal, one she made such a show of me getting, for whatever her reasoning was? How could she so callously strip me of some living thing I loved?

The next day she says that because I’m being such a brat and to shut me up she’ll go get him back. Nothing about her feeling guilty for what she’s done. I just want her to understand how much she hurt me. That she, the mother, has caused me great pain. When she returns she tells me that he is dead. “They got a lot of animals in that night and put him to sleep,” she tells me. “He was just so frightened they didn’t think he’d do well. You know, if you hadn’t tried to hide him and scared him even more he’d probably be alive right now.” She continues by saying that now we can’t get another cat from the shelter because she has been added to the database of people who bring their pets in.

That was the part that hurt me for so many years – she blamed me. If I hadn’t of tried to hide him, he’d be alive. She shifted all of the blame on me. For so long I carried that burden. If I hadn’t have chosen him but gone with the orange cat, Allie would have lived a longer and happier life. Maybe the orange cat would have died in his place, maybe not. If I had just done the chores my mother told me too, if I had acquiesced, if I hadn’t tried to hide him, if, if, if. They swarmed around.

Bottom line though is she killed my cat and took the coward’s way out by shifting the blame to me, a 12-year old girl, her daughter. Instead of taking responsibility for hurting her children and now, taking a life, she passed the buck and rationalized how she was in the right and everyone else was wrong and ‘caused things to happen’ or ‘caused her to do things.’

How dare she. How dare she take a life that I loved, destroy it, and blame me. It’s taken a while to get to the point where I can say it with conviction, and I’d love to add a few curse words in here, but how dare she ever do such a thing. I think that was a major turning point for me. After Allie died I remember being filled with rage toward everyone. I hated so much. The love in my life was so horrifically taken away and I just blamed myself. However, I think I did begin to realize, somewhere within me, that there was no chance of my mother redeeming herself in my eyes. It started me down the road to total disgust with her, a road that has helped me separate myself from her actions and from believing I could ever be like that monster.

Picture from: http://www.allcrossstitch.co.uk

Memes

The more I read, the more of these I notice. We have the Thinking Blogger Award – a nice way to honor blogs that expose you to new ideas, to expose your readers to four other places you enjoy, and a way for others to have more links added on the giant web. I’ve also seen the “8 things about you” one flying around, the ‘Interview’ where you can ask five questions of someone else, and now I just got the Rocking Girl award.

All of these are great for their purposes – they expose people to new facets of the blogger they’re reading, they publicize other bloggers, they are of interest to the reader, and many reasons I’m probably forgetting.

So of course, now I want to start one. Confession is good for the soul, so let’s call this Three Apologies. I figure, since the whole thing I’m trying to get over is that everything I do is wrong, it fits. The rules are simple – make three apologies that are long overdue, something that’s been gnawing at you for a long time. Send it to the universe. You can be as specific or vague as you like, but clear your soul.

All the other memes require tagging people, kind of forcing them to post such things. I’m not that kind of person. But if you like the idea when you make a post just put a little note that the meme, this ‘Three Apologies’ Meme, started here. Unless of course, it didn't. Who knows, it's probably out there somewhere too. But this version is from me.

Image, such as it is, copyright vchase2007
Apology One: Donna – I’m so sorry about what happened at Camp. I know the rest of the crew descended like feral beasts on your dreams. I think we were just all so dead, maybe it was normal teenage cruelty against someone who thinks they can rise above life, I don’t know. But we had no right to run your panties up the flag pole. Or worse, the whole raiding of the cabin? I was involved with everyone on the kitchen staff. We all decided to raid our own cabin just so we could ruin your ‘superstar’ outfit. We tossed it into Lake Seneca. It was the captain’s son, I forget his name now, that peed in your perfume bottles. What hurt me the worst was that I was the one you turned too for a shoulder to cry on. You felt I was the nicest of the bunch, I was just the most confused I think. I wanted to be able to help people, but at the same time wanted to see if hurting others gave the rush it seemed to give everyone else. It didn’t. This has stuck with me for a long time. I’m truly sorry for my part in those actions.

Apology Two: G – In high school I never knew whether to hate or like you. You were intelligent and from a good family, but such an easy target for teenage angst. You had an attitude and feelings of entitlement that bothered a lot of our class. I tried to be nice to you, and compared to the others in school I suppose I was. I think in the end, in our senior year, I did like you but by then felt like I was shut out of your social group even though intellectually I was in every one of your classes. There was a point, maybe freshman year when we used to get along. Remember? We traded books – I ended up with your one dragon book all summer because I was too sick to attend the last three weeks of school. Well I had a crush on you that summer. My mother found out. She told me we were related. She said that she had found her cousin and he was related to your father. I tried to get that out of my mindset, but once it was planted that seed grew. Now I saw your faults in relation to my family and was saddened by what I felt was the inevitable. I wish I had just told you how I thought I could feel instead of letting my mother find out. Who knows how school could have turned out for us two geeks if we had joined forces instead of fought off and on?

Three is a hard one. Those are the main things that kind of hang over my head today, actions I wish I could have taken back or, at the very least, apologized to in person. I don’t know- guilt really sucks.

Apology Three: I remember this, and it’s from oh so long ago. We were just little kids, five years old running around Orange Street in the good ol’ AZ. I don’t even remember your name, but I remember Trin – my best friend at the time. I don’t know what overcame us, we were all latch key kids. But your keys? We threw them down the sewer drain and ran like holy hell. I have no idea why, but sometimes I still see Trin and I running away with your keys and then throwing them down the grate. Just flashes as I fall to sleep.

memewarning from http://www.thehumblest.net/ through google pictures.

Lying To Fit In

I lied on my college application. That has bothered me for so long, it’s time to get it off my chest.

See, the college application essays are stupid. They want to know an important moment in your life, about your future plans, about your hero. The most pivotal moment I can think of now is when I realized I could no longer please or even try to understand my mother. Future plans? I thought I’d be dead by twenty. Hero? I had none. I was dead.

I often wonder why I even applied to begin with. I think it was peer pressure. Being in the honors program, everyone else was applying. Thus, I did too. There was no research involved, I applied only to schools that sent applications to me and asked me to apply. I think I even got application waivers because of my economic status. All I had to do was fill in the paperwork and then write those damn essays.

It wasn’t easy. I understood some things. Colleges wanted happy. Colleges with money could give me money. Looking at the tuition costs, I applied to those that were the highest. My mother was aghast, didn’t support me in it, didn’t help me fill out applications. She wanted me to go to a State school, but she didn’t really even want that. She wanted me to go to community college, like my brother, stay at home and work to ‘save money for a state school.’ There was no way in hell I was staying with her.

So I had to write the essay and I realized that they didn’t want to know the ‘real’ me, they wanted a shiny happy person, and the poorer I was the happier they’d be because all colleges crave ‘diversity.’ Thus, I lied, and still hate myself for it. I wrote an essay praising my mother, saying how strong she was. I talked of how she brought us from a life in poverty in Arizona to a stable house in New York giving up her husband for her children. All hail the mighty mother, I bowed to convention. Playing up the poverty, I turned her into a f*cking saint.

And, I not only got into colleges such as Vanderbilt and Barnard, Columbia, I got scholarships.

But the worst thing was that my mother loved the essay, cried. “It’s so true,” she sobbed, “I never thought you realized how much I did for you.” I swallowed my vomit and asked her to please, for the hundredth time, sign the financial aid forms. She finally did.

Then, to add insult to injury, when admissions came in they called my mother. At work. This pissed me off. I went to school for all these years, I excelled, I wrote this essay that made me ill denying everything I felt, and they call her first to tell her that her little daughter is in. Always the public martyr my mom would cry, then tell them that this was her dream school for me but I wouldn’t listen and if only they could help. . .

In the end I went with the school that gave me the most money, because it was the one that my mother decided would make her look best at work. She told me she wouldn’t help me pay for any other school (not like she helped me pay for that one either. She never signed any paperwork, if anything was sent to the house she promptly destroyed it, and I ended up having to go through the paperwork to declare myself as financially independent each and every term, because legally we shared the same home address) and I held out hope she’d pay for this one. Though, to be fair, one year I filled out the paper work that qualified her for a PLUS loan for my education, I think it was about 1,200, and I never have any intention of paying for it for her.

See, when she bought my brother car after car she told me that I wasn’t getting one because she was saving that money for my education. But when the time came, she bought him another car. So it’s only fair, right? That in the end she burden some costs. After all, she takes all the credit for my success; she might as well pay for some.

I only wish I could charge her more.

I only wish I hadn’t lied on that application, but then I would have never gotten out of that house.

Interesting side-note. I felt so bad after that first year, like everything was a lie and I was such a fraud, that I tried to transfer. This time the essay was real- it was raw. I talked of statistics. I was a female. I was from a life of government cheese and dumpster diving. I was from a violent single-parent home. I was the one in four of my friends who hadn’t been sexually molested. I was (if my mother was to be believed) a minority. Statistically, I shouldn’t be alive. Statistically, I shouldn’t succeed. Statistically, I was less than nothing. Yet here I was, applying to you the college, asking for your help in my continued success.

I was rejected from all places. Maybe I should have stuck with happy lies instead of sad truths. Such is life; we all want to live in cheerful oblivion even if everything underneath the surface is wretchedness. We want to take pills to make ourselves merry, rather than battling and defeating the demons that bring us down.

But I’m not lying anymore, especially to myself. I may have a dark past but I have a bright future, hell, even my present is pretty damn well-lit, and I won’t hide anymore, not even from myself. If a place doesn’t want to hear the truth, the true me, then I don’t want them either. It’s the only way I can be. And if I don’t want to hear the truth, I know it means there’s something there I have to explore and overcome

Survivor's Remorse

This is, I think, one of my biggest issues. “Why me?” And I don’t mean why was I so abused as a child to the degree where I just stopped living, but why didn’t I get it worse? Why wasn’t I sexually abused?

Here’s the thing- I have a brother, older. I loved him so much. He was everything to me. He was two years older, but to me he was the strongest boy ever. I was always a nerd and he protected me at school, beating up kids that threw sand at me as I sat and read during recess.

But things changed quickly. My father had a ‘special’ relationship with his little boy. My mother also had a ‘special’ relationship with her beautiful boy, though I’m not sure of the extent of that one. My father did strip away his innocence and turned him from my knight in shining armor into the one causing me the pain. He’d hit me and insult me at school, and this later escalated as he would bring home knives and guns and became the strong man I always dreamed he was. And he went from being the smartest big brother to failing in some classes.

So as I go to therapy and ruminate about my life, I’ve begun to listen to these thoughts that have always swirled around in my head and they are coalescing around my brother. If I had been prettier, would my father have been attracted to me and my brother saved? My father always said I was ugly; I was never his beautiful little girl. Perhaps if I had looked better it could have been me, not him, and my big brother could have always been my big brother and not turn into the monster he became.

Then comes the other thought – what makes me so goddamn special. Was there a universal plan and I need to fulfill some greater purpose? When I think that way I see myself as a failure, I work one full-time job and adjunct at a college, I do nothing spectacular. If my brother was sacrificed so that I could fulfill God’s plan, am I failing the loss of his innocence?

It goes even deeper. My best friend in Junior High was a girl named Dawn. We used to always play together. She lived in the projects and I only a few blocks away. She had scars around her wrists and ankles. When I asked about them, she said her parents had tied her to the bed when she was little, that’s why she lived with her grandparents. But scars were natural in my world, I have one from when my father punched me in the face when I was about five, a nice white line from when my tooth went through my lip. And that’s just one of them.

Dawn and I used to ride together in the Salvation Army van and lay down in the back seat with our legs over the seat in front of us. Then, with each turn we’d roll into each other giggling and laughing. Sometimes we’d sneak toilet paper from the Army bathroom and hang it out the back window and watch it flutter in the wind and then break off square by square.

Then she turned sixteen and her father was released from prison. Nine months later she had a child and it was a pretty good guess who the father was. I saw her die when she first told me she was pregnant, it was the same look my brother would have when he came from one of his ‘father/son’ moments in the garage. She went on to have another child, and last I heard they were both taken away from her by social services and she was a prostitute.

I’ve seen other people fall too, sexual molestation is the absolute worst thing. But, while I had so many bruises, cuts, and scars not to mention the psychological torture my mother loved to inflict on me, I wasn’t raped.

And I want to know why. Could I have saved my brother from his fate?

Then the rational side emerges – I lived in an irrational world, and living in Manhattan I can recognize the world is still very irrational. I can’t say if it had been me instead of my brother things would have been different. Perhaps my brother would be severely screwed up because he, always the protector, couldn’t protect me. I also don’t really believe in ‘grand plans’ just that I was born to be me, and that’s who I am. Then I start to think of how screwed up I am to wish that my parents had sexually abused me instead, or even in tandem with him so at least we might have an understanding.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that I’m alive, which I guess makes me sorry and guilty that so many other people aren’t. I always thought I was going to die by age fifteen, or twenty-five, or thirty. Then when I finally got out of my mother’s control I realized I had already died so long ago and that now, now I’m actually living.

And now I want to know why I couldn’t bring my brother or friends from that time with me. I want to know why that kind of bullshit still continues and so many children are made to suffer.