Family Betrayal

It's fascinating to me how memories float back up year after year. Perhaps I must tell the story aloud.

The time when I stayed over at my sister's new house and at bedtime she deliberately locked the adjoining bathroom connected to the guest room. She locked from the inside so I couldn't use it. No problem, I just walked downstairs in the night to use the toilet. The next morning she screamed at me, "What the hell, were you wearing shoes to bed? I could hear you when you got up to use the toilet."

The time my mother announced, "We're taking a family vacation to Spain. But you're staying home, you're no fun to be around." At the time I was relieved because she was awful to be around but this exclusion over time has haunted me for years. How come my step-father never stepped in and said anything. This episode was a perfect example of my mother's wish to have a perpetual honeymoon without children, and especially without me. I was the favorite, then I was the circus bear brought out to perform and then shoved back in my cage. And finally I was the demon child who abandoned them. Over the decades the family proceeded to be vindictive in a most immature and glaring way. "We visited your friends on your birthday, backstage on Broadway, and we were so surprised that they like you!"

When they met my husband. They said to him, "We like you, but we don't understand what you see in her."

In their world when you are "family" it means you are no longer a guest. You are someone to mistreat and abuse and that's exactly why I never went back. I prefer not to be abused even if it means I am now officially an orphan. I'd rather suffer the tribal loss than the constant betrayal and abuse. It's tragic on many levels. I do not know my extended family and when I reach out they do not respond. Terrified, they have no idea what to say. If it wasn't for my Grandmother Sophie and my Grandpa Nat I'd probably be another suicide statistic. It was their love that grew in my heart. Their love that kept me alive.

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”

― James Baldwin