Enter the Dragon Series: Part One--Sleeping Dragons Wait for Apologies.

My angry period (no! Not me on my period being angry, but that too, I guess.)

After all of that malarkey with my father’s ashes, something inside me broke.

It was part of me that tried not to be an asshole.

All my life, I had been waiting (patiently!) for my half-siblings to realize that I actually was a person and a harmless, nice one at that. From these conclusions would spring a rush of love and goodwill towards me, they would realize that they did love me. For actual reasons! Once they realized I had value, and wasn’t just a pest, they would feel and express remorse; followed by much-desired kindness towards me. Angels would sing, trumpets would sound, and we would hop, skip, and jump into the sunset—nay, the future—as equals, engaged in fierce intergenerational community-building, legacy-constructing, and mutual aid.

But first, we needed to be on equal footing. I mean, I probably shouldn’t have expected it, but in my defense, it was hard to be around them when they put me down.

Their campaign to improve my character and presentation started when I was a little kid, committing little-kid infractions; like crying, and getting whiny when tired. I mean, who hasn’t wanted to silence a whining, crying child? Those high pitches get annoying and those of us who were kids at the time just did not appreciate the way it stressed out the teens and adults around. It’s not their fault they wanted to have fun instead of trying not to hurt my feelings. What were my parents supposed to do, give me regular nap times, exercise, and meals to help with emotional regulation and resilience?

It would be better once I got to middle school, I resolved. No more ignoring me. No more laughing at everything I say. No more picking me up, holding me upside down and dragging my hair across the floor, pretending I was a broom.

But instead, during my onset of puberty, their ribbing focused on my musical tastes (which caused them to do sexist and bad impersonations of hippies,) wardrobe (causing the same humiliating impersonations of a girl, me, waving her arms around and screeching “freeeeeeeeee!”) and, my changing body (What were my brothers supposed to do, not snap my bra?)

Once I was through that awkward phase, all I needed to do to earn their respect was to be perfect—not only because I knew I was on thin ice, but also because their critiques had become more intricate and passive-aggressive, embracing a more impressively lengthy list of my flaws. While I’m no literary scholar, if I had to guess I would say it maintained a thematic unity around the idea of tearing down basically any interest or skill that I had.

Ok, cool. Cool! It’s a good thing I managed to attract friends that ensured my humility. As usual, I had a foolproof plan to get past the type of embarrassment that comes from the people you love the most excoriating everything about you. All I had to do was keep everything I held the most dear, down, deep inside. For the lack of intimacy that predictably caused, I had another plan: be super vulnerable in a way that was performative, selective, self-deprecating, and hopefully sometimes charming, so that while people did see true, authentic glimpses of my Self and my Soul, there was always another component deeply locked down, that kept me from feeling fully joyful in the present moment.

A small price to pay for good friends and a loving family, right?

The five of them, or as I like to refer to them now, the Gnat Pack, reached the age of maturity a decade, give or take, before I did.

Surely upon adulthood, the Gnat Pack would realize how unfair it was of them to bully a literal child when they were teens three times my size. After all, my parents asked me to be understanding that they had come from divorce and death and that they must be jealous, so it actually was a compliment when they bullied me.

If I was being told to do these mental gymnastics by my parents, I reasoned, eventually my siblings would be. And when my parents finally held them accountable, or they grew up—whichever came first—they would have an epiphany. Then they would do as anyone with integrity would do--self-reflect and apologize.

I know I seemed to have apologized to them quite a bit, for being around them and their friends, for needing to go to the bathroom when they were driving, and for eating too much.

For sure though, Gnat Pack apologies would arrive when I graduated high school. Most of them were either in college or building their adult lives. You need maturity and grace for adulthood, right?

Ha. My sweet, summer child self.

Alas, reader, the apologies did not arrive.

Instead, the bullying and condescension became more advanced, more covert, more verbal and passive-aggressive—really the kind of bullying you would need a high school diploma to understand!

And so passed my late teens and early adulthood, still waiting for those apologies, but doing my best to spread joy and create excellence in my one wild and precious life.

I needed another plan; one that would allow me to be myself while getting them to leave me alone.

By my college graduation, I had perfected the bland, pleasant, plastic self that I presented to them instead of my real personality. I avoided the drama of being made into a caricature and they got a meek, quiet version of me that they could take for obeisance.

Photo by Adrián Valverde on Unsplash

When the youngest two siblings had their own children, I thought, ok. Now they have to come around; after all, these particular siblings would never allow their children to treat each other the way they treated me. Wrong! (On both counts.)

Then, after I completed graduate school and awarded a Master’s in Counseling Psychology, earned 3000 client contact and supervision hours, obtained a paid internship in my field, and started getting paid to routinely assist and support other people’s families, I thought; they can’t discount me now.

Right?

Wrong again! I’ll never forget how my former brother-in-law’s (Carla’s second husband) reaction to the news that I had passed my licensing exam.

“You know,” he began, as I attempted to walk past him with a tray of appetizers, “I went to couple’s therapy with my ex-wife.”

I looked at him.

“I could do your job without having to go to school,” he continued, pointing his index finger at me, then the air.

I rebalanced the tray.

“Basically, you ask Person A how they are feeling about their wife, and then they tell you. Then, you look over to person B and then say, ‘how do you feel about that?’ You let Person B talk, you know, ‘yap, yap yap,’ and then you look back at Person A and say, now what do you think about that?’” He crossed his arms and nodded deeply to himself, “That’ll be a hundred dollars, please. “

“Hahahaha, yeah totally,” I said, “Do you know where Carla is so I can give her this tray?”

Tiffany acknowledged my being a therapist three times. The first time, she was in a crisis with one of her kids and desperately asked me to recite the names of all the child therapists and programs I knew of in two different counties. She kept me on the phone for an hour and followed nome of my advice.

Years passed, and the second mention was to explain why I couldn’t convince our alcoholic mother to get treatment: “You keep using your therapist voice!” she explained.

The last time she ever mentioned my job was when she texted to say her daughter’s first choice for an assignment (that dreaded college paper that students in Psych classes have to do where they waste some poor therapist’s time asking repetitive, inane questions) was sick, and that I would do. That is correct: Tiffany’s phone-owning, college-aged daughter’s first choice fell through at the last minute. But, I would do. She respects me!

Their first choice was probably a PhD—those jerks get all the gigs.

Of course, I stepped up, and I did my best to answer the tough questions, like “where did you attend school and for how long” in a way that seemed fresh and relatable. She’s family! I might be their second choice, but I’m my first second-choice.

But, eventually I realized there had always been a double-standard. I, and later, my own children, were seen as lesser-than, to them and their children. They never explained why, I just was. In their minds I deserved the type of treatment that coincidentally kept me in the role they had assigned me.

And then, I became a mother.

My body felt discomfort at the idea of any of my family of origin being alone with my children. I allowed Mervyn and his wife Merlyn to watch Baby Tiny exactly once, when Husband and I went to a friend’s wedding.

When we picked up our daughter after the wedding, Mervyn had said that Baby Tiny had taken a poop in his toilet, which would have been her first toilet poop ever. Instead of celebrating, I felt weird that my brother had been there for that. I didn’t like that someone who had been a fair-weather brother assumed he had the right to be there for that kind of parental milestone. I didn’t like how he acted nonchalant and smug about it having happened, even after I told him she had never toilet pooped before.

Images of Mervyn holding my arms behind my back while Jack Jr. dug his hands into my stomach, sides, armpits, legs, and feet popped into my head. They had called it “tickling” but at the time, even though I laughed, it felt like a scraping, a digging, and a scratching; ostensibly for some kind of dog toy in my soul.

Much later, when things got bad enough, after Mervyn and Tiffany tried to sue me while our mother lay dying; after Carla messed with my child, after Peggy Sue went full-frontal MAGA, after Jack Jr. stopped using me as a free therapist and started using me as a scapegoat, I realized something.

All of my good behavior, the looking of the other way, the pretending I didn’t hear all the snark and slights, after making every effort to celebrate their wins and show up for them and their families, after all of my pretending that they weren’t boring and predictable…

It was for nothing. Sure, it taught me patience, grace, and self-regulatory skills. But so did school, therapy, and the world.

They never liked me. Some of them did love me, some of them thought they did, some loved me the way a pet bird loves the person who feeds them.

The other one or two haaaaate me. Hate masked as indifference.

My parents had been too old and lazy to intervene when it would have made a difference. They were too busy extracting free labor from them in the form of babysitting me, clearly a conflict of interest. I realized with horror that my parents had trained me to be a doormat to these little monsters because they wanted to leave me with them while they fucked, drank, travelled, and socialized.

That’s when the dragon moult began. Deep inside of me, that dragon was always there, chained up on a short leash, breathing fire inward.

The car accident didn’t just dislocate my collarbone—it dislocated the dragon from her chains.

That’s when I learned: I could be mean.

I mean—I may be mean, not like “could” as in, I might be mean, but am actually allowing myself to be mean; and pissed, and petty. All the things I thought I was above.

I went low, and dug deep, and took the rest of the chains off the dragon and flew out of the dungeon on her back.

By that time-none of them would answer my phone calls, so I sent texts. Texts! To anyone born before 1980, that feels so petty! I fucking love it. I text fast.

Everything that was pushed down, came up like hot wings after a roller coaster.

And that’s when I started having fun.

To be continued. Also, HEY! Thank you so much for reading this to the end. One never knows how their story might impact another and you are such wonderful, validating, deep readers! Thank you for your support of what is now a body of work consisting of 31 posts over two years, with a following that grows faster each month. I am so happy when I hear that something I have written resonates with you. Soooo I am asking you to consider making a donation to me, or becoming a paid subscriber, so I can begin to work towards a world where all of us are fairly compensated for our labor, and where I can personally start to receive a bit more financial support for this project. The goal is to keep this newsletter free, and if you are one or two of the folks that are always reading and sending me DMs and can’t support me financially, I’m not talking about you. But I do want to take the opportunity of what I hope is a scintillating cliffhanger ending—to remind you that if you do have the moves (that means cash) and I got the motion (that means writing) we can come together (you can become a paid subscriber or a donator!) and we be causing a commotion! (Ciccione, 1987) (with your continued support I can devote time to this newsletter, pay my bills, and steadily increase the value I provide to the reader!

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