Silver Spoon

All my life, I hated the silver spoon in my mouth; it felt more like a collar polished dry, rubbing at scabs on my neck. Its hold made it hard to breathe, worse to speak my mind. Took me a while to recognize the loathing, but therapy brought clarity. Yes, I resented my privileged life since I rarely got to enjoy my life. Just thinking that feels liberating because everyone knows how challenging that golden-ticketed life weighs on the wealthy. I won't begrudge those who look at my pompous prick peers in frustrated envy - most of those tailored Brioni and Chanel-wearing trust funds feign competence in their corner of nepotism. And the ones that cashed in on the American Dream lottery can't leer past the chip on their shoulders to see how much luck it took to get them out of their humble beginnings. So I get it. Label me the most ungrateful heir to the one percent since Donald. 

At the age of nine, while captivating the audience with my rendition of the Lark Ascending at my violin recital, I thought distantly when I even started to practice at the strings. To this day, I still can't recall when I did or why, but I presume it originated from my sperm donor of a father's standards or a desire for his attention. Ironic since he sent his assistant to pick me up from that recital.

I rhythmed to the melody that my arco fiddled, but my chin never fit on the rest, and the medium never fully sated me. It felt like holding a brush to a canvas of a blooming rose without any red hues, making do with orange or yellow. When I asked to stop, my donor, through his assistant, asked me why I would stop something I loved so much. He knew best, or so I thought. 

School sucked. No fancy adjectives or prudence for the experience it imbued me with - school sucked. In case one wonders where I first attended elementary, think of a deceptively up-to-date rustic structure that housed less than five hundred kids that screamed the epitome of excess and spitting in the face of equity. Reflecting on it, perhaps cramming every worthwhile extracurricular under the sun down the throat of a pre-adolescent who doesn't know squat about their life purpose yet encouraged a bit of my cynicism, but what really made the narrow halls close in on my smoldering attitude problem derived from my lack of friends.

Lord knows I tried, but who wants to be associated with the girl Conner James and his goonies called the teacher's paramour? He only did it because he felt embarrassed for getting second in class. I only did it because my donor's assistant would squeeze my arm again if I didn't place at the top. They didn't listen. And neither did my donor; he said he paid for an educated daughter, not a weak one. With therapy, again, I realized he avoided saying he paid for my education.o

I eventually transferred to a European boarding school; my donor said I forced him to do it. I couldn't help the involuntary scream I unleashed at Conner after he taunted how my donor didn't love me... Or the tackling and hitting him. It surprised everyone, including me, and ruined my chances of skipping a grade. It came from somewhere, someothing I didn't realize I possessed. Individuality. A voice. 

I didn't stop trying to make friends. Even when the teasing of the foreign American girl wouldn't stop. I just wanted someone to talk to.

But then my uncle found me when legal trouble found my donor. I moved back to the States, attended a public high school, and replaced my seared scallops and spinach with spiced pomegranate glaze dinners with spaghetti. My uncle had to hold my hair and dab a cool rag against my neck as I hurled in the commode after eating so much, but I never regretted it. For the first time, he, anyone, let me pick the dinner. From that night on, I considered my uncle as my dad. Not the donor but the role model dads are supposed to play. I left Plato's cave and felt freedom tan my skin, enlightening me to my own desires. My dad let me drop the violin and pick up the guitar - Hell, he taught me how to shred Sugar We're Going Down. He took me to the local roller rink and told me to run around with other kids for as long as I wanted - an oddly frightening experience for two reasons: 1. I felt that one slip-up on my part and I would go back to the instructed 'fun' others thought of for me, and 2. I didn't know kids could just... Go and play with strangers. On roller skates, no less. 

Despite the hurdles of puberty and acclimating to a lower-end range of the middle-class lifestyle, I found purpose. When I saw underprivileged kids my age struggling in class and the tutors lacking the resources to meet the challenge, I joined all the right clubs and fundraisers and attended county meetings to fight for more power in the schools. They made excuses, reminding me of my place, to which I reminded them of theirs in Hell. Dad dragged me out of that meeting with the chamber filled with a mix of jeering and applause, though he came in later that night and admitted he felt proud of me. 

By my junior year of high school, I saw someone different in the mirror. Someone who looked me in the eye that could grin at my braces and acne. My dad pointed me toward reputable non-profits, helped me apply to the schools that would look good applying for jobs after college, and he encouraged me. He encouraged me. He taught me how to cook, save money, drive, and avoid the frustration of tax season and helped me temper my self-righteous tantrums at injustice. Most importantly, he did it all by instilling self-reliance in me with love. He even helped me understand that it's okay to like women too.

Then my donor returned, collar in hand. A criminally brisk legal battle later, I couldn't see my dad until I turned eighteen - somehow, a criminal can retain all of their wealthy assets despite incarceration. 

The last time my donor saw me, I wore knee-length skirt uniforms, my short hair combed, and I couldn't look him in the eye when I spoke quietly. It took him all of those four months before I embraced adulthood to understand that the cute punk of a youth activist was the same daughter. But I couldn't get away from him.

I'll own up to it; I choose not to leave him for good. As I packed my things in my clunker to meet with my real dad, my donor approached me with an offer - his legal past still haunted his business, and they could use some good PR. Which meant establishing a worthwhile and not-at-all government write-off of a foundation. With one foot in the car, I tapped my index to the rusty hood, thinking that a foundation I made would somehow be different. 

I know what you're thinking, and yes, he made the offer for the wrong reasons. He still wanted at least one hand in driving my life, and he couldn't care less about any endangered pandas or starving children I would help. 

But damn. I wanted to spend all of his lucrative money on things he hated. 

Citing literally the rest of my life, my dad didn't trust my donor's bid for one second, and he hung his head over the steaming cup of coffee in his hands when he realized I already made up my mind. I jumped into ivy-league expecting everything to feel different this time. Some things changed, like my healthy social life with a few friends and making out with my new girlfriend, but unfortunately, so too did the demanding academic performance. Every student came from the top of their class, same as me.

But my donor's deal included me making a name for myself - within reason, he said. At first, we butted heads over my involvement in peaceful pride protests and rallies to increase professors' benefits. Slowly, though, I found myself in his carefully crafted web that took me away from the things I felt passionate about in favor of attending conferences I didn't care for. The professional community thought me a prodigy of my own making, and so did I, not even considering the possibility of my donor's hand influencing the out-of-the-blue career-jumping calls.

Then I felt like a contractor arriving at the construction site and finding the skeleton already built, let alone designed, by someone else. The non-profit clicked into place too quickly; it deviated from everything I learned from earning my Masters - the leniency in the discounts, the clockwork reliability of the workforce, and insurance coincidentally providing the exact premiums our budget called for. I didn't do a damn thing. I signed forms and smiled when they took pictures. Two neat vodkas didn't stop my hands from shaking at the ribbon cutting - excuse me - at the ribbon cutting of a construction job finishing on time. 

I felt delirious, scrambling over nothing at the non-profit. I felt that if I slowed down the fantasy would shatter, but I somehow found myself attending my donor's second wedding. My girlfriend and I sat in the back of the ceremony and watched him marry his former assistant - go figure - and I found myself laughing and dancing with the woman I fell in love with at the reception. The silver spoon didn't taste so bitter that night as she and I made love at a five-star hotel, eating some of the wedding cake we swiped. I choked on it two weeks later, and my voice found me again. 

Feds let themselves into my office and "asked" for every record of our financial transactions for the past two years. I stuttered for the first time since childhood but complied, knowing deep down that the fantasy failing was my fault; somewhere, I slipped up, whether I overlooked the fine print in the tax forms or spaced on something two years overdue. Sitting on a metal folding chair in that cement box, waiting for the good cop bad cop routine to free me from the agony of not knowing how I broke the law, I wrote a mental rough draft of an apology to my donor. 

But then, when a woman from the IRS came in, I became a specter of a spectator and watched someone explain to my paling face how my donor duped me and all of the charitable institutions we promised money to. He laundered, embezzled, lied, and used my - his - non-profit as a way to cycle money back into his businesses while accruing a turned-leaf persona who enjoyed millions of dollars of tax forgiveness. 

Shock couldn't describe how it feels to look down at your wrists and recognize that chains imitated the cuffs of a suit. To hear the sound of your own voice violate the air around you and know that you didn't speak such things. A reel of every form I signed ran on replay in my head, and with the reminder of what a cruel man my donor is, I thought again and again about how I let him corrode my very signature, my name, my life, and my purpose. I let him put me in a box this time. The life-sucking hollowing within my core made me crumble and cry in front of the surprised IRS woman. 

Because I ran a tight ship, a subordinate noticed the numbers didn't add up. A tip later sent the IRS sniffing, and luckily they caught the scent of the failsafe my donor concocted to ensure my loyalty. Evidently, he didn't pay for my tuition outright, accumulating an outrageous student loan in my name, and planned on dumping it on me if I ever found out about his illegal activities. 

I visited my donor's house the day before his trial. I ignored his gaslighting. His excuses. Even his pleas for forgiveness. And then the unbridled balloon that swelled within me all my life gave me the strength to bite that silver spoon in half. I couldn't speak the next day at the hearings, my sore throat taking a vacation to recover from the screaming I slugged the day before.

My donor surprised everyone though. He pleaded guilty. 

After my donor's imprisoning, the settlement left me with a sizeable student loan - not nearly as much as the initial mountain - a menial job, and a distrusting, cynical, and fragile mental health state that nearly cost me my relationship and future. 

Now when I look at the walls I feel that they could close in on me. With no one to blame but me.