Wendy

I'm sorry, Wendy. It's only taken me 60 years to say this. You. With the green eyes and crooked smile. I kept wanting to believe you love me. Yet, yet, yet...the signs were always there.

I think it really only hit me when I saw a movie called "The Bad Seed," where a dangerous little girl found ways to cause the death of people she didn't want in her life.

We shared a bedroom. The green of your eyes did nothing to hide the jealousy you harbored for me. Our parents were struggling to discover a reason for your late emotional development. The pooped pants until you were eight. The slight drooling of "pablum", I called it.

I knew better than to try to play with you. Maybe it was when you said; "open your mouth and close your eyes." I obeyed. Suddenly I realized you put dry dog shit in my mouth.

Or maybe it was when you put garter snakes in my lunch box. You loved snakes. You knocked me onto the ground and held me down while you took the snake you had placed in my lunch box, and made it bite my arm. Little fang marks. Not a lot of pain.

I put my fear of snakes away and buried it in my mind. Years later my eight-year-old son came marching proudly into the house with a big paper bag. “Check this out, Mom!” he announced with pride. He reached into the bag and produced a six-foot-long garter snake.

The next thing I knew I was backed against a wall screaming. Poor Lucas. I spent the next months sitting next to the snake aquarium for a time every day. I would watch the crickets crawl over the snake’s black scales, and imagine I could hold it without fear.

I never understood why our parents believed you so easily. You were a liar. I was not. Yet, when you blamed me for stuff you did, they always believed you.

It got worse as we got older. You started befriending my girlfriends so you could lie about me in a way that ended my friendships, and caused problems for me at school.

Maybe it was the miraculous way you would feign innocence with your pretty lashes blinking with wonder. Perhaps it was your huge, voluptuous breasts. Maybe it was your striking eyes and round face with golden long hair framing your quirky beauty.

I remember praying to God in our front yard, pleading “Please let me have small breasts so boys will look at my eyes, not my boobs.”

Mom was desperate to buy your good behavior. That’s how you ended up with a horse.

I knew you’d never let me ride him. 

You practically lived at the stables. I remember that beautiful gelding. You named him Spite. You told me he didn't like you, but you'd ride him anyway. 

He got you back, though. Spite jumped in front of a car. He was uninjured, but you landed on your head on the pavement. I prayed hard for your recovery. The doctor told us it would take a miracle. Lo and behold… you bled through your ear during the night, releasing pressure on your brain. You lived.

And came back to our bedroom. Back to the line through the middle of the floor. Your side. My side. You, with poop-stained panties and food hidden under your bed. Throwing shoes at me if I crossed the line. Rotting food smells wafting my way.

I hated you.

After the divorce, Mama struggled. She had three young kids. She earned a low, disrespectful salary because she was a female teacher at our local high school. This situation resulted in her tears whenever Dad failed to make his child support payments on time. 

Mama’s UC Berkeley education didn’t earn her the respect, salary, or positions her male counterparts enjoyed. There was no cultural conversation about mental health issues, and no respectable options for a Mom with a kid who loved to control her using hysterics. “Why don’t you hit me then!” You would scream at her. She, a peace-loving social change advocate, never complied.

You would sharpen your fingernails so you could draw blood when you attacked me. You would punch me in the gut so hard I couldn't breathe. To tell on you did no good. This was just my lot in life.

Then things got weird. The word poltergeist comes to mind. I heard it said they were more common around teenagers. 

It started with strange events in our room. We now shared a bedroom in our Mom’s small apartment. We had a stackable record player. For some reason, it would skip some records and drop the Black Sabbath album at will. Or so it seemed. The bell on our bedroom door would ring independently.

Then it was the mysterious smell of rubbing alcohol that we never found a source for. Also, the AM radio would turn on - on its own. The scariest one was when I had friends over one evening. You were in the living room with us. I can’t remember what the conversation was…but suddenly you started laughing maniacally, and there was an unexplainable shadow moving across the ceiling.

My friends were witnesses. It freaked them out. I remember later hearing whispers in the girl's bathroom at school that I must be a witch. 

Finally, one day when you had your boyfriend, Craig, as a steady for a while, Mom realized if you were married…Craig would then take over caring for you. And so, at the age of 17, off you went. I was finally free.

Then there was Harold. Vietnam vet. Ex-drug addict. You seemed ok for a while. Then came the accident. Mom and her friend went for lunch in Sacramento. Maybe they had a little wine with it. Patrick missed a curve. Mom died suddenly of a broken neck. Patrick was thrown from the car, uninjured.

You were pregnant with Elizabeth at the time. Dad said Harold called him after the baby was born. You were standing in a corner, seeing things that were not there. He said you were moving your hands randomly in the air. He said you seemed like you were in another world. I think that was when we lost track of Harold. Dad said Elizabeth had been adopted by Christian parents, as you had wanted. It was a lie.

Three years later I was visiting you. You were having an “unsupervised visit” with your three-year-old daughter. She had been placed into foster care. I was livid. I guessed it was because I wasn’t living a “Christian life” that Dad felt I shouldn’t be informed about what happened with her.

The jealousy only deepened when I became pregnant myself. I was put on bed rest for my pre-term contractions. We had to explain to our neighbors why a “crazy woman” would come to our house and pace back and forth screaming “I hope your baby dies!”

After Lucas was born I was able to focus on how to get Elizabeth out of foster care and adopted. It seemed obvious that I couldn’t take her due to the scope and nature of your apparent insanity. I met a woman who couldn't have kids of her own. I was able to observe her while working as a counselor in an alternative “Children’s Farm” where difficult kids were sent for treatment.

I helped Sandy adopt Elizabeth. Stable home, loving mom. I know there were so many issues, yet Elizabeth is an amazing therapist and Mom today, so there's that.

I wish these words could be spoken directly with and to you. I wish your brain could capacitate “normal” sibling relationships. I wish our years had not been consumed with me trying to help you keep a job, or move house when you quit paying rent, or when you decided to take your “walk to Canada” from California.

I have a friend who was an engineer and an officer in the military. He told me that sometime in the late fifties, the military wanted to test a new chemical to see how it affected humans. He said his superior officers considered the coast of California the place where all the “weirdos and hippies” lived.

According to Ron, they decided to spray over our area and then check the records and statistics at local hospitals to find out how it affected our population. We had pet rats that grew tumors. I, myself, had a tumor grow on the back of my leg, and I was born with only one kidney. The benign tumor was removed, but later cancer grew in its place.

Was this an explanation? Do you deserve my forgiveness? Is anyone acting out of anything other than logic and impulse? I gave up on forgiveness early on. Forgiveness for me seemed to correlate directly with no consequences for bad behavior.

I wish I had known the answer.

I wish. I wish. I wish.

I remember it was after I couldn't reach you by phone yet again and I realized I needed to come check on you that it really sank in. I entered your apartment to find every glass, cup, mug, and dish shattered on the floor. I heard a weak sound from your bedroom.   

I turned the corner and there you were, lying upside down on top of a huge pile of clothes. Your face was swollen and blue. So blue. You squeaked out a semi-chipper “Hey, Jo!” 

I’m sure you had been stuck there for days. I called an ambulance.

You were not safe at home alone.

Today is Christmas Day. I write with a reflection that helps me remain in my heart. You call me from the nursing home maybe four or five times a day. Sometimes I answer. Sometimes, I don’t.

When I do it’s because I know Mom would have wanted me to. When I don’t it’s because I can’t. And to be honest - I’m not sorry.