Monday, December 5, 2011

We don"t choose our family, and when it chooses us, we can just walk away

My mom left me with my dad one weekend when I was 10 and a week later she called me tell me she would be visiting her sister in Georgia until she "got better". I didn't know exactly what this meant except that I'd been living out of a car for the last couple months with her and my brother since her boyfriend of 2 years broke up with her. So, I guessed getting better meant finding a new job, a new house. But I had other problems. My dad had always been a weekend dad so neither of us were ready for this change and he had started answering personal ads to find a suitable woman to raise me. Connie must have been as desperate as he was because they had a whirlwind of a marriage 6 months later. I didn't know what he liked about her, she didn't bring anything of value into their relationship, in fact all she had to her name was an old copper colored '77corvette and a ridiculous Cocker Spaniel named Bentley. She was 10 years older than him with grey hair and a mustache for god sake. Yes, she was artistically talented and smart but she was manipulative and controlling too.
She fooled my dad's family but not me. There were too many unanswered questions. Like, why had she been married so many times? She still wore 2 wedding bands from previous marriages (both husbands which she admitted had died quite soon after the marriages....creepy) and had 2 kids that she didn't talk to for some reason. Then came the "incidents" when she swore that I locked her inside a closet and another when she claimed I locked her outside the house and inside the gated premise- both of these incidents I am certain to this day, never happened.
These accusations and other argments we had frequently enough landed me in therapy once a week. To be honest, I was quite happy to have someone to vent my feelings of frustration to however it only made things worse when the counselor requested to see us as a family. Halfway through the meeting, the counselor asked to speak to with Connie privately and suggested she have isolated counseling- I thought a breakthrough was occurring, that someone finally saw her for what she was, but she declined insisting I was the problem. I almost believed it too but I used my position to it's advantage and told my counselor the one thing I knew she couldn't ignore- I would rather die than live with Connie anymore. In less than one week, I was a ward of the court petitioning emancipation.
The hardest thing I ever had to do was tell my father I didn't love him and I didn't have to, but I did it anyways because I wanted to hurt him like he hurt me when he refused to part ways with her. I was his daughter and she may have been his wife for 2 years but he insisted he didn't love her. So why wouldn't he leave her?  I'll never know. But that was my revenge. Well, that and the $1200 per month he had to hand over to the state for the next 2 years.