Divide and Conquer

A power play which happens in families and in countries

There is no easy answer to the divisive world we live in. The artist in me continues to write. The librarian side looks for the footnotes. Where I can connect the dots tell a clear story about what was happening back then and what is still happening in all of our lives. In my own life I never felt like the main character. I always saw myself as more the funny caustic best friend with a heart of gold, an archetypal character. Easy to love. A nice place to visit. The girl with the open landscape kind of face. Lending a hopeful ear. No one to fear until the moon turns red. Because over all the easy peasy of my ideal life, loomed the absurd reality of my actual life. Dodging existential angst at every turn. Having no idea what other people thought of me, still needing so much energy to figure out what was going on inside my own head. Living in the long aftermath of a childhood standing in the void of what may or may not happen next.

Everything always about to explode.

Mama played favorites, making our childhoods divisive and consequently cruel.

Play favorites, meaning to show favoritism to someone or something.

Play favorites, an idiom meaning to give preferential treatment to someone or something one likes or favors more than others. The Free Dictionary online:

1. The teacher is always playing favorites in class, letting the students she likes go home a little bit early.

2. As a senator I promise not to play favorites with our public services.

Seven years old, given the gift of a pink jewelry box. Inside a dancing ballerina. Twirled as mechanical music played when you lifted the lid. I didn’t have any jewelry, and I’d never had anything like it. The box to keep what I didn’t yet possess. A box for desires. I didn’t have a jewelry box. And neither did my younger sister. The favorite. I was decidedly not the favorite. That day on my seventh birthday the favorite cried for my gift to be hers. Her own magic box with a twirling dancer inside. Tiny dancer. Small heart in a box. I clung to it crying when our mother screamed for me to give it up. “Give it to her you little bitch,” she said.

And I let it go.

I gave the gift meant for me to my sister the favorite. Just simply handed it over. Not happily and not quickly. Still, I handed it over. Not because I didn’t want the gift. Oh no. I wanted that magic object. So much had been taken from me by the time I turned seven. Much more than a cheap toy.

Studies have shown that favoritism can have negative effects on children and their relationships. (1)

My mother preferring my sister drove a wedge between my sister and I, kept us at odds, not close, never close. Never able to come to one another’s aid. Never able to come together to confront her abuse and neglect.

Mama played favorites and her playing favorites divided us.

Divide and conquer from Merriam Webster online: to make a group of people disagree and fight with one another so that they will not join together against one. [his military strategy is to divide and conquer]

In general, Mama liked her girl children better than she liked her sons. Among her three sons and six daughters, she favored my younger sister, and she favored one sister in a set of twin girls born when I was ten years old. Split them down the middle and chose a favorite.

One to favor and praise and one to ignore.

Once I heard Mama say to her favorite twin, “You are the cat’s pajamas.” Her twin sister standing alongside flinched and immediately responded, “Well, I am the cat’s robe.”

My beautiful, sad sack younger siblings, you needed so much and received so little.

I loved my fellow unfavored little sister in that moment; admired her for the imaginative way she took care of herself. I disappeared in the midst of painful comparisons. Let go of what I wanted. Of wanting anything much for myself for a very long time. The superpower of every living being. To want. To do. To wish for. To have. To say this is mine. My own. You can’t take it.

When I was a toddler I’d jumped on my trike and pedaled off. Twenty blocks away before I was found. I’m leaving I’m leaving. After that I stared out windows. Into alleys and backyards. I watched game shows and read Nancy Drew mysteries. I wrote haiku. I climbed trees fences hillsides. I side eyed. I cried. Sometimes I cowered. I went inside and shut down. I let her take whatever she wanted from me.

When she was in a mood she looked like a giantess, whether she was across the room, or right in front of you. She’d stand at the kitchen sink slamming her left foot against the floorboards over and over; despair pounding through the house.

When the amygdala, the fear part of the brain gets going, the cerebral cortex, which controls reasoning and judgment, becomes impaired. You can’t make good decisions or think clearly.

In high school safe and away from Mama I lounged on the couch in my foster parents’ home watching a Smothers Brothers comedy routine on television. The brothers wore a sweater together, their two heads coming out of one neck. Straining to face each other one man angrily, sadly, finally said to the other man’s head: “Mom always liked your head better.” And I laughed. Laughed wild and crazy in the dark living room. Laughed in the cruel face of something I understood, something hard and true.

No one does you a favor by making you their favorite.

Mama’s favorite children died young, before they reached the age of fifty. Before they found their own footing. Before her children could all come together as one. Free of favoritism, catastrophizing and the normalization of dysfunctional power.

(1) Don’t Play Favorites: New Findings on Parent-Child Relationships in America

https://ifstudies.org/blog/dont-play-favorites-new-findings-on-parent-child-relationships-in-america