In the Aftermath
All I wanted was to gather up my left behind siblings and bring them back to me, their oldest sister
What I strive to be every day is who I was before all the trauma: the original me. The toddler who confronted the rooster. Not a woman still struggling to tell her story, the story of a first and oldest child, an only child too, a girl who cared for her younger half siblings as if they were her own children, loved them the way she wanted to be loved: enough to make up for the hopelessness. Even loved Mama’s favorite, her surprise with blue eyes, the girl three years younger and always a foot taller, the sister with dark hair and a poet’s heart, the sister closest in age if not in temperament, the one I’d known since the beginning of knowing, and the one I’d wanted most to save.
Moody Sister had already died three years before Mama died. After one too many pills, she passed me by, walking to the right of the sidewalk, in the grass, close to the gutter where we used to play when it rained. Christy, Christy, wait for me, she sang out in my dreams. Mama said to wait for me. Mama said you had to take me with you.
I didn’t take her with me. I left her behind and all the others too.
Abandoned her and the child who came next in line, a boy born two years after Mama’s favorite. “You can be my baby, you can be mine,” I’d whispered in his ear when I was six and he was brand new. Understood even then that Mama would not love him.
Even then I knew.
Knew it four years later too when she brought home twin girls: blonde dolls with sapphire eyes. I knew she would have to choose which one to love, never enough to go around. And she did. She chose the twin who would die a few months before her, beautiful and drunk and alone. Another favorite gone too soon, loved by a mother who had to parcel out love.
Nine children by eight different men, men mesmerized by her loquacious speech, convinced by her beautiful body.
When the twins were three years old, she had another baby girl, gift of some stranger in the night, and I knew once again I would have to love her as my own. And I did. I loved her so hard and so strong she called me mommy. Toddled toward me, a thirteen-year-old girl, arms wide open and loving.
I held on to her the way I needed someone to hold on to me.
After I left, Mama had two more: number eight, another girl to ignore, and number nine, her last, another boy to hate. Born when I was twenty, five years gone and at last in college.
I had never met either of them when I got the call Mama had died.
Her story over and done, mine just beginning.
In the aftermath I couldn’t get any of my siblings out of my mind, thought night and day there must be something I can do—some way to change them was what I meant—to retroactively erase the years of pain and waste. Clutched in the chest by tamped down desire to hold them in my arms and say I know what you went through. Lonely and in so much pain I couldn’t think straight.
I pushed that pain around on the page for a while; describing things I could not yet give voice to. Be okay; be okay I said to myself. You can breathe now. She is gone. Just tell your story.
But how would I ever be okay if my siblings weren’t okay too?
After all this time, that was still the question.
Their once childish chatter an arrhythmic cackle in my dreams.
Their mile high moxie, their ruthless disregard of authority, their freedom, of a kind I had left behind, left behind and sometimes longed for.
Desiring kin and afraid of them too.
Afraid to know what happened after I jumped the fence and ran, knowing there might be some bad stuff happening if I wasn’t around to protect them.
Knowing some people can’t bear it; some people don’t come out okay.
My stepfather had called me over the years to share updates of his son, my first brother; the baby I had once vowed to love as my very own. I’d only seen him a few times over the years. His dad, my stepfather fought for and won custody of him when he was seven years old. Now he was grown and homeless, living on the streets. And his dad, anguished and at the end of his life, called to tell me how much he wanted to take us all away, how hard he tried way back then to convince his attorney that his ex-wife was truly crazy.
“Not just sexy crazy like in the movies. Real crazy like not right in the head.” Nowadays people might say she had “issues”, as if there were a few difficult subjects too perplexing for her to focus on for very long. Not a chemical surge, which had turned off the light of reason in her brain long before any of her children were born. When I asked my only living aunt, my mother’s youngest sister, why their parents never got my mother any help, she said, “Mom was afraid they’d lock her up.”
Instead, they left her to run wild. A grifter for most of her life—living off a combo of child support, Aid to Dependent Children and whatever she could extort from men. Moving back and forth across the county, living in cheap motels and cars, marrying and having children, year after year, with nothing to hold her back, and nobody willing to stop her.
I stayed as long as I could and then I left and saved myself.
But that’s another story. One I’ve already told.
This one is not about leaving, but of coming back. Of finding what I didn’t even realize was lost after I jumped off my family tree and asked the state of Missouri to make me a ward of the court. Put myself in foster care, a decision that made me. And every word I write. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: there was no other way. The tree was falling. Now Mama was dead, and I wanted to gather those fallen branches in my arms, find those left behind siblings, and bring them back to me, their oldest sister.
Because I needed them, wanted them, only them, the only ones who knew the story. I loved them. But I was afraid of them too, afraid of who they were: people I had left. Afraid they would hate me for leaving. Hate me for surviving. Hate me for what I knew: no matter how pretty they looked, how tough they acted they couldn't hide from me. Because I knew. I knew because that’s how I’d once lived too: hiding leftovers away for later, holding hands and running when Mama’s fits started, laughing loud when strangers stared.
Hanging together no matter what: a clan, a pack, and a rolling carload of need.
Now she was gone I hoped there was something I could do to bring us together again, some way to reach out, to convince them kindness wasn’t just a sucker’s game like Mama always said.
Still. It would be a long time before I was able to get Mama’s voice out of my own head.
You’re a mess you know that? Not the kind of girl that does well. Just not pretty enough. I have a use for you, so I will keep you, but I don’t want you. No one wants you. You’re too ugly to even go to school. Fact is, maybe I don’t even need to send you.
I did not cry when I heard Mama had died. Howls of grief have seldom come from my body. They reverberate inside. Bottled up. Contained. Mourning is for other people, the socially adept. The ones who trust others will hear their wails and not wonder at their meanings. I envy their lack of shame.
Lack of shame—I write that phrase down and bile rises up in my throat.
Still haunted by the past, still in the backseat with the twins and the one who used to call me mommy, listening to all of them cry for the love Mama didn’t know how to give, always afraid she was growing another one, another sibling I could only mother as best I could.
A couple months before I found out about Mama, the sister born after I left called my landline. I didn’t recognize Last Girl’s number on the display, but I answered anyway, uneasy with the guy installing a new lock on my door and unprepared for what I was about to hear.
“Our sister is dead,” a Missouri voice said, and went on to tell me that Platinum Twin had died unexpectedly, and at home.
The twins so beautiful and two, were now one.
“When?”
“Yesterday. They found her in her bed. Pretty as she always was but not breathing.”
I listened to the news my mind a whirr of remembering: my baby sister at five, then at seventeen, the last time I had seen her, in the Tulsa Juvenile Detention Center, looking at me with dread, a truer blonde than her full blood sibling, with spooky blue green eyes strangely tuned out like Mama’s.
“How? How did she die?” I asked. Wishing I had taken all of them with me when I left Mama, and then the Midwest.
“She’s in heaven now, at peace with her savior,” this sister responded, flat as that.
“How did she die?” I asked again, needing to know. “What exactly happened?”
“I haven’t seen the death certificate. They won’t give it to me.”
Jesus! Can’t any of them answer a simple question? “Okay,” l said. “Forget about the death certificate. Don’t you think it’s strange she died so young?”
She was only forty.
“I find it very sad you can’t move on.”
“Have you?”
“Look, I haven’t ever met you,” she said. “I was a baby in the front seat of the car when you ran away. So, you know what, you don’t know anything about me, and I really don’t know anything about you. But I’ll tell you what. I have faith and I do like my faith tells me to do. I forgive. What about you? Do you accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior? Do you even believe in God?”
I got off the phone as fast as I could and sat down on the kitchen floor quaking.
Moody Sister gone.
Platinum Twin gone.
Both of Mama’s favorites dead.
Then Mama died too.
In the aftermath Last Girl would call and we’d talk on the phone, conversations full of confusion, punctuated with a consoling recognition of our shared origins.
“What do you mean?” I asked her one morning after she’d told me the story of another sibling’s recent escape from the cops. “How did she do that?”
“Do you remember who our mother was?” Last Girl responded. “What she was like?”
We both exploded in a fit of laughter.
The kids in the car know how to laugh. I trust our laughter. I get that laughter. I let that laughter in. Because I know the lack and loss it comes from, the sheer need which drives it.
Greedy people are seldom funny. At the very core of humor lives a profound understanding of loss. Especially the ultimate and inevitable loss of life itself. The kids in the car grew up on loss, forced to leave everything behind, time and again.
“Leave it,” she would say. “You can always get it again.”
You can never get it again.
I never got another Swinn husky bicycle pale blue with big fenders, the Tinker Belle glow in the dark wand I used to read by undercover at night when our rental grew finally quiet, or the homes we left, the schools, the friends, one after another. With every move so much was left behind, and we were on to the next place and the next. Teaching me time and time again to let go.
Let it all go.
After Mama died Last Girl sent me Mama’s ring.
A few years later, another heavy envelope dropped through my mail slot.
Inside the envelope, I found a turquoise necklace, a gift to me from another estranged sister, Tomboy Twin, the surviving twin, the girl who so long ago had refused to get out of her counselor’s car and come inside to see her oldest sister.
“She passed wearing it,” Tomboy Twin wrote.
I held in my hands a string of cold stones, encrusted and old. They smelled of cigarette smoke and gasoline. The attached card read. “May you find peace and joy in the many wonders of the season.”
May you find peace and joy in the many wonders, the many wonders of this strange and mysterious life.
I began to think about the idea of renewal, the possibility of joy. Maybe now, I could let myself off the hook for Mama’s unhappiness; maybe now, I would be able to tell more of my own story. Maybe now was the time to finally come to some acceptance of what had happened to me, to my siblings, to all the kids in Mama’s car.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
“What I strive to be every day is who I was before all the trauma: the original me” - what’s at the heart of spiritual practice. (Love the photo!)
I’m moved by the way you describe this ongoing string of childhood chaos and how it can leave people emotionally entangled.