Family

Latchkey kid is the acceptable version of describing neglected children. I'm not sure there's a polite word for unwanted children. My parents didn't marry for love and they certainly didn't have a second child out of love. Both of my parents suffered personality disorders of their own but they 'did the right thing.' Getting married and becoming parents was a way out for both of them. My mother a fair skinned, hazel-blue eyed Mexican farm girl dying to get out of a migrant community. My father a single young man drafted into the army likely due to his economic status, son of an Appalachian coal miner, who more than anything did not want to go to Vietnam. So one night at a USO dance held, for soldiers as a morale booster and for women like my mother to met a husband, they met, pregnancy ensued.

My brother was a byproduct of getting out for both of them, but where they went was far away from grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and any community support system they might have had when my father was stationed in Washington DC.

My mother was a Mexican wether she looked like one or not, they were in a mixed marriage, our neighbors knew it and my mother felt it. She would sometimes use Spanish intermixed with English around the house, little words here and there and I picked up on it. I went to school and used these words innocently, I was teased relentlessly. My mother stopped all together teaching me these words, when asked later in life why she didn't teach us Spanish, she answered because she didn't want us to grow up with the discrimination she did. This left my brother and I in this middle zone where we're not White to our White family and we're not Mexican to our Mexican family. This only became apparent to me in my adult years, but it was always there looking back. It explains the lack of family support on either side that we grew up with. None of our cousins' knew what it was like to grow up without that love and bonding from just being near blood relations.

My father started his professional career as a salesman for a liquor distribution company. He started making good money after a while, moving up the ranks from sales to management and eventually to become the vice president of warehouse distribution. My mother while not college educated was the grandchild of a school teacher, her father spoke multiple languages and taught her how to speak, read and write in English as a child. She passed as white and made good use of that in a place where there were no Mexicans at that time. She held positions related to language throughout her career, starting as a court stenographer, later as a medical shorthand transcriber and eventually a translator and stenographer for the NSA.

I was born ten years after my brother. My parents were coming up financially but they were also having serious marital issues. My father was a heavy drinker and gambler. He used his job as an excuse to stay out late at night, or take weekend trips, regularly and leave my mother alone in a trailer home with a child. She felt trapped and she had struggles with depression and grew to resent my father. He knew it and rather than changing his habits he worked hard to get her pregnant again, because if she is pregnant she won't leave him. Worked once before, why not rinse and repeat.

Once pregnant with me she demanded that they move into a home. So my father bought a new construction home in a community raised for housing Department of Defense employees situated between Fort Meade and Annapolis Maryland, with a short direct commute to his job in DC.

I came to being under the conditions of self preserving manipulation so it's no surprise that I was resented even before I was born. As soon as I could be entered into school off to fulltime work my mother fled, knowing she still wanted her independence. She pushed the responsibility of being a parent onto my teenaged brother, who had zero interest in raising the sibling that ruined his life. He was however interested in psychological torment and revenge.

Meals were almost always frozen or came from a can, cereal box or bag of junk food. We ate carry out and fast food more than most families. I was overweight from a young age, as my father criticized my mother for gaining weight, so did my brother call me names like 'piggy' and snorted while I ate. As most things were with my father, his drinking, his anger, his constant criticism of my mother and children, so too did my brother inflict upon me with adolescent cruelty. My parents never corrected that behavior, they acknowledged it but then placed it upon me to 'just ignore him.' This continued to be both of their strategies for the entirety of their lives, just ignore it.

Psychology was not something that was believed in by my family, it was probably like that for most families in the 1970's. My brother was growing into a narcissistic personality disorder as he approached adulthood. I was exhibiting signs of what now might be labeled autism from a very young age. Inability to socialize, throwing inconsolable tantrums at the smallest of things, labeled uncooperative and a disciplinary case from the onset of my schooling. I was sent home from Kindergarten for disrupting during a painting activity when the paintbrushes they gave us were too large. I don't remember almost any of my young childhood, I only know about the paintbrushes because I later read the note the teacher sent home with me.

I spent many hours in my room alone growing up, I do remember some of those. At the time all of these things felt totally normal. Only now do I realize how much this detachment from other people in my early life would inflict years of pain and depression as I navigated adult life. Countless hours and dollars spent on self help, therapy and other activities trying to fix myself. Years of my life ruined taking medications that only made me feel worse. A lifetime of diets and counting macros and failed exercise routines. My best medicine is being alone.