Marla

Raising me, my mother, Marla, ruled with manipulation. Giving love and then taking it away. Telling lies and gas lighting. It was a very long time before I realized exactly how marla didn’t really love me. Every step of raising me was built on the expectation that I would never “betray” or “abandon” her. She would gently demand emotional parentification (projecting the parent role onto me) every day in subtle ways.
“I’m going to die one day.”
“You’ll never abandon me, right?”
“You don’t love me, you just want to have fun with your dad.”

Everything was a well oiled machine to keep me docile and subservient to her. My tiny little girl mind didn’t stand a chance.

Marla never taught me anything directly. I never learned personal hygiene or cleaning up after myself. She didn’t teach me any skills like cooking or hobbies. She never taught me about puberty, my period, sex or my body. I grew up reading books from the library and actually listening in school because those were the only lessons I was getting about physical health.

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It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized why I had a certain affliction so often. This will be gross 🙂

Marla never taught me how to clean my vagina. Crash course: You don’t clean inside your vagina. You clean the skin (outer labia) around your “entrance” (gross) and leave the inside to do it’s own self cleaning.
I didn’t know any of this. So my vagina would obviously get gross because I was not keeping myself clean, and later in my teens, the men I slept with had dirty hands and penises that they put inside me.
Frequently I would get UTIs and oh my god they were so painful. I would cry while peeing because it felt like knives coming out of me. I would desperately google to find relief in home remedies but what is there?
And I didn’t dare ask my mom because she would think I had sex and I would be in trouble and shamed. I thought I had contracted an STD somehow.
So she neglected to teach me anything about my well being and body, but then turned around and shamed me when I didn’t know what I was doing.

What a fucking idiot.

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She did, however indirectly, teach me how to be hypersensitive to the feelings of those around me. To hear the emotions in the footsteps outside my door and prepare myself for the inevitable anger, because Marla never came to get me unless I was in trouble. She taught me how to talk quieter, laugh softer, and most of all, how to take punches.

Let me back up.

Marla and my father, Michael, divorced in 1994 after 14 years of marriage. They had three kids together, each two years apart. My sister, Rachel, the eldest. My brother, Michael, the middle, and me as the youngest. She would go on to re-marry and have two more sons with another man, but we will introduce them later.

When I was born my siblings, Michael and Rachel, hated me. They were my first bullies. I remember once they wouldn’t stop poking me and touching me, so I hid under one of our beds. They started jumping on it, crushing me over and over. I screamed and screamed but I don’t remember anyone stopping them.
They loved crushing me. Almost any time we “rough housed” as my parents called it, they would pin me down and crush me so I couldn’t breathe. Sometimes they would pin me down and tickle me till I cried or lashed out, then I would get in trouble for crying or lashing out. I was such a small little girl I had zero defense against them, my brother being a boy (SEXIST!) and my sister being 4 years older and larger than me.
It was here that formed my earliest memory of being “sensitive”, however, at the time they would call it “inconsolable”. My brother and sister would bully or physically hurt me and I would cry my eyes out. They would antagonize me just for a reaction. And I would be upset because I loved my siblings. Why would they do this to me? So I would cry and cry and cry. So sensitive.
As I got older I learned to shut down my feelings around my siblings. When I got excited they’d get annoyed and tell me to calm down. When I cried they’d tell me I’m too sensitive. When I laughed too loud it suddenly “wasn’t that funny.” I wasn’t allowed to react to anything or else it was fodder for ridicule or admonishment.

Meanwhile Marla and Michael turned a blind eye. They were so consumed by money first, then custody. They spent 18+ years in and out of court, dragging us into dusty, empty old buildings to see adults that we would meet then never see again. I don’t remember any of the mediation or court visits. I think I blocked it all out or I was just too young.
I do remember my first therapist, Doctor Strauss. He was a tall, slim man and very kind. He had toys for me to play with and he always asked his questions very nicely. I don’t know what he thought of me, but sometimes I wonder.

Eventually custody was “established” by the loosest definition. Marla and Michael couldn’t agree on anything just to spite each other, so we had insane schedules. At one point it was Sunday/Monday with mom, Tuesday with dad, Wednesday with mom, Thursday with dad, Friday mom and Saturday dad. It really was that insane, and it changed all the time.
I would grow up to be very adaptable to change in my surroundings. I didn’t have a childhood home that I was fond of and grew up in, with memories of Christmas day or big life milestones. Every place around Los Angeles looks the same, so none of our apartments or houses stuck out to me. Every house was some shade of beige, all the lawns were brown or struggling. The seasons never changed and I was too controlled by Marla to really explore and experience the state. This made leaving California easier when I turned 19.

Making us choose

When my sister turned 14 Marla allegedly kicked her out of the house for being a lesbian and she went to live with Michael Sr. . I say allegedly because Marla says she didn’t and Rachel says she did. Honestly, I don’t give a fuck, they’re both shit people. But Marla didn’t deny the accusation of being a bigot. In fact, she would often openly use derogatory terms and slurs for those of the queer community or those of a different skin shade than her. After that, I made sure to keep my attraction to women a secret from her, one of the many facets of my personality that I would hide.

Marla always called Michael Sr a “Disney Dad” because he always did fun activities with us. During birthdays he would do a clue chain where we had to solve clues he left to find our presents. We would take road trips to go to hiking trails and visit friends and family. He would write plays for my classes to perform for the school I attended.
What the fuck did you do Marla?
But since she hated Michael Sr she wouldn’t take her anger out on him. That would mean speaking to him. Instead, she took it out on us. It was OUR fault that we wanted to have fun hiking or seeing family. Why would us, as KIDS, want to have a fun summer or weekend? It wasn’t about where we went, it was the fact that Michael actually wanted to spend time with us. Marla did not. She would guilt us and say things like, “Well I was going to do x and y and z but you wanted to go see your father.” and then I would be upset that I disappointed not only her, but myself.
I distinctly remember celebrating one of my birthdays. I kept asking when my dad would get there and when he finally did, Marla wouldn’t even let him into the house to hug me. He had to wave to me from the front door.

When my brother turned 13 the courts made him choose (or perhaps my parents did) which house he wanted to live at. He chose Marla’s. This would be the beginning of his decline into drug and alcohol addiction, if it hadn’t started already. Marla was no stranger to giving her under age kids alcohol. More on him in another post.

This left me. I was 12 or 13 and being forced to choose between two parents that I loved very, very much. Because I was conditioned to.

I don’t know what is stronger. A love that has been controlled and manipulated, or a love that is genuine. The broken heart my parents left me with was worse than any break up I ever had. Often I hear the phrase, “It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.” I wish I could forget the things my family said and did to me. I wish I could forget all of them if it meant erasing the pain of losing a family that’s still alive. I wish I could never feel anything if it meant I never thought of them again.

So I didn’t choose. My heart ached at the idea of “abandoning” one of my parents and I think I cried myself to sleep alone in my bedroom more often than not during this period. Eventually they agreed to let me switch off every week on Fridays. One week with Marla, one week with Michael Sr. We will talk about Michael Sr’s side in another post.

Living in a house with Marla in my teens

The house we lived in while I was in high school was a big house. My step father, John, was an entrepreneur who started his own company selling music boxes. In the garage there were metal shelves stacked full of music boxes. Sometimes when I was sad (which was often) I would go into the garage, pick out a music box, wind it up and play it. This ended up making music boxes a bitter sweet experience for me. I hear the delicate little metal prongs bouncing off the wheel and it takes me back.

Anyway, my room in this house was upstairs. It was intended to be a study and so it had a shuttered window that was right in front of the top of the stairs. Marla rarely came upstairs, so she never peeked into the shutters. But Michael and my little brothers got some sort of sick satisfaction out of peeking in randomly throughout the day. Sometimes I was naked. Sometimes I was masturbating. I had no privacy.

I got my period at age 13. I discovered it while masturbating with something that was NOT a sex toy. I thought I had hurt myself, but then I remembered I was going through puberty. Not once did I think to go to Marla about my period. I stuffed my panties full of tissues and went on with my day. I was in middle school, and I remember getting my period at school one day. I didn’t have any pads or tampons, obviously, I was 13 and Marla was an idiot. So I took a half roll of toilet paper and shoved it into my underwear.

There was a middle school dance at the end of the year, the last year of middle school for me. It was the first school dance I would attend without a chaperone. I was excited! I picked out my outfit carefully. I was always cold, so I went with a long sleeve, and I layered two skirts on top of each other. I walked out of my room and went down stairs. I didn’t even take two steps down the stairs before Marla told me how ugly my outfit was. She tore it apart.
“Why are you wearing two skirts?!”
“It’s 80 degrees out, don’t wear long sleeves!”
“You look like a bag of dirty clothes.”
I went and changed.

This type of criticism was a daily occurrence. My clothes, my hair, my body hair, the way I smelled, my teeth, my acne, how skinny I was, the size of my feet. Everything was fair game. She gave me no direction or guidance and then laughed at me as I stumbled through growing up. This continued until the day I left California.

She also used to speak poorly about my brother Michael and my sister Rachel. She would call them demons, devils, phantoms. She would say they abandoned her, betrayed her. She would insist that if I spoke to them, I would be alienated too.

I loved Marla more than anyone in the world. I would have killed for her and I would have died for her. I thought I was her little girl, despite what she said to the contrary time and time again. I thought maybe she would realize how great I am and she would love me like I loved her.

But she got worse. When I left California, she called me, asking me to come back and baby sit the boys. I told her I couldn’t upend my life just to baby sit the kids for a few weeks. I offered her money for a baby sitter. She refused, saying she couldn’t trust anyone.

Then, she cut me off.

From then on I would be fed scraps of information about my brothers and John. I was not allowed to call them, and they were not allowed to call me. One of the last phone calls I had with John, I had sent him a card that said how I considered him more of a father than my biological father. He called me without Marla knowing, speaking in a hushed voice. He thanked me but he asked me what my dad would think seeing what I wrote. I don’t know, John, but why do you think I felt that way?

Unbeknownst to me, John was diagnosed with stage 4 thyroid cancer. Apparently this is the most aggressive stage. I believe, between diagnosis and death, there were about 6-8 months for him to live. I wouldn’t know how bad it really was until after his death.

At the time I was living in Nacogdoches, TX with my then-boyfriend Jeff. I popped on Facebook one morning and saw that I had received a message from one of John’s co-workers.

“So sorry for your loss. I just heard.”

I asked him what he meant and he said he heard John was passing. I booked the next plane to California. My sister, Rachel, picked me up from the airport and we drove to the hospice where John was being kept. Rachel parked outside and made no move to unbuckle. I told her he would really like to see her but she was too afraid of seeing Marla. This wasn’t the first time my sister showed cowardice and it wouldn’t be the last.

I went in alone. It was quiet of course and the nurse directed me to John’s room. He was laying there, unresponsive with his eyes shut. I sat next to him, took his hand and just… talked. I told him how much I loved him and how sorry I was for leaving him and the boys behind. I drew him a little comic on a post it note and left it there in case he did wake up.

He passed early the next morning.

Marla lost all sense of logic and ethics at this point. She put up huge walls so that the rest of the family couldn’t see the boys. She refused to let anyone speak to them unless she was present.

Eventually I moved to Ohio. She continued to try and guilt me into moving back to California and I almost did a few times. She would use my love for my little brothers to manipulate me and I would cry myself to sleep almost every night thinking about them.

My Wedding

Planning my wedding was a lot of fun, I enjoy planning get togethers. However my family, both sides, would do their best to make the worst of it.

I told my dad the original date, sometime in late spring, and he said he “couldn’t make it.” So I offered a later date in October. Once again, couldn’t make it. So I pushed it further back, to November. He could pencil me in. Thanks dad.

Neither Marla or Michael offered any financial assistance. Marla pointed the finger back to my father, as she usually did when money was involved. “He has plenty of money, ask him!” She seemed to think he was financially well off. I wouldn’t know, and I never asked, but I believe he was and is in a lot of credit card debt. At the time, though, I just wanted a nice wedding

Creating the guest list was emotionally draining. My husband’s family is huge, so we dedicated one hundred seats to his side. My family got twenty-five. My sister in law would pull me to the side and say, “It’s okay if you want to invite less of our family and more of yours.” No, Maggie. This is all I have.

In the end, ten of my family would show up.

I invited Marla purely so that I could have my little brothers there. She came to the tuxedo fitting with the boys and me. Men’s Warehouse. They brought out the tuxes and she starts fiddling with them, rubbing the fabric between her fingers like she was in The Devil Wears Prada. “This is the cheapest material! You’re paying for this?!?!?”

I thought I would drop dead from embarrassment. Tears came to my eyes immediately and I forced them back, plastering a smile on my face. I rushed the fitting and walked out quickly. You aren’t even paying for anything Marla, shut the fuck up.

My step sister, who I chose to be a bridesmaid, would also make a comment about how the bridesmaid dresses looked like cheap Halloween costumes. Jesus fucking christ.

Lastly, Marla insisted on walking down the aisle with me and my father. What the fuck?!?!? Later Marla would say she almost punched my dad while we walked down the aisle.

I think that was the last time I had hope for my relationship with Marla. I came to realize that she never loved me. She loved the idea of being a good mother. But she was never a good mother, and her children are proof of that. So when we get old enough to turn that proof back on her, she exiled us.

I will never understand why Marla never loved me like a mother should love her daughter. Looking back, I was a cute, giggly little girl who just wanted to make friends. What did I do that was so horrible? I wasn’t born with blue eyes and blonde hair? Is that really so condemnable?

I think I’ll end it there. Maybe I’ll have more to say another time.