The girl with the flower tattoo

Her name is Stacey, and she is my baby sister.  Sometimes it feels funny calling her that because she’s taller than me, but that’s what she is….what she’ll always be. 

Stacey is…..well, she’s something else.  Growing up, she was tall, blonde, thin, popular, a cheerleader….what every teenage girl dreams of being.  She had tons of friends, many boyfriends (not at the same time!), and a vibrant, loud personality.  We were as opposite as two sisters could get.  I was also thin growing up, but I had red hair, and was almost painfully shy.  I was kind of a wallflower.  I had lots of friends too, and a couple of boyfriends in high school, but I pretty much stayed in the background and observed.  Stacey was the girl everyone wished they could be, and I was the girl who wished I was more like her.  I was also (and still am) the emotional one.  I cry at the drop of a hat!  People tell me that’s good, that I shouldn’t hold my feelings in, but sometimes I wished I were more like Stacey.  She came across as coldhearted, and she would NEVER let anyone know they had hurt her.  She kept her emotions and feelings bottled up, while I wore my heart on my sleeve.

I’d like to say we were close growing up, but we really weren’t.  We’re only 2 1/2 years apart, but it might as well have been 10 years.  We just had nothing in common….especially when we were younger.  Maybe when we were really little we were close, but I don’t remember.  But here’s what I do remember, and what I learned, on our long, painful journey together…

When I was a sophomore in high school and Stacey was in 7th grade, she woke up in the middle of the night one night and was sick to her stomach.  We shared a room, so it wasn’t like she could hide it.  After she threw up in the bathroom she came back to bed and whispered to me that she had swallowed a whole bunch of Tylenol earlier that evening, and made me promise notI to tell mom or dad.  I remember at first thinking…."You did not!"….but I could see she was serious.  I promised I wouldn’t tell, and I got up and got ready for school.  Later that morning I went to the nurse’s office and confided in her what my sister had told me.  It was eating me up inside.  She told me I HAD to tell my parents, that I could not keep that secret for my sister, and I finally agreed.  She called my mom at work and explained to my mom what I had told her, then put me on the phone with my mom.  Mom, of course, was upset, confused, bewildered…every emotion you would expect a mother to feel who had just learned what she’d learned.  I confirmed what the nurse told her, she called my dad, and they both left work and went home and took Stacey to the doctor.  Later that evening my dad was pissed at me for not telling them sooner and told me "If we’d gotten home and she’d been dead, it would have been YOUR fault!"  I will never forget that, and I don’t know, honestly, if the guilt over that has ever really gone away.  But that was just the first of many, many times I would break my sister’s confidence in the years to come.

After I graduated high school I stayed in Illinois for a while and worked, and six months after graduating my best friend R and I moved into an apartment together.  It was TOO much fun!  And I, finally being free of my uber-strict father (and R can testify to that fact), went a little wild.  Partying all night, struggling to make it to work the next day….I came very close to losing my job.  Actually, I knew they were talking about firing me, so I quit before they could.  Then R got sick and ended up being out of work for a while, so the both of us had to move back home. 

Now, during the time I was living in the apartment, my parents split up and my mom and Stacey moved into a duplex while my dad moved into an apartment about 45 minutes away.  My mother had no control whatsoever over my sister and to say she became wild is putting it mildly. While my parents were still together Stacey became aneorexic.  She was hospitalized for that, but she came out of that hospital even more dangerous.  She drank, she did drugs, she lied….and she had my mother jumping through hoops.  All Stacey would have to do is threaten to not eat, and Mom would give her whatever she wanted.  Stacey wanted nothing to do with our Dad because he wouldn’t put up with her b.s. 

So I had to move into the duplex with the two of them, down in the basement because there were only 2 bedrooms.  I tried to join the Air Force, but was rejected because of my vision.  I remember coming home and crying for hours because of that, because I had really had my heart set on it, and after they rejected me, what was I going to do then?  I found another job, but life at home was hell….literally.  Stacey didn’t like to share our mother’s attention with me, and did anything and everything she had to do to have it all to herself.  There were times I honestly thought my mother forgot I existed.  She doted on Stacey, and barely even glanced at me twice.  I was lonely, frustrated, sad…..it seemed like life just kept getting worse. 

During the time I lived with Mom and Stacey, she got put into yet another hospital….this one for kids/teenagers with major personality issues.  She was there for three months, and I can honestly say it did not good at all.  She came back home, and everything went right back to the way it had been.  I think maybe subconsciously that’s why I started acting up at this time.  I started missing work, staying out all night, hanging out with very unsavory people…..I think subconsciously I was trying to get my mother’s attention, too.  Well, I got it all right….she kicked me out of the house.  She didn’t want me, my Dad didn’t want me (he told me my lifestyle "disgusted him"), and I had nowhere to go.  I spent a few nights here and there, with diferent friends, until I was offered a way out.

I had been dating a guy from the Navy Base…his name was Sterling.  Sterling was an irresponsible, abusive, alcoholic who treated me like crap, but when he got his orders to go to Little Creek, VA and asked me to come with him and marry him, I didn’t hesitate.  What else was I going to do?  We went to Alabama first, where he was from, and got married at the courthouse with his mom, his cousin Wilson, and Wilson’s girlfriend Catina in attendance.  I remember thinking, as he was putting the ring on my finger…’Oh my God, what am I doing????"  NOT a good thought for a newlywed to be having, eh? lol

Sterling left for Virginia and I stayed in Alabama with his mom and stepdad because we didn’t have a place to stay in VA or any money.  Life in Alabama was….oh wow, nightmare is putting it too nicely!  So I didn’t stay there long.  From there I moved to Georgia for a few

months, then back to Evansville, IN, where I was born and still had tons of family, and lived with my grandma and got a job at the hospital.  I was feeling settled and happy for the first time in a loooooong time! 

Of course, that feeling went away when my Mom and Stacey came to visit.  My Mom and Aunt Pam (one of mom’s sisters) and Stacey talked about renting some movies and taking them to Pam’s and watching them there and hanging out.  My mom invited me to join them and I was thriled to be included!  But while Mom and Pam were still in the kitchen at Granny’s and Stacey and I were in the living room, waiting for Mom and Pam so we could go rent movies, Stacey told me to my face "There’s no room for you in the car, Amy, so I don’t even know why you’re coming with us."  Honest to God, just thinking about that moment still makes me want to cry.  The look she gave me when she said that to me was one of pure disdain.  I think at that moment I realized that my own sister wanted nothing at all to do with me, and probably wished I didn’t even exist.  I was heartbroken.

But they went home back to IL and things got back to normal again.  Sterling came to IN when he got some leave and when he had to go back I cried on and off all night the night before he had to leave.  I really did love my husband, and I wanted to be with him.  We talked about it and I put in my two week’s notice at my job so I could move to VA to be with him all the time.

Then he went and did something really fucking stupid.  He and a buddy of his in VA decided to go AWOL from their ships.  They came to IN and picked me up, then we went to IL and spent some time up there with my mom and new stepdad and my dad and some of my friends, THEN we drove to AL to see his mom and stepdad and his friends, then he and his buddy decided that they’d better get back to their ships before 30 days was up so they didn’t get kicked out.  He wanted to leave me to AL again with his mom and I told him absolutely not!  I was going with him, period.  So we went to VA, where he was put on restriction for 30 days (meaning he couldn’t leave the ship at all and I was allowed to visit him every Sunday) and I slept on a friend’s couch.  Right before his 30 day restriction was up he went to some department of the Navy and they gave us money to rent an apartment, money to turn the electricity on, and vouchers for groceries from the Commissary.  I was beyond excited!!!  We had our own cute little apartment and could live like a REAL married couple!

Now, I mentioned earlier that I was allowed to go visit him every Sunday while he was on restriction.  Well, on a couple of those visits we snuck into an empty room on the ship and…um….had a conjugal visit, you could say 😉  The reason I mention this is because as soon as his restriction was up, he was able to come home for one night, then the ship went out to sea for several weeks.  One night while he was gone I spent the night at my girlfriend Chris’s house.  Her husband was on the same ship as Sterling, so she was home alone with her three kids and I liked to go over and spend time with her and the kids.  Anyway, I spent the night at her house and woke up the next morning in incredible pain!  I knew I had a bladder infection, and a BAD one!  I called NavCare and they told me to come in and bring them a specimen.  Chris got a sitter for her kids and drove me to the NavCare, where once there I was asked some general health questions, handed over my cup of urine, and told to go sit back in the waiting room and they would call me when the urinalysis was done.  So I did.  Chris and I sat there and chatted, then 10 minutes later I was called over to a nurse’s desk and sat down.  She told me that yes, I did indeed have a nasty bladder infection, and that they were giving me a prescription for something-or-other to treat it and oh yeah, by the way, YOU’RE PREGNANT!!! 

OH.MY.GOD……that’s all I kept saying, over and over and over and over…..OH MY GOD.  I don’t even remember leaving the clinic and going back to Chris’s house.  I was in shock, I swear.  And I found out a week before my 21st birthday.  Talk about putting a damper on the plans I had…lol!  Instead of going out clubbing and drinking, I turned 21 at Chris’s house with pizza, tacos, cake and ice cream.  But it’s a birthday I’ll NEVER forget!

Okay, I’m going to take a break now.  And yes, I know I’m talking mainly about myself right now, but Stacey figures in to much more of the story, I promise!  Time to go shower and head to the doctor’s office.  I hope everyone has a lovely day!! 🙂