Dear Sadie

Dear Sadie,

I have to write this letter to my diary because you’re not speaking to me right now.

I love you so much. I wish that you would let me love you, but over the years it seems like the harder I try the farther away it pushes you.

It’s been clear to me for several years that you don’t like me very much. I get the very strong feeling that my presence must be tolerated by you, and is far from enjoyed. Your responses when we speak are superficial. A lot of “mmhmm” and “..yeah.” You roll your eyes when I’m talking. At times I see you look away in disgust out of the corner of my eye.

This is in very stark contrast to how you act towards our other sister, Jamie. You light up when she’s around. At Christmas time you snuggle with her and laugh. I used to chalk this off to the simple fact that you’re closer in age and just have a tighter bond. I tried to be respectful and not take it personally, but it still hurt tremendously.

I don’t know why you treat me this way, and you won’t tell me, so all I can do is speculate. And speculate I do, for hours, all the time, sometimes every day, trying to solve the puzzle, trying desperately to find the solution so I can solve the problem and earn your love. I try to mend what’s been broken, even though I don’t know what that is, and with each effort I feel your resentment grow.

I had a lot of anger when we were children, and I imagine that was scary for you to see as a child. I had a lot of anger because I was being abused. We were being abused, but specifically I was being deeply abused, and had been since I was born. Mom told me things from a very young age that no child should hear, bad, scary things. She screamed at me all the time, often times because of things that you and Jamie did. When you girls misbehaved, I got the brunt of Mom’s rage. She said I was the oldest, I should have been watching you. As a child, I didn’t know any better, so I internalized this. This is why you perceive me as being bossy. I was trained that you were my responsibility, and. your mistakes were my mistakes.

It mad me really confused, scared, and angry that when you misbehaved, I was the one who got in trouble.

Mom also invalidated my feelings constantly. If one of you did something intentionally to hurt me, Mom would brush it off and say you didn’t know better. “They’re just little,” she would say. What she should have been doing was teaching us conflict resolution. “Hugging it out” doesn’t get to the root of the problem. It doesn’t fix anything, or truly resolve anything. It’s confusing. It doesn’t feel good. The truth is that Mom just didn’t want to deal with anything, so she put the brunt of that responsibility on me, and when I failed, or when you failed, I got severely punished. How could we ever form a proper sibling relationship under these conditions? You resented me for acting like your parent when I wasn’t, and I resented you for being my responsibility when I should have been enjoying being a child.

Starting about age 7, Mom would have “night talks” with me. It was our special time. During these talks–often she was drunk–Mom would talk to me for hours about very adult matters. She treated me like a confidante. She told me it was because I was an old soul and we had a “special bond.” This is called grooming. Mom wrapped her inappropriate behavior in a pretty bow and called it love. This was very confusing for me as a child, because I wanted her love and affection, but these “special talks” left me feeling yucky and empty inside.

As a teenager, when Dad was out of the picture, Mom treated me like something akin to a partner, not a daughter. This is a form of child abuse called emotional incest, or enmeshment. I encourage you to watch some videos about it on YouTube to learn more about it, because I can’t even begin to explain the complexities of this type of psychological abuse here in this letter. In addition to this, Mom consistently made me feel like an unbearable burden, which caused me to focus all my attention on alleviating that burden. That’s why I went to work as soon as I was 15. It was my little checks from McDonald’s that kept the lights and the heat on.

Mom also obliterated my self esteem consistently. It made her feel better to make me feel bad. She wanted her pain to be my pain.

She taught us how to lie. Do you remember that? She taught us that omitting parts of the truth meant you were still telling the truth. She taught us to lie about what was going on at home. She did this in a general sense several ways, by allowing us to live in filth, a kitchen filled with gnats, our bedrooms so filled with trash and toys that you couldn’t see the floor. Do you remember that we couldn’t use the front door at the house on Lombardy because there was a pile of laundry blocking the door for an entire year? Living like that teaches a child over time that they’re worthless. Even worse, when one of us tried to clean, Mom would punish us. One time I cleaned the entire kitchen by myself when I was only 10 years old, and rather than praise, Mom started sob-screaming, saying I had thrown out her cup of vodka, and instructing me to smell it next time. She told a 10 year old child to smell cups before cleaning them to make sure they weren’t coveted alcohol. Her cup of vodka was more important than anything else in that moment. I remember you cleaned the kitchen table one time, and she lost her shit saying you ruined her “organized chaos” as she called it. That table was covered in a mound of dusty papers and envelopes, so we couldn’t sit at the kitchen table, and she yelled at you.

The point that I’m trying to make is that Mom and I aren’t “like oil and water” as you once called it. Mom was abusing me, and because of that I had a lot of pent up anger.

I’m so sorry that you were exposed to that.

I imagine that you hate me for calling child protective services that afternoon. I don’t know how much you remember about that moment, but I remember it like it happened yesterday. The three of us had locked ourselves in my room because Mom was wasted and she was banging on the door screaming. We were terrified. I remember the look of fear on your faces. I looked at you both and I said, “I can call for help, but it means we might not see each other for a long time. We might have to go away. Is that something you’re okay with?” And you both said yes. Jamie was crying. So I made the call.

You’ve said before that I just went off and hung out with my friends, but that’s not what happened. I have a feeling that Mom has something to do with this line of thought. See, Mom can’t ever be accountable for anything. She has no ability for self reflection. She has to blame others all the time for all her mistakes. She told you girls that I did a bad, bad thing by calling that day. And to add to that pain, I was just off galavanting around with my friends while you suffered at the group home.

That’s not true.

I was only a child. I was an abused child calling for help. The pain of that experience was so great that I was suicidal for a period of time. I was a lost, abused, broken child living in a home that was not my own. We’ve never spoken about our experiences. I wish that we could.

Mom is not a victim. Mom is the perpetrator. She made incredibly selfish, poor decisions time and time again, and not ever with our best interest in mind. Every excuse that she has for the problems in her life is a lie. She often says the recession is to blame for her hard times, but the truth is that Mom got fired from jobs for stealing and for drinking on the job. This is not speculation. I know this for a fact, because our boss at 7-11 told me.

Even if Mom gets a pass for her bad behavior while she was drinking, she still continues to this day. She’s manipulated me into doing all her dirty work and taking care of her every time she fucked up for my whole life. She should have been taking care of me, not the other way around. Did you know that one time Mom took money from me and I found out she turned around and sent that money to you while you here in college? That’s a perfect example of her lies and manipulation. She told me she needed the money for bills. She gave it to you and took the credit. I would have happily given you the shirt off my back, but Mom wanted the praise and adoration.

I did so much and made so many sacrifices for you and Jamie, so that you might have it better than I did. I tried so hard to bring joy into your lives whenever I could. I never told you about the things I did in the shadows because I never wanted you to feel like a burden the way Mom made me feel like one. I just wanted your lives to be better, plain and simple, in any way I possibly could.

One example of this is moving out when I was 18. You told me that you felt I had abandoned you and Jamie. I moved out because Mom said the reason she was drinking so much and crying at night was because she didn’t have her own room. She said, “How can I be happy when I don’t even have my own space to put things?” So I moved into a house where I slept on the couch and was the maid because I couldn’t afford rent, just because I thought it would make your life better, Mom’s life better.

I scratched and saved for an entire year to buy a car while I was in Denver. I lived in a studio apartment with no furniture and bed bugs. When you called and said Papa was sick and needed to go to the hospital in Nashville, I spent all that money to buy a plane ticket that night because you sounded so scared. You said you had exams that week. I was happy to do it, and I would do it again. But that’s another example of putting the needs of the family before my own. Did you know Dad would have died? He was hours away from dying when we got there the doctors said. Dad should have just gone to the regular ER. It shouldn’t have been our problem to figure out.

I did my very best. I did the best I could for being only a child. It hurts so deeply to be cast aside by you girls. I know I’m not a perfect person. I’m painfully aware of that. But I do know that my heart is good and everything I’ve ever done came from a place of love and wanting better for you girls.

I’m not expressing these things to say anyone owes me anything. I just wish that you would try to understand. I wish that you wanted to understand.

When mom yelled at me at the table at Chili’s in Oklahoma, I could see it on your face: You got what was coming to you, Katy. That’s what you get for upsetting Mom. And I just don’t know how we got to that point. How did we come to the place where you feel I deserve to be verbally assaulted, rather than being upset with Mom for not being able to control herself? She’s the parent. She’s always been the parent. The punishment does not fit the crime. Was I being short with her? Yes. Did I deserve that response? No. But given the circumstance, I feel like I deserve some grace. I was still grieving Dad and Mom had foisted that whole mess onto me. Mom should have been handling all of that, but instead she called me crying, saying that they were going to throw Dad’s ashes without us. She said she couldn’t call you girls, that I had to do it. I had to call Uncle Terry because he “didn’t like” her and wasn’t responding to her messages. It was all a bunch of bullshit. She just wanted me to do all the work, and so she played with my emotions so I would do her bidding. That whole situation with Jamie just straight up not answering me for months until 3 days before… No one deserves that.

Mom has been meticulously trying to pit us against each other since we were little, because it shifts the blame off of her. It’s an abuse tactic called triangulation. Did you know every time Mom comes back from Florida, she calls me and talks trash about you and your family for hours? About Kyle’s relationship with his dad, your relationship with Twila. The last time she did it, her opening statement was, “I’m never going to Florida with them ever again!” I listen, and I let her vent, because that’s always been my role and what’s expected of me. I didn’t know that this type of behavior is wildly inappropriate and abusive. Moms shouldn’t be talking shit about their kids to their other kids. It breeds contempt.

I wrack my brain day in and day out trying to figure out what I did wrong and how I can fix it. I try desperately to show you my heart is good and I just want to love you. No matter what happens, I am your sister, and I will always be here for you. I’m open to hearing anything I’ve ever done that may have inadvertantly hurt you so I can make it right. I want our children to be friends and know each other. I want you to come out here and stay with me so we can get to know each other again and our kids can play in the backyard, and swim in my little pool. I want to be in your life, and I want you to be in mine. I want us to make new, beautiful memories. I want us to heal all this deep pain. I know it’s possible, but I can’t make you want it, too.

 

Love,

Your Sister Katy