Knowing When to Leave
Put Those Toxic People in Your Rear View Mirror
I remember the Summer of 2002 when I left an abusive relationship. There weren’t any real-time acts of physical or verbal violence precipitating my exit, but it came about in a profound moment of clarity that was positively metaphysical. It wasn’t a lightbulb moment, but instead, the internal revelation of a still small voice, not my own, that simply said, “She really doesn’t like you.”
This wasn’t news to me, but hearing the universe say it so matter-of-factly gave me the validation I had never really allowed myself to feel. It was liberating! In that moment, still wounded by the shaded condescension and abject disregard piled on me that entire day, I felt relief knowing that this relationship, at long last, was finally over as she unwittingly hammered the final nails into its coffin. I sat at my computer, MapQuest-ing her route back to San Diego from my apartment in Los Angeles, a single tear streaming down my face. She snatched the directions out of my hand, gave me a quick little hug, and said with a chuckle, “You’re just like mama.”
My abuser was my sister. Seventeen months older than me, she never made peace with my emergence into the world, declaring war upon me in our infancy. By the time we were adults, her contempt for me had taken on psychopathic proportions. Our family history is full of “cute” little stories about her hijacking my bottles, crawling into my crib and sitting on my head, and even trying to pull my legs through the slats of my baby bed. I have no memories of those things, but even as little girls she never held back from openly expressing her disdain for me.
When we were teenagers, she made sure to tell me that the people we knew in common really didn’t like me, that I was stupid, ugly, and needed to “do something” about myself, as if I were a hideous sight to behold. Yet, ironically, whenever she and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the outside world, I was always pointed out as “the pretty one”. Whenever this happened, especially if the compliment came from some random boy, I’d end up wishing I could disintegrate into a heaping pile of smoke like the witch from the Wizard of Oz because I knew retribution was coming. It would usually start with an explosive barrage of degrading name-calling reiterating her opinion on my unsightliness and stupidity, sometimes in public. Along with the tongue-lashing came the stealing, wearing, or destroying of my clothes and other property. I always paid a high price for any positive attention directed at me in her presence.
The thing is, I never cared about looks, or superficial compliments; still don’t. I was the creative artist and bookworm in the family who lived inside my head as a way of escaping our grossly noxious dynamic masquerading as a happy, black middle-class family. Friends used to tell me that my sister was just evil and jealous of me, but back then, I loved her too much to believe it. I’m sure that had something to do with my lifelong indoctrination of never allowing an outsider to come between us and family. Unfortunately, I was the only fool who believed it. Decades later, her former close friends would tell me about the animosity she frequently expressed for me; by then, I had no trouble believing it.
In many ways, the relationship between me and my parents’ other daughter never stood a chance. We were the collateral damage of their fifty-one-year marriage — a contentious and baneful union that began in 1948. And yet, while she and I are equal parts of both of them biologically, how we came to identify or dissociate with them is the stuff psychological case study research dreams are made of. I identified with my mother who was an easy-going woman, patient, spiritual, loved a good laugh, and had a preference for being happy and getting along as opposed to fighting. While I loved her for these and so many other wonderful qualities, I also went through a painful period of separation from her because she never stood up for herself, or me. In fact, it was the other way around. While I frequently protected her from my father, she never did the same for me, which often left me square in the crosshairs of his wrath because of my devotion to her. In her later years she asked for my forgiveness, finally recognizing her role in the devastation of our family, and especially what she allowed to happen to me without intervention.
My sister was born with and adapted the ways of our father — raging alcoholism, relentless bullying, unabashed vulgarity, and prideful profanity. Through therapy I began to understand how her attacks on my being were actually expressions of how she felt about herself. I realized that all the years she spent tormenting me were rooted in her own self-hatred, which she has yet to confront. With this insight I re-examined some of her verbal attacks, and it became so clear. I was 5’7” and had inherited my mother’s smooth pecan-brown skin. I was actually known in my peer group as the only one among us in high school who never had a pimple. My sister, on the other hand, was three inches shorter than me, plump, and had no appreciation for her beautiful eggplant skin coloring because she inherited dad’s acne vulgaris, which he had until the day he died. It’s hard not to feel a little schadenfreude for their affliction and its apropos name. Mother died at the age of 86 with a beautiful crown of shiny silver hair and not a wrinkle on her face.
While I recognize appearance as a small and superficial element of the disorder that existed between me and my sister, there are far deeper components that I will not address in this writing because it is her work to do, as I continue to do mine. I will say, however, it was inevitable that she would become a chip off the old block — never examining the environment in which we grew up, taking the time to unlearn the dysfunctional behavior she witnessed, or making a conscious decision to break the cycle by doing the necessary work in order to create a different outcome for her progeny. Instead, she re-created the environment and duplicated the same patterns, ultimately passing it on to her own two fatherless boys — one father unknown, both fathers unseen.
Ironically, although her sons are almost ten years apart in age, when each was about thirteen years old, their mother’s physical and verbal violence became so unbearable, they took to the streets as runaways. They were both brilliant and talented boys who should have been in university building their potential and intellectual capacities to the fullest. Instead, one ended up an addicted convicted felon, and the other escaped by joining the military fresh out of high school, landing on the front lines in the early days of the war in Iraq. He survived the war and even distinguished himself, but suffers from long-term PTSD. My sister’s unwillingness to do the necessary work to disrupt the cycles of abuse and violence in our family has affected her children, and without a doubt, her grandchildren have been consigned to more of the same.
As for my father, in therapy I finally got strong enough to face the fact that his aversion towards me was masking an abominably consuming lust for me since I was a little girl. I had always felt it although I couldn’t process the signs and signals in an appropriate language that I now recognize as grooming. There were times when he would tell me about men he knew who had sex with their own daughters. I would just look at him with confusion and disgust, but I never told anyone, not even my therapist, until I was in my fifties.
His obsession detonated in a drunken rape attempt when I found myself alone in the house with him in 1984. I got past him by swinging a floor lamp like a baseball bat to keep him away from me. When I got out of the house, he followed me and stood in the doorway. I was standing on the sidewalk in shock and horror. It was the Saturday before Easter and I had just gotten my hair done that morning, but there I stood, hair standing all over my head like a wet cat. In front of him, the neighbors, and God, I screamed at the top of my lungs, “I hate your mother fucking guts!” It is a salvo I have never regretted firing. I’ll never forget the look on his face — eyes bucked and jaws so slack, with his mouth gaped open wide enough to ram a basketball down his throat. He was in shock, too. I was the one who usually retreated broken and crying with my tail tucked between my legs while he relished his handiwork like the pleasure of that first cigarette after a hearty meal.
His first act of damage control was to call my sister. To this day I don’t know what he told her, but whatever it was, she believed him, spreading his version of the story to relatives local and out-of-state. Even more galling, as of this writing in 2021, she has never asked me what happened. With me as the perpetrator the truth was irrelevant. Any falsehood lodged against me, no matter how vile or ridiculous, was always enough for her.
After the incident, my father demanded an apology from me, which, of course, was never going to happen. As a consequence, I was banned from my parents’ home, unable to visit my mother or participate in family gatherings or holiday celebrations, which amused my sister to no end. That banishment ended fifteen years later when my father was hospitalized for the last time. When I did get to spend time with my mother, we would either meet for Chinese food or Cinnabon (I also inherited her wicked sweet tooth), or I would go to the house, park in the driveway, and we would have our visit sitting in my car. I did this until it got to be too humiliating and heartbreaking. Interestingly enough, my mother never asked me about the incident either. In retrospect, I understand that she couldn’t ask because knowing would have required her to take a stand, which was something she couldn’t do for herself, and certainly not for me. Over the years, we discovered irrefutable evidence of my father’s aberrant sexual deviance, brazen crassness, and his insatiable appetite for inflicting cruelty on the family he professed to love. Although she never openly admitted it, I believe my mother hated him until the day she died, in spite of her lifelong faithfulness to Christianity.
After my mother’s death in 2013, one of my close female cousins, now deceased, revealed a horrible secret that my father’s entire family had been keeping for decades. It happened when one of my male cousins brought his new bride to visit us. I was probably around fourteen years old at the time and I do remember their visit as well as their abrupt departure, but I never knew why. As the story goes, when my cousin got back home, he told his mother, my father’s sister, that my father had raped his wife. Everybody knew, but it was swept under the rug with so many other heinous and destructive secrets. My cousin’s marriage to that woman ended in divorce after a couple of years, and he remarried, unhappily. Sometime in the early 1980s, he hung himself from the rafter in his beautiful suburban home. He didn’t leave a note, but I am certain that with all of the pain he carried leading up to that moment, the rape of his wife by his favorite uncle played a part in his final act.
I went out into the world convinced that I was ugly and stupid because it was incessantly pounded into my fragile psyche all of my life. And while it hurt me terribly, I comforted myself with the literature of James Baldwin, Mark Twain, Maya Angelou and other great autobiographical writers who taught me about perseverance and overcoming adversity, along with the intrinsic value of acceptance, forgiveness, and transcendence. Literature and the Fine Arts were my life preservers back then and literally saved my life. Additionally, after years of good therapy (beginning in my early thirties) and doing the work of spiritual development, I was able to examine my family experiences through a broader lens. It bears saying that when the family learned that I was in therapy I was called “weak and crazy”. Hell yeah, I was crazy! I have lived through decades of familial violence, abuse, and neglect, which resulted in debilitating depression and my acting out suicidal ideations. My first attempt was at the age of six, my last when I was thirty-three. By the time I heard that still small voice in 2002, I had already been about the work of healing and moving forward in my life; that’s why I knew to listen to it.
My father died in 1999 and believe me when I tell you, there is not a single day that has gone by that I have missed him. He died of heart failure after a protracted case of diabetes (due to alcoholism), so insidious he had two amputations leading up to his transition. Although I got no gratification out of his suffering and death, I felt a tremendous amount of relief when he died because I didn’t have to worry about him hurting me, my mother, or anybody else ever again. Even though he was no longer ambulatory in those last years, his tongue was as lethal as ever. The only thing that kept his violence at bay, in spite of his willing spirit was that his flesh had weakened.
Recognizing my sister as the prototype of our father and removing myself from any proximity to her is one of the best things I have ever done in the interest of achieving not only a better life, but the life I was meant to live. When I stopped dispersing my physical, emotional, and financial resources to my ungrateful kin and kept them for myself, my life changed. I was able to travel around the country, take a trip to Europe; and best of all I found my way back to school, reclaiming the educational dream that was deferred when a collision of family traumas catapulted me into a nervous breakdown when I was twenty-one years old. It took almost twenty-six years to get back to school, and almost ten years to finish, but by the time I was done, I had my Bachelor of Arts in English, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.
Reclaiming that most precious dream gave me the courage to pursue others. I am now a food artist/entrepreneur (you should taste my gumbo!) and published writer. I spent eleven years writing and doing standup comedy in Los Angeles, and I was even a resident chorus member in an opera company. In my heart-of-hearts I know that I could not have achieved any of these things had I remained in the toxic proximity of my family. I am so happy and amazed that I survived! Once I discovered how sweet life could be without them, I’d rather go bungee jumping without the bungee cord than to ever be a cog in that dysfunctional wheel again.
In 2018, my sister reached out to me, oddly enough through one of our most legendary dysfunctional cousins, with the message that “life is too short”; still unaware that she crossed the Rubicon on that sunny LA day in 2002. I was angered by this message because I am the one who danced with suicide for three decades. I know the long and short of life. I gave my family much of my life, and they misused and mistreated it, driving me to depression and suicide. The funny thing is, had I been successful at suicide, they might have been sorry for a minute, but I’d be permanently dead just the same.
Truthfully, I don’t hate my sister or anyone in my family for that matter. I have no need for apologies and there is nothing to forgive because I understand now that these people, like most of us, are just being who they are. But I stand firm in my position against the tide of generational dysfunction that continues to take its toll on my family. Embedded and normalized for so long, it has rendered those of us who refuse to participate as outliers — unstable anomalies who just won’t submit to the status quo.
The rewards of my personal growth and continued healing have led me to a life full of possibilities, elevating me to a place where I freely dare to dream, knowing that I can make them come true. When I reclaimed myself, I reclaimed those dreams, and while they might seem quotidian and simple to some, they mean the world to me.
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