Making Sense of My Narrative: Ch. 02
Correcting my natural course of self-destruction.
My parents only ever talked me up. Even when my report cards reflected average or below-average grades (I remember once getting an F1A* in elementary school), my dad would look at me and say, “you know you could get all A1A’s if you wanted to, right?”
I believed to my core that if I didn’t get perfect grades, it was purely because I was not trying hard enough. This hardly seemed to bother my parents. My ability to glide through the first eight years of my education without turning in a single piece of homework was something to brag about, apparently.
To this day, my mom still rambles about how I am a genetic goldmine. Even though I have been married for almost eight years, she still occasionally asks me if I knew my partner had asthma as a child when I married him — as if that would have deterred me from committing to potentially procreate with him in the future. She would often remind us she chose my dad because of his great legs (my husband also has great legs, but whatever, mom).
Legs aside, my dad was the absolute best.
I thought my dad was awesome. My mom was pretty much absent from my life, but when she was around, she was a pain. Nonetheless, both of my parents empowered me with the best sense of potential that anyone could ever inject into a child (perhaps to the point that it could be considered neglectful or pathological, but that is a thought to unpack at another time).
He always told me that the only thing standing between me and what I wanted to achieve was a matter of doing it. I grew up expecting great things of myself — not that I ever put any of these things to action.
I had every encouragement that a kid could hope for. I did not relate to movies or TV shows where the children were constantly put down and abused by their parents.
My dad was a really talented artist, and he could build or fix almost anything. He could expertly handle any vehicle on land or in the water. He was an adventurer, but admirably, safety came first. He did not take no for an answer. No dream or idea was too big or out of reach, he just had to figure out how to get there.
But once he was there, it always kind of fizzled out and faded into the background of the rest of our lives as he drifted to and from it and his other activities, like drinking four coladas a day at our local Cuban cafe. (Spoiler: All the cafes were Cuban cafes where I grew up.)
My dad taught me how to find solutions for any problem, irrespective of my relevant experience or skill level, because we all had to start somewhere.
I asked him once what I should tell my friends when they ask me what he does for work, and he taught me the word entrepreneur. As a kid, I thought this was heaps cool. As an adult, if someone told me they were an entrepreneur, I would immediately think they were the biggest wanker.
My opinion of my parents (especially my dad) started to shift one day when I came home from school and found my mom’s side of the bedroom had been completely cleared out.
I remember looking at the top of her dresser, usually cluttered with jewellery and makeup, but instead finding the dust that had collected around what used to sit there.
I even opened one of her drawers. It was empty. They were all empty.
I opened the door to the the walk-in robe. The top left shelf had no handbags. There were no bright sundresses under them. The pairs of shoes she never wore but still hung onto were missing.
She was gone.
My dad was (and I assume he still is) a slave to addiction.
His drug of choice is oxycodone, otherwise known as oxy, percocet, and according to PubChem, Hillbilly Heroin.
As long as I can remember, I never knew my dad to have a job. I think I assumed that he made money somehow, but I was never really able to put my finger on it. In hindsight, my dad was just blasted out of his mind on narcotics.
He popped pills all day, every day; it was just normal. We knew he took them because he was in pain. Headaches, I think? He had a bad case of the bends before I was born, I knew that, so I guess I just put two and two together.
I was 17, and my brother was 12. I was in my last few weeks of 11th Grade. We were left with a chronically unemployed addict in the home we rented in Miami, Florida.
At the time, I was glad that my mom was gone since she had proved to be nothing more than a hindrance to my heinous teenage activities.
At the end of the day, though, I was abandoned by someone who always seemed to believe in me; someone who thought I was just better than everyone else.
The volatile relationship I had with my mother made the discomfort of it all even more confusing, but it was way easier to ignore if I did not easily understand it.
Today, I am still paying the price and working through the scars that my parents left on me, as we all are. When something is uncomfortable or boring, it is abandoned, just as I was modeled to do.
Combined with my innate emotional handicaps, I am a specimen primed for functional addiction and wasted potential, just like my dad. This is not an overstatement. I know this because I have pulled myself out of those default patterns before. That road is familiar and it feels like my steering wheel is being pulled in that direction. Without actively correcting its course, I promptly lean out of my lane.
Anyone who has gotten to know me, even a little bit, knows that I want to be a medical doctor one day. Today, that feels like it is never going to happen. I feel like I am not good enough or smart enough — but this is a cop-out, an excuse to let go of the wheel and let the vehicle pull me in whatever direction it wants to go.
Every minute of every day, my mind bombards me with opinions about how I couldn’t do something, even if I tried my hardest. The path is too steep, or too spiky, or too murky. It is exhausting to constantly sludge my way forward towards a goal I am pretty sure is impossible, and its just so fucking uncomfortable.
Today, I acknowledge that my parents were right about something: I have great potential. The people around me tell me. My husband tells me. Strangers online tell me. I am convinced they flatter me out of pity, and so I metaphorically let go of the wheel and engage in the default course once again.
It is all too hard. This is easy. Sure, I could if I wanted to, maybe, but also, maybe not?
The worst part is that I’m still at the wheel and I can steer any time I want to.
*This was the grading system my elementary school used. The first and last letters were on the five-letter grading scale, A to F, with the middle number ranging from 1 to 3. The first letter grade reflected the culmination of graded classwork, the number corresponded to the student’s effort in the subject, and the final letter grade was for conduct in that class. So, A1A was considered the ‘perfect’ grade, while my F1A indicated that I had failed all of the classwork, but I was exerting the maximum effort possible, and had exemplary conduct. Needless to say, my mother ended up disputing the grade with the teacher, not that I was particularly bothered by it.
