We were living in my grandparents’ basement. My brother and I were the first grandchildren, but my brother was the one who was favored. Being 3, he was a whole lot cuter than I was, a sassy 7 year old. It didn’t help that my aunt was only 6 years older than me and resented me to no end, the fact that I was there. She tormented me and, since my grandparents didn’t know me and had coddled her her whole life, whenever anything happened between the two of us, she immediately ran into the house with a story about how I had wronged her.
The well-known family story example:
We had gone sledding. I must have done *something* to piss her off (knowing me, probably it was something mouthy) and she got angry and shoved me down into the snow. We were both already covered in snow from having gone sledding. She then ran into the house and told my grandparents that I had shoved HER into the snow. By the time I got inside, cold and now sore from having been pushed to the ground, I was in trouble and made to apologize by all the adults.
To this day, I cannot understand how anyone would believe that a slight 7 year old could push a much larger 13 year old down in the snow, but so it goes, and I was in trouble. Being the wronged party, and with a keen sense of justice, I didn’t apologize right away and tried to make my case that she was lying and that *I* had been shoved and was in need of comfort. I was sent downstairs until I was willing to suck it up and apologize, which eventually I did. The next morning, my aunt came clean, admitted that she had, in fact, pushed me down and apologized to me in front of everyone.
Keep in mind that this is a single example of something that happened on a regular basis. There would be a physical scuffle that was blamed on me. I was forced to apologize and the next morning she would tell the truth.
To this day, 25+ years later, my aunt tells that story with glee. To be honest, I’m still not particularly amused. On any level.
I think that this was probably right around the time that I started to resent my brother. He was little, he was cute, and he was no threat to the existing status quo. Apparently, I was.
I had a few friends in the neighborhood, but not close friends. My aunt was pretty possessive of the neighborhood kids, so I didn’t want to do much that might make her more bullying/resentful of me. I had a few friends in the public school where I went to second grade, but I don’t really remember them very much. I remember a deaf boy named Jerry who was the reason that our class learned very basic sign language, another boy I would encounter later in life when my brother became friends with his younger brother and a friend whose name was Marc – he made the "c" in his name into a PacMan shape. In 1983, in second grade, that was pretty cool.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all bad. I remember a place in the woods where we would play and the backyard jungle gym. I remember my grandmother standing under a pine tree conducting singing worms that lived there. I got the chicken pox that winter for Christmas, and also a pair of roller skates, so I was allowed to skate in the house, so I could try out my present.
But everything had changed. I became more reserved and a lot more shy. Instead of talking to strangers wherever I went and encouraging my mother to make new friends on the bus, I turned inward. I started to write poetry and lost myself in books. This was a new world, and I wasn’t entirely sure where I fit into it.