Broken Yet Rising
She is smokin’ dope if she thinks she is getting the adorkable duo. Fine, I might have just turned eighteen, but I’ve been emancipated since I was sixteen. Had she been around before our lives turned into a Telemundo soap opera, none of it needed to have happened. She might not have been the cause of our parents dying but she sure didn’t help what came before and afterwards. Maybe she doesn’t carry all the blame, but she carries her share of it. Gah! She and her husband both.
They are both holier than thou and so are his family and everyone else that assumed that the stories she told back then were the full truth of the matter. She stood there and let our parents’ reputations get shredded, let people that didn’t know what really happened trash-talk them like they were somehow defending her in the process. Yeah right. Hypocrite! She tried to say she didn’t agree or participate with the gossiping, like that somehow exonerated her of the exaggerations and outright lies that the gossip turned into, but there wouldn’t have been any if she hadn’t talked to her “friends” and let her emotions to make it out to be something it wasn’t. She dug that hole. I thought we were filling it. Well now she can live in it til the end of days for all I care, though frankly I don’t know for sure that she cares. She’s got her narrative that she believes in, and I have mine.
Yeah, Dad could be an emotional guy, but he worked his tail off to give all of us everything he hadn’t had as a kid. And yeah, maybe Dad’s parents hadn’t exactly been … well … the most educated or anything like that and Dad had all but raised himself because that is what his own parents had also been forced to do because they didn’t grow up in households where the dad hung around. It was like all they knew and almost all they were capable of knowing by the time Dad came on the scene. And yeah, Mom was kinda emotional herself in a different way, but she loved us and none of us could ever doubt it. She and Dad both told us all the time. Showed us in all the sacrifices they made though I might not have understood all of that in the beginning. But I did know Mom was always there like a reliable taxi service and Dad was there most of the time, and when he wasn’t it was because he was working, not because he was off “socializing with his buddies”. He was never one of those men that had “outside interests.” It was family and work. Okay, so sometimes that could get out of balance, but only because he threw so much of himself into everything.
Tessa was the oldest, she shouldn’t have just left and then … <sigh> … I gotta stop this. I know it isn’t healthy but I’m feeling pretty torched. Mitchell warned me against being so hard-hearted … and hardheaded. He wanted me to keep an open mind. He sure wouldn’t have wanted me to blow a blood vessel. I mean he was hurt worse than me when Tessa decided she couldn’t have a relationship with Dad which pretty much meant Mom, and the same thing for the rest of us. She closed the door on each of us one at a time. Slammed the door is what it felt like, with our hearts caught between it and the doorframe.
I really thought we were working out a way for things to be different than they had been. I really, honestly thought that and thought we were both trying. Aw gawd, maybe we were, and we both dropped the ball and took a wrong turn. At this point I honestly don’t know. All I do know is that it feels like a lot of wasted time and effort, at least on my side. I just don’t know. I hate feeling like I do. And with the world being so screwy it would have been better to be building allies, not this mess we’ve made of things. I mean I tried. What more could I have done?!
Oh brother, if I’m going to write out my feelings like those idiot self-help books are always on a person to do then I might as well start this journal the correct way. I need to write like someone may someday actually read it. That means I need to make sense and have a timeline that goes all in the same direction. Whoever you are, pretend person in the future, don’t blame me. I’m trying. I’ve been trying. I’ll keep trying. At least I’ll put the energy into constructive relationships and try and avoid toxic ones. For now there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of reward to it. And maybe that’s my problem. I was looking for the pot o’ gold at the end of the rainbow, but all I found were broken skittles of the flavors I don’t like, mixed in with noxious unicorn farts. So for better or worse, here it is …
Prologue
Part 1AShe is smokin’ dope if she thinks she is getting the adorkable duo. Fine, I might have just turned eighteen, but I’ve been emancipated since I was sixteen. Had she been around before our lives turned into a Telemundo soap opera, none of it needed to have happened. She might not have been the cause of our parents dying but she sure didn’t help what came before and afterwards. Maybe she doesn’t carry all the blame, but she carries her share of it. Gah! She and her husband both.
They are both holier than thou and so are his family and everyone else that assumed that the stories she told back then were the full truth of the matter. She stood there and let our parents’ reputations get shredded, let people that didn’t know what really happened trash-talk them like they were somehow defending her in the process. Yeah right. Hypocrite! She tried to say she didn’t agree or participate with the gossiping, like that somehow exonerated her of the exaggerations and outright lies that the gossip turned into, but there wouldn’t have been any if she hadn’t talked to her “friends” and let her emotions to make it out to be something it wasn’t. She dug that hole. I thought we were filling it. Well now she can live in it til the end of days for all I care, though frankly I don’t know for sure that she cares. She’s got her narrative that she believes in, and I have mine.
Yeah, Dad could be an emotional guy, but he worked his tail off to give all of us everything he hadn’t had as a kid. And yeah, maybe Dad’s parents hadn’t exactly been … well … the most educated or anything like that and Dad had all but raised himself because that is what his own parents had also been forced to do because they didn’t grow up in households where the dad hung around. It was like all they knew and almost all they were capable of knowing by the time Dad came on the scene. And yeah, Mom was kinda emotional herself in a different way, but she loved us and none of us could ever doubt it. She and Dad both told us all the time. Showed us in all the sacrifices they made though I might not have understood all of that in the beginning. But I did know Mom was always there like a reliable taxi service and Dad was there most of the time, and when he wasn’t it was because he was working, not because he was off “socializing with his buddies”. He was never one of those men that had “outside interests.” It was family and work. Okay, so sometimes that could get out of balance, but only because he threw so much of himself into everything.
Tessa was the oldest, she shouldn’t have just left and then … <sigh> … I gotta stop this. I know it isn’t healthy but I’m feeling pretty torched. Mitchell warned me against being so hard-hearted … and hardheaded. He wanted me to keep an open mind. He sure wouldn’t have wanted me to blow a blood vessel. I mean he was hurt worse than me when Tessa decided she couldn’t have a relationship with Dad which pretty much meant Mom, and the same thing for the rest of us. She closed the door on each of us one at a time. Slammed the door is what it felt like, with our hearts caught between it and the doorframe.
I really thought we were working out a way for things to be different than they had been. I really, honestly thought that and thought we were both trying. Aw gawd, maybe we were, and we both dropped the ball and took a wrong turn. At this point I honestly don’t know. All I do know is that it feels like a lot of wasted time and effort, at least on my side. I just don’t know. I hate feeling like I do. And with the world being so screwy it would have been better to be building allies, not this mess we’ve made of things. I mean I tried. What more could I have done?!
Oh brother, if I’m going to write out my feelings like those idiot self-help books are always on a person to do then I might as well start this journal the correct way. I need to write like someone may someday actually read it. That means I need to make sense and have a timeline that goes all in the same direction. Whoever you are, pretend person in the future, don’t blame me. I’m trying. I’ve been trying. I’ll keep trying. At least I’ll put the energy into constructive relationships and try and avoid toxic ones. For now there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of reward to it. And maybe that’s my problem. I was looking for the pot o’ gold at the end of the rainbow, but all I found were broken skittles of the flavors I don’t like, mixed in with noxious unicorn farts. So for better or worse, here it is …