#nothing is easy and I’m tired of trying 10x harder than everyone else to do simple tasks

[ifithasafandomimapartofit]

The weird thing about being disabled is that I don’t feel disabled.

[englishmemoirthing-blog]

Memoir Project

Preface

I am not a parent. I will be one of these days to my own children, but at this point in time, I am not a parent. I am a sister. I am a first-year college student, studying nursing with the goal to become one of the best and most experienced nurse practitioners out there. I like to draw and I’m a pretty amateur singer. I am an 18-year-old who still drinks juice boxes and eats microwave chicken nuggets for lunch. I am not one to take on something that is too big, mostly because I know from experience. I am not what you would define as your typical parent. I’ve never even had children of my own. And yet, I was handed a cranky 4-year-old at the prime age of 10 years old, and I call her my kid. She is my child, even to this day. I am not a parent, but when it comes to my sister, my one and only source of happiness, I am one.

The Initiation

         I’m sitting in between my sister’s bed and my own on the floor, playing with my dinosaurs when I hear the loud banging on the front door. I immediately look up from my imaginary Jurassic world, knowing that in my 10 years of living in that house that no one ever knocks on our old, broken down front door. I sprint up around to the back door of my mom’s room leading to the living room to see who our loud, new guest could be, but by the time I get there, my grandmother is being pushed aside by the police barging into our house. I could see their police cars blocking our driveway and in the road by in front of our house through our front door, now left wide open. I watch them as they head out of my sight, towards the hallway to the kitchen, which I promptly circle around using the back entrance.

         I jumped up onto my grandparents’ old armchairs, through a large window looking into the kitchen. I remember slipping a little bit, making me giggle a little while I got back up. However, the sight that I saw once I got up wiped my tiny, innocent smile off my face. I watched as the police took hold of my father, handcuffed him, and started to recite his Miranda rights. My heart sunk to my stomach, and all the noise in the room started to fade around me. I then looked to my right to realize that my 3-year-old sister, who had climbed up onto the chair next to mine, was trying to see over the window, just as I had been doing. I calmly and quietly climbed down from my perch on the chair, pulled my sister away from the window, and quietly led her back to the room we shared. I shut the doors so she couldn’t escape, then sprinted back to the front of the house. I had just missed the cops putting my dad into the police car in our driveway when my mom came up to me with a look of utter disbelief on her face. “Can you please go get your father some clean pants to take with him before he leaves”? I stared at her as if I was waiting for her to laugh and tell me that she was joking. When that moment never came, I slowly turned around and ran to my dad’s closet for the pants. When I got back to my mom, she yanked the pants from me, almost knocking me over, and walked out the door. I wanted to follow her, but something was holding me back (in due time, I found out that my grandfather had held me until everyone left the driveway). My mom didn’t come home until about 2 in the morning. I had to figure out how to feed my baby sister without my mom or dad helping me. And sure enough, this continued on for the next 5 years after my dad got arrested. This was my first day of becoming a co-parent to my sister.

         Every mother can attest to the hardships of motherhood, from birthing the child to watching them leave for college, nothing is easy for parents these days.  However, being the child having to take care of one or more of your siblings makes it 10x harder, especially if your parents are still around, but are too caught up with everything else to worry too much about taking care of the kids. And this isn’t me trying to bash my parents or the thousands of parents relying on the older siblings to help with the younger ones, they do the best they can with the circumstances they are given. I wanted to share my story considering that there are thousands of others out who could possibly relate to my experience. Each situation is unique and some definently had it worse than me, but speaking on behalf of myself and all the other older siblings out there that had it somewhat like me, raising a kid when you’re still a kid can either the worst thing or the best thing for your childhood.

         There are a plethora of things that I have learned from becoming a co-parent (which is technically between two divorced parents, but my parents agreed that we could call all three of us to be co-parenting), but the most important thing I could’ve learned is the art of patience. From the start of my parenting journey (awful word to use but I’ll work on it) to now, my patience threshold had risen to levels that still make me wonder how I was ever impatient with anybody. If I had a dime for the amount of times I held my tongue when my sister would back talk me or throw a tantrum, I could go into early retirement (and I’m only 18).

    The Struggle

         Ever since my father decided to make the mistakes he made that ruined our family dynamic, I’ve been left to be my sister’s primary caretaker. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve had to help her with homework, and the amount of recipes in my head that I have from having to scramble to make for dinner is more than I’ll ever need. From getting her to 7:00 am theatre practices to following her and her friends around the mall for hours on end, I’ve made sure that she still gets the childhood that was taken from me. And in doing these things and having to be there for her, it triggered this unexplainable love for my sister that I have never (and probably will never) experienced in my entire life. She is the most important person in my life and my absolute favorite person on this planet. I would do anything for my younger sister, and at times I have had to make sacrifices so she could be happy, but I was more than willing to do them for her. My school schedule is solely based off of when I need to be home to get her from school or make sure she’s not at home alone for too long. In about two months, I’ll be getting her first and middle name tattooed behind my ear. She has become my whole life, the one person I could not live without. And yet, she is also the person that gets to me the most. She’s the only one who knows exactly what button to push to make me a certain kind of angry. She knows every single thing to say or do to get her way with me. She bends every rule in my rule book and uses that against my parents now that they take care of her more with me. She learns from everything my parents and I do so she can use it for the future. She’s the smartest, yet most annoying and manipulative child I’ve ever met. And I bet many parents (or siblings with the same case as me) could say something like that about their kid as well.

I’ve come to learn very quickly that guardians are the most predictable human beings ever, knowing from myself and my parents equally. We use the same punishments and same phrases when talking to our children or telling them right and wrong. We say the same lectures when the kid runs with scissors or tries to touch the hot stove or telling them not to talk to strangers. Everything is the same with us, mostly because kids tend to have a hard time learning from certain things, but we tend to prepare what we want to say in certain situations in order for them to understand. We want to be ready for the worst of the worst, for the stuff that will stick with them in the long run. The first time they go out with friends by themselves, the first time they stay home alone, their first boyfriend or girlfriend. Looking into the future at that stuff is scary, so we prepare something that is going to get the point across, but still give them room to learn in a safe manner (whether we know it or not).

         Another harsh truth of childcare is the no sleep thing, especially when they’re little. She always had a hard time sleeping in her bed, so I let her sleep in mine when I first started taking care of her. My only problem with it was that she tends to sleep like a starfish and kicks like a horse in the middle of the night if you get too close to her. I was constantly covered in bruises, and the bags under my eyes looked like they weighed 50 pounds. It went on for about a year before I found a good way to kick her out for good. One day she started crawling in with me, and at one point I started to apologize. “What are you saying sorry for?”, not knowing the horror she was about to endure.” Oh, not much, I just thought you should know that I farted in my bed a minute ago”. She never stepped foot in my bed after that.

  The Aftermath

         After being a tired, baggy-eyed witness to my parent’s divorce, and they finally stepped away from the problems they had with each other, they finally started to help with me with my sister. Of course, they had their struggles considering by the time they started pitching in, she was around 8. They didn’t have too much experience with the madness that is my sister. Frankly, they didn’t really know her personality all that well. So, in a very awkward and weird set of conversations with my parents, I began to teach them the ABC’s of how to raise a little girl who wants to become president or a lawyer some day at the age of 8. I taught them her little quirky things like not to question her when she names her stuffed whale Jefferey, or not to correct her when she says deodorant like de-do-dar-ant because she knows the correct way, she just wants you to correct her so she can laugh at how concerned you get when you correct her. However, the most important thing I taught them about her is that she is one of the most individualized people on the planet, and she will always try to do everything by herself first before asking. The last thing she wants to do is ask for help, but I taught her when to realize your capacity for doing something and that it’s ok to ask for help sometimes when you really can’t do something. And the last thing I wanted them to do was to undo everything I taught her because it didn’t fit with how they wanted her to be.

At times they wanted her to be something she wasn’t, like the time my mom wanted to put her in gymnastics even though all she wanted to do was play in the pit with all the foam blocks every time she went. My dad had an easier time accepting everything, maybe because he felt bad for missing out in the first place, or because he wants the same things I want for her. My mom never felt like she did anything wrong, so she came back into it as though she already knew her. However, after a while she realized that the 4 year old she used to know was not the same as the smarter, more independent child that was in front of her. Even to this day she says my sister scares her, because she never got used to the fact that there’s a good chunk missing from her memory of my sister in the time she was chasing my dad around everywhere and going to court all the time. She learns something new about my sister every day, even as an 11-year-old middle schooler who wants to join the volleyball team and is constantly mumbling internet memes to herself to make herself laugh.

Now, my parents and I both equally split the work of raising our tall, very strange 11-year-old girl. Sometimes I take her all the way into Katy for school in the mornings in exchange for one of them to go and get her or to babysit when I want to hang out with a friend or something. And in some ways, they pay me back for all the lost time. Both pay me whenever I go out with her to buy dinner, but my dad gives me more freedom when it comes to going out with friends or my boyfriend or someone. My mom still likes to think she was there all those years to cope, so the most she’ll do is not fight with us when we want to have fast food instead of meatloaf. They both, however, have grown into the whole parenting thing, and both love how my sister turned out in the end.

My time with her was long and hard, and sometimes I think I lost apart of myself as a kid that I know I won’t get back. But I wouldn’t trade any of it for the world, because I gained something so incredible and I gained so many good things I can use for my own children someday. I’d go back and do it all again if I had the chance. I’ve learned so much, and I’ve become someone my sister is going to look up to while she grows more into who she is. And I hope one day I can show her this, so she knows our past a little more and can understand why she is who she is. Because in a way, she lived out the part of my life that I lost, and for that I am eternally grateful.