(no subject)

[badstar]

Mom would continue to buy clothing sometimes…they would make fun of it, videotape us looking as ridiculous as possible in it, and point out how it still made her a bad mother. Up through November of 4th grade was mostly uneventful, and then my other grandmother (mother’s mother) died. Then in January, she found a house in the same school district…even in the area of the same school where we were attending. My sister and I moved back in with our mother, brothers and Keith, into a huge farmhouse. I was still convinced that my mother didn’t love me, and I wanted to be back with my grandparents. I would frequently miss my bus home, and have to take the bus to my grandparents’ house (it left about ten minutes later) and my mother would have to pick me up there after work. I actually really liked living where we were at the time, but I never really said that, I didn’t want my mother to think that I liked living with her. At this point, we were spending every other weekend with our grandparents. They started to buy us a lot of new toys and clothes, but we had to keep them at their house, saying that they would get ruined at our mother’s house. Every now and then, we’d be allowed to take something home, but it had to come right back the next time we came over.

Holiday visits during all this were complicated. The visitation order divided the days up in the middle, so when most people were eating Thanksgiving or Easter dinner, we’d be shuttling back and forth. Christmas was he worst- the break was divided up into three parts, and we’d either spend the first and third part with our mother and the second with our grandparents or vice versa- it alternated each year. Every year my grandparents would talk about how they’d love to go away for Christmas like we did the one time when we went to Florida, but then they’d blame it on my mother, saying that we couldn’t and that she ruined our holiday for us.

At the end of fourth grade, we went to Texas again for the summer, and it was pretty much the same as the previous- I got a lot of ridicule from all sides about how I was lazy and spoiled and there was something wrong with me because I liked to read. Shelly continued as the previous summer, and neither my father nor step mother did anything about it.

Coming back to PA at the end of the summer, we found out that our mother had been forced to move out of the farmhouse where we were living (another case of the house being sold on short notice), and into a house in the city (and outside of the school district). I thought this would mean that we could go back to live with my grandparents but we didn’t…it ended up being arranged that we would change our address with the school back to my grandparents’ address while living with our mother and Keith….and two other families- they had moved into a large shared townhouse. After school, we would take the bus to our grandparents’ house where our mother would pick us up after work. We only ended up living there for a few months- there was a room that saw two or three tenants in the time we were there- all ice people in that case, but the other family living in the house…a woman named Tammy, her three kids and her boyfriend. He turned out to be a drug dealer, she was an alcoholic and did several drugs. We spent as much time out of the house as possible, often taking Tammy’s two oldest kids with us to get them away too. Within a couple of months, to get us out of that house, my mom agreed to let us go back to living with our grandparents. Tammy’s kids ended up in the foster system.

I don’t remember when it was, but at some point between third and fourth grade, they started talking about how it would be impossible to keep us all living with them forever, and somehow got the idea of trying to adopt just me. They asked me if I really wanted to do that, and said that I might never see my sister or brothers or mother again. There were a few trips to their lawyer to discuss this (one of their lawyers anyway…they kept two for some reason but nothing ever came of that. They also had told me on many occasions that if I wanted to, I could call them “Mom” and “Dad” though, I never really did that, except on occasion when I wanted a friend to come over or something and permission and other information had to be exchanged in which case I would refer to my grandmother as my mother because I didn’t want to tell people that I lived with my grandparents and have them wonder what happened to my parents. Though, I did say on many occasions tha tI wished they were my real parents.

It was later in fifth grade- around Easter or shortly after- that I moved back with my mother permanently. She found a house, the requirement that she stay in the same school district got dropped somewhere along the way, I finished out fifth grade in the same school and started sixth grade in a new school. Still not wanting to live with my mother, still convinced of all the same stuff from before. For several years at that point, I was unable to tell my mother that I loved her. If she said that she loved me, I would just say “I know” or ignore it. I remember one day some time in fifth grade when we were living with her at the beginning of the school year…she was getting off work and called my grandparents house to let us know she was on the way to pick us up. I don’t remember why I suddenly did this, but I hung the phone up on her. She called back, I told her I didn’t want to talk to her and hung up again. She called back I picked up the phone and said I hated her, laughed and hung up…this went on for several calls before she finally called back on my grandfather’s business line (he had a home office) My grandmother stood there watching me do this. She didn’t encourage it, but she didn’t try to stop me either.