An essay on my childhood.
Having six children cannot be easy. I recognize this because I am number six of my mother’s children. Being the last of my siblings means that I had a unique relationship with each of them. I’ve also lived many lives in my 28 years of life. So here’s what I would call, the first chapter.
My brothers are 17, 15 and 12 years older than me while my sisters are only 6 and 3 years older. My brothers had more parental roles rather than brotherly ones. My oldest brother was more like a father seeing as he was nearly old enough to be one by the time I was born. My second oldest brothers were more like the weekend dads. They came and went but when they were around, we’d drag the mattresses from our rooms and create a wrestling ring where we’d practice the new moves that we learned from last Mondays WWE match. My sisters and I were like their test dummies for power bombs and clotheslines. I watched so much wrestling as a kid that at one point I wished Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was my dad. Silly, I know, but I thought he and my mom would be a good-looking couple and The Rock seemed like a great guy. Obviously, I felt as if my father was lacking in certain areas.
My father was, unfortunately, a stay-at-home dad leaving my mother to work some 70 hours a week. Although, to say he was a stay-at-home dad with the responsibility of us kids is an overstatement. We had rules, some basic like most kids had and others we had to learn along the way. Our rules were, do whatever homework we had immediately after getting home from school, do all the house cleaning and chores after the homework is done, then we were free to go out and do whatever we wanted as long as we were home before dark. I can tell you with certainty that I have no idea what my father did during the day besides coming up with new ways to be a menace. Because of him, we spent most of our days away from home. Always outside playing games with the other kids in the neighborhood, like kickball, hide and seek, flashlight tag, which I would get upset about if I was IT to which I would cry about how I didn’t want to play anymore (yes, I was that kid).
Because my mother worked so much I didn’t her often and I really didn’t get to know her until I was a bit older. My father on the other hand… I knew him too well, more than I would have liked. My relationship with my oldest sister was a little more complex. After we moved for the 2nd time since my arrival into the family, and my oldest brother stayed behind to start his own family with his girlfriend, my oldest sister kind of took over in the means of looking after me. She would pick out my clothes for school, make sure I bathed and fed and make sure to keep me out of trouble with our father. However, she never forgot to be my sister by tormenting me relentlessly. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized how much she did for me as a kid and that she was just a kid herself. My other older sister, well, we were the epitome of sisters that are only a couple of years apart in age. By day we would physically fight each other, kicking, choking, over what I couldn’t tell you and by night we would curl up in bed together and go to sleep. The 3 of us girls all had our own beds, but we would often end up in the same bed together, which were my favorite nights.
I didn’t realize for a while that we were poor. It didn’t occur to me when I was a child that vacations were a thing, or that other kids would get more than a couple of gifts for Christmas’ or birthdays or that kids would get brand new clothes for the new school year instead of hand-me-downs or second-hand clothes. As a kid I was grateful to receive what I did, for the most part. There were times when I would want so badly for a toy and then throw a fit because I didn’t understand why I couldn’t have it.
Life set in even more than it already had when I was 9 and we had to move again due to being evicted. Thankfully it was the end of the school year, and we had all summer to be homeless without worrying about homework on top of that. The first week or so was spend at a neighboring friend’s house whose caring parents allowed my family to take over their bedroom room, that is until my father did what he does best, and my friends parents didn’t want a man who acted in such a way to be around their children. In the same day my father, Nick, met a man named Rick, who told us if we cleaned out his garage we could live there until we found a place. We did all the hard work of cleaning that dirty, overfilled garage only to be gone in a couple days due to my father getting violent with my mom and my oldest sister. After that it was a dirty motel where we got the good news that my mom found a house! The summer was already coming to an end and the house wasn’t ready so me and my sister stayed at her friend’s house for the first couple weeks of school.
The first 9 years of my life was a classic LifeTime movie turned horror anthology turned comedy. Some say it takes a village to raise a kid, for me that couldn’t be any truer.
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