🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
I remember when I was 10 or 11 years old and how I was just starting to get into real trouble. We had moved out of an impoverished inner-city neighborhood to a more affluent suburban neighborhood. The demographics changed from predominantly black to absolutely white. It was quiet, safe, and peaceful in ways we had never known.
It was horrible for my older sister and I.
We had been raised in constant adversity. We were the minority and did not belong. Because of that rejection we had learned to cling desperately to family and friends as our only safe harbors in a storm. We had an entire family in the inner-city to turn to when we needed someone. Aunts, uncles, grand-parents, older cousins, family friends… a support system. All close by.
The need for that loving safety net was necessary in the world of hate that we knew. We needed to be accepted, and in that circle we were. The fierce loyalty that such dependence breeds was indelibly seared into my soul and remains in my character to this day. Loyal to a fault is not a euphemism in my life. It is an accurate statement because we learned to back each other up regardless of right or wrong. Our loyalty was never wrong.
In moving to the suburbs, we were broken off from that support system and my older sister, Shannon, and I could not adjust. We were only children, she being 11 and me being 9, but the fires that shaped us also baked us into harder shells than other children our age. We were also exposed to many things by that time that had traumatized us too often and led to our desensitization. We were already hardened.
In that hardness, we ended up in for more trouble than my younger sister, Danielle, who was still sheltered as a girl of 6 or 7 years old. We were all struggling in school because we experienced first hand the gap in expectation between lower-class and middle-class Americans. Where I had gotten straight A’s in school every period up until our move, I was failing now because we were over an entire year behind in the “white” school’s curriculum. Now we were the poor, stupid kids who didn’t belong.
Shannon started to rebel first. I think it was in part because she felt the loss of our support system more than I did as well as me being so used to opposition. Shannon ran away from home and tried to live with a friend. She was only 11 or 12, so she was forced to come back home, but she was allowed to go back into the city more to visit family, baby sit our cousins, and just be with family. She and I had the same father, who was absent, so that was the only family she had.
Danielle and I spent a lot of time with Danielle’s father and his family. Danielle had a father other than Shannon and I shared, and he was present. He had accepted me as a son and took me anytime he took Danielle for weekends, vacations, family picnics, or whatever. He also lavished on me the attention any father would a son. He had effectively adopted me but not Shannon. As a child I didn’t recognize things that I do now, but I did feel the guilt then that I still feel now. I can understand now how I felt like I was betraying Shannon in her being left out of so much of Danielle’s and my life. Back then I just knew I felt bad for Shannon. I just didn’t grasp why.
Shannon began acting out a lot around that time and I remember one particular night when she and our step-father were screaming at each other in the middle of the night. When she broke down sobbing I remember our step-father asking her in a very angry tone, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Through her sobs, she said, “Uncle Tony raped me.” She was 13 years old.
We never recovered from this. I say we because the decisions made and choices made based on those decisions severed many of the ties in our family. That circle was broken and never repaired. At that time sympathy and empathy were real forced in my life, too. Shannon never recovered from it. The breaking of that circle effected her more due to her exclusion from Danielle’s father’s family. Though Danielle and I still had that support system, Shannon now only had us. This made her need for our love that much more desperate. We are all she had.
My sister continued to act out as nothing can be done to possibly help in such circumstances. In response to her running away, becoming promiscuous, and acts of theft, our mother felt she had to intervene. It is so shard to know what is right in a situation where everything is wrong, so I don’t blame anyone for trying to do the right thing. It’s just hard to know what’s right. The loyalty we shared was the only thing sacred we knew. It was the one constant we had when we felt like we had absolutely nothing else. As a God fearing Catholic I saw with certainty that I would face Hell for my sisters because that is what love means to me. I now that love is returned, but it wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. That love is what keeps me alive. It keeps me human.
I say this here because I know how it hurt so deeply to have that loyalty violated when my mother had Shannon placed in a juvenile home because of her behavior. Shannon had to face the reality that her mother sent her away. This wasn’t the police arresting her, nor child-services taking her, or even a court taking her: Her own mother sent her away.
I know that it completely altered the way I saw my mom. My sister, who protected me and loved me and whom I protected and loved was gone because the person who was supposed to love and protect us all gave her away. Trust no longer existed. Loyalty was scorched earth. All authority given to her over my life was now rescinded. Mom didn’t really love us. She wanted us gone.
That is how it felt to us. I guess the lesson in this could be to know what people value before you make decisions that could come to define your relationship with them going forward. I no longer blame my mother for her decision because I can see how she thought she was doing the right thing in a very difficult position. How can I fault her for seeking help when she knew she could not fix the situation?
That awareness now doesn’t change what happened then, though. This was my sister getting sent away, but it changed the course of my life one step further down a road of destruction.