A public comment on a private matter

This is to you two, you know who you are. True sisters of friendship who I count as blessings. Nothing I personally could tell you could ever erase it or fix it or kiss it away. And, frankly, that's your badge. Would you really want to lose that whole part of who you are? I know there are days when I wish with all my heart to wish away the things I can't go back and fix, but, most, days I know they created who I am, and I believe that one day I'll actually be OK with that, with who I am.

Roundabout, I guess. But I do have something to tell you that I hope isn't the pitying, the over-sympathizing, the outcasting, or the different-ing of you.

There wasn't an idyllic childhood. Ever.

My middle school best friend had it all. I mean, she really had it going on, with everything I ever dreamed of using to buy myself into the popular clique. She had the L.L.Bean backpack in green, The Land's End parka in red, Ralph Lauren Polo shirts instead of Catholic uniform shirts, some sort of suede shoes we called "dirty bucks" (though I have no idea anymore why we called them that), and--my god--she had MORE THAN ONE Louis Vuitton bag. Seriously. Was anyone cooler than her? Gretta even rolled her uniform skirt up at the waist to show off more leg. She dyed her hair blonde. She had a perm.

Gretta had everything I believed my parents were preventing me from attaining. I whined and cried all the time, "I need a Liz Claiborne purse! I need a Land's End parka! I need everything Gretta has and I never will!" I thought that if I had the cool things, I'd be cool, and then my world would be perfect instead of perfectly dorky.

But all of Gretta's cool-ness couldn't win her the one thing she actually needed--a family. Does that sound too cliche? It sounds so Lifetime movie, but it really was that way. When Gretta let me into her world of cool, I saw things that devestated me raw. Both of her parents were alcoholics, and her high-school-aged sister had such easy access to the never-ending liquor cabinet that she was already imitating their behavior. Gretta's beautiful world of perfect bikinis became the world of laundry that never got done, no food in the house, a pool that never had the proper chemical treatments, and constant screaming and bikcering. Parents who were never home. Parents who fell into bed passed out with their clothes on. A mother that cared more that she got to play bunko weekly than she cared whether or not her kids passed history class.

Even in middle school, I realized that Gretta was so intellectually stunted that she propbably suffered fetal alcohol syndrome. They were all like that, all three sisters, suviving on cool but absolutely nothing else. After seeing into Gretta's real world, I still wanted in. I can't believe it now, but I wished my parents were so drunk they didn't care where I was. I wished it was OK to fail math. I wished I could get drunk at the age of 12. I wished my parents taught me how to makes shots of rattlesnakes because they were too drunk to do it themselves. I would have changed everything for their lives of BMW's and dirty dishes, just to get the Louis Vuitton purses.

And my life. My family reads my blog on rare occasions, so I don't talk about how I really feel most of the time. But, in honor of the braveness of my two friends, I'll tell my version of events.

I suffered depression from a very early age. If you looked at my life, it was perfect. We had a huge, green yard with swingsets and jungle gyms and flower beds full of irises and roses. We played badminton on the lawn, we set the table for family dinner together, We used the good china every day--just because we could.

But, I wanted to die. Literally, I wanted to die. I even wrote in my mom's calendar, "Things to remember: Christine's death." I told my parents how much I hated them, hated myself, hated my life, but somehow things just continued on the same. No one ever tried to fix what was really wrong. My mom bought me off-season Liz Claiborne purses so I could fit in better at school, but it made no difference in how much I hated myself.

And I hated everyone else for it, too. My anger came out in weird ways. We had a dog for a brief year, and I beat it. I punished my little sister most for my misery. I treated her so badly that I wonder if I abused her. We played tricks on each other, hiding things in each other's beds, but I always took it too far. I hurt her by putting a high heeled shoe pointy end up inside her bed.

Once I even nearly smothered her. If we stayed up late laughing and talking instead of sleeping, our mom would come in and yell at us to be quiet. Part of our joke was that if we laughed too loud, we'd push each other's face into the pillow to be quiet. One night, I got carried away in the moment, and I started getting mean. I made her shout, and I pushed her face-first into the pillow, driving her harder and harder with each shout. She wailed her arms around and struggled, but I held her down. When I finally let her up, she choked out, "I couldn't breathe! I needed you to let me up." I said, "sorry," and went and got in my own bed, remorseless until years after the fact.

I even tried cutting for a while. In middle school, some of Gretta's friends liked to cut their thighs with razor blades then show the scabs off at school to prove how tough they were. I tried carving the name of my "boyfriend" into my thigh, but the letters faded out toward the end when the pain and blood became too real. I showed everyone at school, and it helped my status for a little while at least. Fortunately my cutting left only one slight scar, because I'd look incredibly stupid with the word "BEAU" upside-down on my right thigh. (I swear that was his real name, and I'm not making that up.)

My parents finally got me treatment for depression when I was sixteen. Looking back, sometimes I blame them for waiting so long, considering I first told them I wanted to kill myself when I was ten. I got released from therapy for being "OK." But I wasn't. The depression kept coming back, sometimes worse than others. Sometimes I had panic attacks with the depression, and the smallest things, like getting library books from a floor of the library I'd never been to, would send me into hyperventilation. I got treatement for depression again in college, and, again, I was released from therapy for being "OK."

But I still wasn't. I'm still not. I still get treatment when insurance works in my favor (which it too often doesn't), and I still go through periods of "OK," and defintie periods of not-so-OK. I look back on my picture-perfect childhood, so full of love and hope and family, and I see the sunshine and the puffy white clouds and hear the neighbor whistle as he mows his lawn. And I look back on my tortured childhood, where nothing I ever did or had or felt was right enough. They were both there, the mirror-image childhoods, always, at the same time, facing each other.

Neither wins. Both are me. One gives me no satisfaction and one gives me regret. Dear readers, you can choose which is which. I must keep some secrets to myself.