I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part #29

There have been times when we’ve gone shopping together. I find something I like and she’ll look at it and say, “Oh, Danice would like that.”

When she does that I feel as if she’d buy it for her, but not me. It took an incident at a fabric store to
make me realize why her saying Danice, my sister-in-law would like something I chose, bothered me
so much and how it showed mother’s favoritism of her over me.

We’d gone to the fabric store where mother used to work to get some foam for a couch David, my roommate had bought. While we were there, I found a cross stitch kit showing a golden retriever with a “welcome” sign hanging from his mouth on a piece of string. I thought it was cute. She looked at and promptly told me that Mike would like it. That hurt.

We were unable to buy the foam, as it wasn’t in, due to a mix-up. By the time we went back, I had talked to David about the kit and decided to buy it. When we went back, I got it and put it on the foam table face down, where she was working. She immediately reached over, picked it up and looked at it. Then she told me that if I hadn’t bought it, she would have. The faintest of hopes flickered in my breast as I asked for whom she would have bought it. She promptly said, “Mike.”

That told me all over again that Mike and Danice are still her favorites. Not only that, but I learned later that she wouldn’t have given it to him in kit form. She would have done the project herself and then presented it to him.

I can only recall a couple of times when mother put me ahead of Mike and Wayne in any way.

Mike had a Hot Wheels tricycle when we were young and he created a parking space in the garage for it with a large piece of cardboard. He proudly showed it to me and I told him it was nice, but it was in the path for me to put my bicycle away. He said, “Tough!”

I was surprised, but didn’t argue with him. Instead, I went and found mother then told her what happened. She got after him and made it very clear that he was not to treat me that way again.

The other time was on a road trip. We were driving to Montana in the old pick up with a homemade camper and we kids had to ride in the back. There was one long bed and one short one. She allowed me to have the long one to myself throughout the trip, as I was the tallest. The boys had to share the short one.

When she moved from her house to an apartment before moving to the condo she was buying, Mike and I spent time out of our busy schedules helping her pack and sort for the move as well as hauling away unwanted household items and garbage.

I went to the apartment one night after the first move to pick up Caleb. I used mother’s computer to go online and noticed a cellophane wrapped ceramic planter with chocolates nearly overflowing out of the top sitting next to it. When I asked her about it, she said it was a gift for Mike and Danice to thank them for all the hours they had put in helping her move. She gave no indication of having bought something for me for all the hours I put in helping her. Sure, I received some household things she no longer wanted, but Mike received a lot of Bill’s tools, which he no longer needed.

When I confronted her about it several days later, she conceded that she should have done something for me too, but only after trying to get out of doing something for me as well.

Mother told me later that the buyer of the house had graciously allowed her an extra day to move out, because despite the help from my brother and me and even some people from our church, she had been unable to be packed up and moved out on the appointed day. He even allowed her to leave new fixtures in their boxes where he could find them so that she didn’t need to take time to replace the ones she was taking. At 5:00 p.m. on the day mother should have been out, the new owner came to the house. He found mother and a few people still there standing around talking. At that point he said that if they didn’t get out of the house immediately, he was going to get a lawyer. Mother told me he was a “jerk” for saying it. I remember being surprised and thinking, “He had every right to expect her to be out of the house and to threaten to call a lawyer when he found her and her friends there at 5:00 p.m. that day.”

 Looking back on this, I realized that at some level my mother expects the world to revolve around her.

Another example of her expectations happened when she called me one night and wanted to buy an ornate brass music stand that I’d bought several years earlier. She told me she thought it would be a nice birthday gift for a friend of hers. The amount she offered me was approximately one fourth of what I’d paid for it originally and probably less than I could have gotten selling the metal for scrap. When I told her the bare minimum I was willing to accept; she snapped that she didn’t have that kind of money. It was as if I was supposed to be willing to sell her what she wanted at the price she offered because she wanted to give it as a gift to someone else.

Mother’s husband Bill used to tell me that I was too sensitive and that I cried too easily and too much. If I complained to her, she sided with him. I realize now that what I was feeling then was natural and normal. It was the result of the pain I still felt from being abused, the hurt from her favoritism of everyone else and being an adolescent young girl turning into a woman with all the hormonal and mood fluctuations that come with such changes.

When I was growing up, mother would occasionally call me “Sis.” One day I asked her why she called me that. She told me it was just a nickname. I knew at the time it wasn’t just a nickname. She thought of me as a sister instead of her daughter and expected me to be mature enough to lean on. No one calls anyone “Sis” unless they think of the other person as a sister. In fact, I realize now that she wanted me to be mature enough for her to lean on, but not mature enough to walk away from her.

I also remember her telling me once that one reason she had me was so that she would have someone who would love her unconditionally.

When we were growing up I had a tendency to beat on my brothers at the slightest provocation. Mother would get angry with me for beating up on them and tell me not to do it anymore. I realize now that the reason I used any excuse to beat up on them was that I resented them and her. I resented them because she favored them over me. I resented her for favoring them. I couldn’t strike out at mother, so I hit Mike and Wayne instead.