I Tried To Help

You cannot help a person who is intent on hurting themselves in one way or another. Over the weeks since I had stopped posting here I tried to take the negative I was expelling here and turn it all into positives helping my big sister. 

Currently 40 years old, HIV +, 83 pounds soaking wet and losing weight daily, and on the heels of a debilitating stroke, I thought it was the right thing to do. No. I knew it was the right thing to do. I knew I had to do it. I knew I had to help her. It was just in my nature despite the years of manipulation.

I thought I had gotten to the point where she could pull no more punches with me. She wouldn't get over on me. But in her addict ways she did.

After being hospitalized for nearly a month not able to check herself out like she so desperately wanted to over and over again, she got out. And I unknowingly helped her.  The promise was I would bring her home for a couple hours and help her wash up before she would go to another hospital in the area with better care. I had seen her left in her own urine as well as vomit in the facility she was at.  Not surprising to be because of the reputation there.

She cried on the phone as she signed herself out against medical advice and had no one to pick her up. She has burnt all her bridges. The men who adored her gone, the family members who supported her gone, her own children gone.  I had my husband help me as I could not carry her.

In the midst of it all, her 14 year old first born baby came to see her, and help us carry our plan out. A shower, a little relaxation and off to the better hospital. 

As soon as my husband left, and it was only her and her son the truth came spewing out like venom. She lied. She lied to everyone. She wasn't going to the other hospital, she wasn't listening to anyone, fuck everyone!   She told her child, her own baby that she was going to shit on his grave because he wouldn't stay there in the house and wait on her like no teen should be doing.

She spouted off profanities and hung the phone up on me a number of times.

I am spent. Finished. Emotionally overdone.

I cannot do it anymore as her tirades impact me like none other. They bother me to the core that it impacts my well being, and my ability to mother my own children.

She is alone. Unable to walk. Barely able to talk. No one to feed her, and unable to feed herself. And this is what she wanted.

I want nothing more than to scream in her face and slap the shit out of her. My caring and love has turn into hatred and resentment.

What happens to her from here on out... is not my problem

Slumber Party From Hell

I remember a sleep over ages ago. My parents had gone out of town for the night because my sister insisted on taking me overnight. I guess their whole plan focused around the fact that I would be gone for a good 18 hours.  Doesn't seem like a long time, but it was eternity for me.

Sissy picked me up from school that day, and I felt like the coolest kid on the block. I had my big sister picking me up in her car!

She had already picked up my full overnight apparel from my parents, and we were on our way to our typical candy store sugar overload. I am not sure who enjoyed those trips more, her or I.

The plan was to sleep over at the condo she was living in at the time. Owned by a family friend who was away for the winter. I didn't care where we were going as long as we were together though.  I never got her to myself. But the one perk for me was the jacuzzi in the condo. What 8 year old doesn't want to swim around in a mini indoor pool in the middle of the winter time?   I was a fish in the summer months, so when the winter set in and limits were put on swimming by the hours at the local YMCA club I wasn't a happy camper.

But after the candy store, instead of making our way to the condo for our night of manicures, pedicures, and sisterly bonding over ice cream and junk food we started to head towards an area of town I had never been to.  And it did not look nice!

Looking back now, I know she was going to cop drugs. But being 8 years old I was just frightened of the unknown and worried about the area, because my parents had always stressed that it was the place the bad people lived.  Great right?

As if I couldn't get anymore scared at the moment, just as we are getting to our little corner store destination the car got a flat tire.  I freaked out.  I was a child, a scared child, and my sister couldn't handle it. She couldn't handle me. She couldn't handle what she was actually doing. Scoring crack with her little sister in the car?  How could someone do that with a clear conscious?

A normal person couldn't and wouldn't. But she wasn't normal... she was an addict. Still is just in recovery although I don't think those who were dependent on narcotics at one point in their life should be abusing certain types of prescription medications. Another tale in its own for a later date though.

Eventually a dirty looking, scary, shady gas station attendant changed the tire for her. Only after we were forced to drive on the rim of the flat tire for a mile down the road.

With the donut tire on the car we headed to the condo. By this point I was so far hysterical that nothing short of offering me an entire toy store would calm me down.  Put yourself in my shoes as a little kid, you would probably have done the same thing.

The memory is so vivid to me because it was the first, last, and only time my mother allowed her to take me in any type of overnight capacity, until much later in life. Once I was a teen at least.

I was able to play in the jacuzzi tub as promised, but she was more concerned with talking on the phone, and having other people over.  I wasn't the priority even though she made it seem like the night would be mine.  It always has been that way, but in the following years it became men that came first.

We Called Her Sissy

We called her Sissy, at least that is the name that stuck to her like her healthy image sticks to my mind. What used to be, and how I forever want to remember her. When I was born she was a teen, and for a little hint of time she loved me enough to stay in the house.  But I was the only person keeping her there.

My mother, a single mother for 13 years by that point in time had little control over her. I don't think an iron fist would have been able to contain her.   It was her way or the highway. And in some ways it still is today.

When I was an infant I got pretty sick, in the end it was my tonsil's who were the culprit and eventually came out. Looking back from what I am told I was eighteen months old.

As the tale has been told, the only person who could ever get me to sleep during that time was my Sissy. If I would cry, she could calm me, if I wouldn't sleep, she would rock me. And once I had completed my recovery she was gone like a ghost. A figment of my imagination. An image I wanted but couldn't have.

It is not that I can remember these events, but this is when it all began. I always wanted her by my side, but she would have rather gone out on a three week crack binge with the latest fool who would foot the bill to look at her beautiful blond hair, and baby blues.

She has always been able to get by on her looks in life, although I would compare her body these days to that of a twelve year old boy.  When I reached my teen years unknowing to me she was suffering from HIV, I gave her my hand me down clothes as I grew out of them and she continued to get smaller, and smaller.

Even though I don't remember these days for myself, I have pictures. Family pictures which even include our brother who has since removed himself from it all, as I try daily to do.  Unfortunately for me, this pain of an on-again off-again relationship will continue until the inevitable end which will be when our family buries her.

No one wants to bury their sibling, especially the one you are closest with. No parent ever wants to bury their child. No child ever wants to bury a parent prematurely.

- Little Sister

Her Story...

It sounds like a vague title but the meaning couldn't be any deeper in my life. I am just the voice behind the tale, but the life in question is that of my older sister. An older sibling who fled home at fifteen years old right after I was born almost three decades ago.

Writing without a name attached to me has become an outlet for the emotions life has handed me in these difficult days. A life that has withstood disease, heartbreak, and more near death experiences than Evil Kenevil.

An amazing person with a troubled soul. A wife, mother, pathological liar...
A gold digger, manipulator, and the most mild mannered lady attached to these sociopath traits.

The sister that would take the shirt off her back to keep you warm, but not without a knife right inside that shirt for the eminent stab right in the back.

I am the type of person who always wants to see the good in people, but with children of my own and a soap opera of a day-to-day life because of her lack of conscious, the good has long fled from my sight.

Instead now I am filled with anger, and bitter thoughts of a woman I went above and beyond for, and in the end she opted to take a man over her family.

Her story starts back as far as I can probably remember or the early 90's. Salt n' Pepa was the jam on the radio and my sister was that on-again off-again presence in my life. She would always come stumbling back to my parent's house when she had no place else to go. Near death from whatever recent crack binge she had been on, but the child in me didn't care how long she slept for in that spare bedroom because when she woke up my sissy would be mine until she fled again for another month long vacation of self destruction.

A trip to the toy store for candy was the typical activity for the day. Mainly because she would want to stock up on candy for herself. Strangely I never recalled her ever having a job so the origin of the money was always a mystery to me, at least in my younger years.

I can clearly remember days waiting in the office during lunch at school waiting for her to come pick me up, never showing up. Leaving me hungry with another promise broken. I later on learned the worth of her word.

But I plan to break the history up into posts. Experiences I remember the most. Memories I wish I could forget. And the wasted life of someone who could have been great and changed the world, but clouded their life with drug addiction, prostitution, and disease.

-Little Sister