faking

It would be four years until I would know where my family had moved.

I now know that much of my extended family knew all along where they had moved, but my mother had told them never to tell me.

She had told them that I was taking drugs and drinking and had moved out or ran away.  [a big lie - the only drinking i did was in her home.]

Whatever it was it was enough for them to lie to me for too many years about where she was.

I went to school; my senior year.

I had to go to a court and became a ward of the state. My father and his new wife did not want to keep me, they thought I may have been trouble, they did not know, so my father signed me over to the state and I became a foster care kid.

I tried therapy a few times but was never really ready to talk. People gave up on getting me to talk about it, and so life just went forward, with me supressing so much inside, the pressure that would surely become my eventual demise.

I really loved the home I was living in.

There were rules. I could not drink or smoke, or stay out late.

I finally had rules; different rules, the kind of rules you have when someone loves you and cares about your safety. It was really weird.

And these people they treated me like family. The entire family did, to the extended family, as though I had been there all along... From uncles to aunts and cousins. I was always a part of their family.

It felt really nice. I was able to be a kid, finally.

I went to work with my real father. I really enjoyed that. It was actually fun to get to know him and my other step-brothers and sister. And it lessened the difficulty of him not accepting me.


I thought that for once all was going really great for me. I had a lot of nightmares and I remember that I had a lot of tantrums.

I would threaten to run away, sometimes I wanted to die. Even the good couldn't completely alleviate the pain of the past.

I have been told my reaction was a lot like post-traumatic stress disorder.

What I know is that it was hard on the people who were loving me.

At first my grandparents did not know where I was and were told not to look for me because of my problems.
When they found me I was really sick with a flu.
My grandmother thought maybe I was hungover, she was trying to get me to say I was hungover; I was really, really just sick. And again, I paid for the pains of my mother, my past.

I was enjoying seeing my dad and grandparents, my mothers family, and I thought only the best was ahead. They were all really nice to me. It was wierd.
Wierd because my mom had taught me that they didn't like us. Some of the things that she told me, I learned, were true;
and I paid for trusting too much... trusting that I was okay to be loved. We weren't good enough, we came from a divorced family; it seemed our horns, the things that were wrong with us, would never go away completely.


And then in November, my foster family's mom died. She went away one weekend and never came back home. My foster family was hurting and I was watching this new chapter unfold. A life that would never be the same for anyone I loved again. It seemed to me that anything I touched, the lives of those who loved me, were destined to be destroyed.

And now I had to be strong for the family.

They were hurting so much. I didn’t know what to do. It was really like a nightmare. A new nightmare.
Again, I was supressing; Learning to live by blocking out the pain each day brought.
This seemed to be the beginning of my faking my life away, with a smile, and strength, not really courage, but bravery.