All three years of middle school were pretty much the same. I had poor grades, I was constantly in trouble, I was fitting in much better now, and the relationship with my mother was, well it was, still pretty crappy. If anything it was worse.
It was time for me to start high school. I was so excited about my first day of high school that I did not sleep at all the night before I was to start. I fully intended to keep my grades better in high school than I had the previous years. That did not happen. What happened instead is that the teachers would hand out the books and I would go ahead and read everything in the literature book on the first day of school, I would look at the list of books we would be required that year and I would discover that I had already read most of them and went ahead and read the ones I had not yet. I even read the stupid vocabulary book from cover to cover, and most of the time if I chose to, I could repeat the definition of the vocabulary word, word for word with no mistakes.
My high school was so crowded that the freshman and sophmores had to start much earlier than the upper classmen did. When class time hit, I was bored because I already knew the material or could learn it really fast, and tired from having to get up so early. I did what most teenagers would have done in that situation…….I slept through class. That meant I hardly ever completed my work, and of course my grades were awful.
This was the time in my life when I actually was able to have a “best friend” We had lived in Georgia for a number of years and as far as I knew we would not be moving anytime soon, so it was a safe time to get close to someone. Lee (name changed since I do not have her permission to use it here) never knew how much her friendship meant to me. The neighborhood she lived in was right next to mine and I spent a lot of time with her and her family. I spent most of my high school career grounded. The only thing I could do was ride my bike. Whenever I could I would sneak off on my bike and go to her house.
I know my parents wanted the best for me. I know they did the best they knew how when I was growing up, it is unfortunate that their best was not sufficient. I think they were at a loss in some ways as to why I would do so poorly in school and had such poor social skills, when in the past the opposite had been true. Doing poorly in school was a choice on my part, I was certainly more than capable of doing what I was supposed to do. The lack of social skill was mostly because I was still choosing self isolating behavior. I lacked the full understanding myself as to why I changed like that and I think even if I had the understanding, I still would not have gone to my parents and told them. It was not until I was an adult and was carefully examining my childhood that I was able to pin point why I changed into someone who did not care about much that was around her. The change began the moment my mother did not believe me about the creepy old guy feeling me up.
The pervading feelings I had all through my teenage years were that I was unloved, dis-liked, rejected and a disappointment to others. For the most part those feelings are associated with my mother. She was still very easy to set off, she still said humilliating and cruel things, and often when I was around her, I felt as if she did not want me there. My father was still gone most of the time.
Life continued to get worse in my house. My mother was trying to keep up appearances with her friends, so the person she portrayed to them was not the person I knew at home. The person I knew at home was the one that told me I would never be anything, that I was stupid and while she was saying these things, have me sweep the floor and tell me I would grow up to be nothing but a maid. She was the woman that slapped me so hard and so many times in a row, when I had braces on that I felt the only way to make her stop was to slap back. I know I was angry that she was so good at hiding what she was really like and people just thought I was a “bad seed”.
I think it was when I was around eighteen that I did my first self destructive act.
To be continued
Beginnings – Part V will be out tomorrow
