Diary of a home schooler

happy?

When you are eight years old life is supposed to be simple. No eight year old should have to worry about money, or parenting their siblings, or calling 911. Unfortunately these are things many kids have to deal with, myself included.  Many of my evenings were spent trying to distract my younger brothers and sister from my parents loud fights downstairs. I would put on puppet shows and sing nursery rhymes until the littles got to sleep. Then I would lay in my bed  silently staring at the ceiling, trying to block out the insults and anger.

My older sister Liz would sit and write in her diary or read, unbothered by the noise. She had learned not to let it get to her,  and would wake up in the morning and talk to my parents as if neither of them had done anything wrong.

I think that around this time I began to go the opposite direction, and some days I would refuse to speak to my parents at all. Something just didn't feel right to me about the people who would reprimand me for raising my voice, calling names or bickering with my siblings doing the exact same thing to each other. Even still I thought that this was just how parents acted, after all it was all I'd ever known.

My family has always been low middle class, my dad works in engineering and my mother stays home with us kids. Because of the size of our family and the fact that we only had one income we rarely got to go on vacation or even do slightly expensive things like visiting the amusement park we lived ten minutes away from. We had been saving up to take a long trip to Australia in 2020 but we all know how that turned out.

Even without the unwelcome arrival of Covid-19 our house was subject to many natural disasters. Just as soon as we got our roof fixed from hail damage a tree would fall on it and we would have to fix that. It felt like every week when we went to Children's group we would tell our friends about another exciting (and expensive) thing that had happened to us. As a child I didn't realize how much money my family was sinking into every problem our house had, from mold, to lead pipes, to a literal landslide there was always something going on.

Despite these things I was a very optimistic eight year old who just believed she had a very interesting life. In every photo I'm smiling and playing, blissfully unaware of the abuse taking place in my own home.  You know that paradox where once you learn about something you see it everywhere, like learning a new name, or seeing a new style of clothes? That's how it feels now, like everywhere I look in my memories there's a new pattern of abuse,  more evidence toward how terrible my father really is. And here I was, singing and dancing through it all.

I had a knack for finding the silver lining in every situation. When we had lead pipes the workers dug up our entire back yard, unearthing the hard clay like dirt. Then they accidentally split a pipe, flooding everything. The silver lining? I found some tools and started making pottery, sitting on a big rock in my overalls getting my hands dirty. It was every kids dream, I had my own personal mud pit! When we found out about the landslide it took years to fix, and during those years we had many workmen and their heavy machinery by our house, and so we would watch from our windows as they worked. My brothers would pester them for information and when the men left for the night we would sit in the bulldozers they had left and pretend we were workers.

As much as I hate parts of my childhood I can still see how amazing it was from other perspectives. Its strange to think that due to all these problems 2017 was one of the best years of my life.