A Story Worth Telling

Episode I

Everyone has a story. My name is Sheba Beaufort, and this is mine.

There's nothing special about it, not really. Millions of people probably live harder lives, and there's a chance no one will care about what I have to say. But then again, someone might. So I figure, if my story could help someone out there, then maybe my story might just be worth telling.

To understand everything from here on out, you'll need some backstory. So here it goes...

My parents didn't have a happy marriage. From an early age, I knew my parents only got married because my mother got pregnant with my older brother Simon. She was twenty-one, fresh out of university, and my father was twenty four, working in management at a prestigious bank. Our father was white, our mother black, and neither family was happy about their relationship or the fact that my mother had gotten pregnant. It was an ugly thing to say, but my father was of the mind that dark was okay to sleep with but not to take home. I suppose his mindset was aided by the fact that he came from very old money, the kind accumulated by people of a certain view that the two races were never to mix. Unfortunately for him, my grandfather didn't believe in children outside of marriage - so his solution was to marry his son to his baby mama, regardless of how he felt about who she was.

I was born a year after Simon. Maybe they had me because they thought he would benefit from having a sibling. It was a question I'd asked myself a lot when I was a teenager, before coming to the realisation that I'd never get an answer. It helped that Simon and I were so close in age, because we became each other's support system. All we ever really had growing up was each other in our little family of two. Everyone thought we were twins because of how closely we resembled each other. My skin was a little lighter, but we had the same dark brown curly hair, same facial features, same hazel eyes.

My mum's family all but abandoned her a short while after I was born. I've still never met my grandparents, or my aunts. I don't even know if they're alive. But I don't think it would make much difference now. I learnt the hard way that family is made of the people who stay, who have your back. They left us a long time ago, and I see no purpose in attempting to build that bridge. I think, knowing what I know now, that the animosity coming from all sides eventually wore my mother down. She'd lost her support system, which left her defenseless against my father. She had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. He slowly eradicated her self-esteem and her individuality until she eventually lost her fight, so much so that all I remembered of her growing up was her being a shell to receive my father's abuse in whatever form he dished it out.

It was a loss though. Growing up a mixed race child was a hard enough experience made harder by having no access to one half of who we - Simon and I - were. We both had to learn how to take care of our hair ourselves, learn that sunscreen needed to be a staple in our lives, learn what terms and expressions and phrases were offensive... Everything was a do-it-yourself scenario. It didn't help that father made it perfectly clear as often as he could that he wanted nothing to do with us, not in private and certainly not in public. That constant toxicity was a hard environment to grow up in. My father's unmasked disdain for being married to my mother always made me feel off kilter, like I was some kind of abomination who shouldn't have existed. I'd ask myself what it meant for me, being born out of and into a relationship of such dysfunction.

My brother and I reacted to our environment in polar opposite ways. It pushed my brother to best whatever idea of him our father had. By the time he graduated high school he was captain of the basketball team and class president, had a 4.0 GPA and graduated valedictorian, and he was dating my best friend. I, on the other hand, ended up in rehab when I was seventeen. Sadly, I turned into exactly the kind of person my father told me I was, the picture of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You could boil it down to being dealt a bad card and having bad coping mechanisms, but I take responsibility for all the decisions I made that led me up to that point... Even with the choices that were taken away from me.