Family & Sonder

I came across this word last year, maybe the year before. I had to dig to find it again for the purpose of this post, and I discovered that it's not really a word yet, but something that was coined on Tumblr and probably will find its way into the official English language eventually.

sonder  

n. the realization that each randomly passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own-populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness-an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you`ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. 

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Every so often, more recently, I experience this. It's a surreal feeling, as if you step outside of everything you know and into some theory of everything, some wondering, speculating - feeling like a piece of something more than an individual.

However -

I also, for a time, very strongly had this feeling about my siblings. It's always been obvious, to me, that my parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all have far different experiences than I do. My mother had a whole life before me. She even had another daughter before me, as a teenager, and that daughter was eventually put up for adoption. They found each other a few years ago, and of course, I realize that this sister has had a life of entirely different experiences than us.

For all intents and purposes, I was the oldest child. My brother came along 3 years after me, one sister 3 years after him, our last sister a year and a half after her. We were 4 kids, 7 years apart from oldest to youngest. We were very close in age and because of that, I always assumed that we grew up the same, that their experiences and mine were the same, that we perceived things the same way.

Toward the end of 2017, it suddenly dawned on that I had to have had that all wrong. That we had different experiences and even experienced the same things differently. Though our basic environment was, at times, the same - our perceptions weren't, and couldn't be.

We are a close family, not geographically but emotionally. As kids, our close ages made us bitter rivals, we fought like cats and dogs, we fought worse than that sometimes. We fought like scarred kids who didn't know how to deal with the lives that were handed to us. We fought like wild little beasts. We needed an outlet, and that's what we were to each other. But often, when it really came down to it, we were also all we had.

I was a baby when my parents split up. My mother remarried before I was 3, my brother was born shortly after. My earliest memory is of being in the home of the family who took care of me while my mom and stepfather were on their honeymoon. Their daughter was teaching me how to twirl. It's a tiny snippet of a memory, but it's there.

To me, my stepfather was my dad. He was the only dad I knew. Once my brother was born, he became the golden child and I was "less than." I didn't know why I was second class, I didn't know I was the stepkid, the baggage. I don't think I could've understood it even if it was explained, and it might have been, for all I know.

I was introduced to my real dad when I was maybe 5 years old. I didn't comprehend that he was my dad, I don't think, he was someone that came and took me places and I was just fine with that.

When I was almost 7, mom and I were walking and she told me she was leaving. I only remember being terrified that she was leaving me too, and she said, "No, you'll come with me, you're mine." I remember that not making sense to me, which is how I'm sure that I didn't understand who my dad was - but I was relieved nonetheless.

She was pregnant with my baby sister at the time, and I think back and realize that my youngest sister never actually lived in a home with both parents. My brother was 3, the next sister was 1. All of this is part of me and my memories that they don't recall at all.

We left my stepdad, and went into a shelter for a few days, as I recall. Then my siblings went back to my stepdad, I flew on my own from southern Ontario to northern BC to stay with my aunt and uncle, mom went into the hospital after suffering a breakdown. I spent my 7th birthday with my aunt and uncle. Thinking back, my brother would've turned 4 while we were apart. I started school living with my aunt and uncle, I was there maybe 2 weeks and then I went back home. Mom and I lived with her aunt for a while, just us, it was a pleasant time for me.

Eventually we moved, my sister was born, the other two kids came back. This was when I grew up, really, this was when I became the other parent. Just before I turned 11, we moved to BC to be nearer to my mom's brothers. To me, it felt like a fresh start. I was a shy, awkward kid. I was poor, I had gone to 4 different schools by grade 5. I was bullied mercilessly. Not just put down, taunted, made fun of - but also beat up quite often. I never fit in. I thought that I would be able to start over, where nobody knew me, and try to fit in.

Because our mother was chronically depressed, and because we were so poor, I stepped in as a parent from when I was about 8 onward. I learned to cook. I learned the kids' schedules. I changed diapers and dressed them, told them what to do and when to do it. It carried on a long time, but I grew to resent it as a teenager. I didn't cope well and I was sometimes cruel, sometimes I power tripped, sometimes I hit them and hurt them. Something that I carried a lot of guilt for a lot of years, especially how I treated my brother, who reminded me of his father far too much. Over time I realized that I was a child and I did the best I could with what I was given, I apologized and I was mostly able to move on.

My middle sister went to live with my aunt and uncle for a time, I don't recall why. We all went into foster care together when I was in grade 7, for about half a school year. We went back home just before I started grade 8, high school. By grade 9, social workers came to take us away again. I was angry. By this point, I wasn't the same shy meek thing I was as a younger kid, I was full of spite and fury. I decided I was going to fight. I decided that I wasn't going to make it easy for them. I thought I would have no choice in the end, but I refused to go quietly. We were not beat or abused. We didn't have a mother who maliciously neglected us. We had a mom who was sick, who hoarded, who didn't know how to clean a house. We had a mom who was depressed and sometimes neglectful because of it. We had a mom who was overwhelmed with mental illness, finances and four kids who ran wild. And when she asked the ministry for help, they came to take us. So I fought. I told them I wasn't going. I told them they couldn't make me. I told them I hated them. I glared and crossed my arms and spit my words at them like venom. And then they told me that because I was over 13 years old, they couldn't actually make me go but that they "strongly recommended" that I did go. I turned them down.

My sisters and my brother didn't have the option. They thankfully went to a foster mother who was beyond wonderful, who loved kids immensely and did what she did because of that. My sisters were still so young at that point, 7 and 8 I believe, and still to this day are grateful for their time there. They were fed, clothed, given the chance to do extracurricular activities. They didn't have to worry about a thing. My brother, he was like me by this point. 11 years old, angry and difficult.

During this time, mom worked. She had completed her high school diploma, and a home care aid certification. She worked in a group home for mentally disabled adults. Shifts were 3 days on, 4 off, as I recall. By this point, I struggled with school so much that I had convinced her to allow me to do correspondence - distance education. But for her long shifts, I was home alone. I was self-sufficient enough to take care of myself, I'd done it for years.  But I was 14, and I didn't have the maturity to self-direct in things that mattered, I still needed guidance and boundaries, and I had none. I was listless and depressed, just drifting along. I knew how to survive, and that was it. Maybe because my whole childhood was largely focussed on just surviving, it seemed like enough at the time.

My teenage years are a blur to me. I really was just surviving. I had suffered a lot of sexual abuse between the ages of 7 and 11, I was constantly in therapy. I was prescribed anti-depressants for the first time at 13. I smoked, smoked a lot of pot, experimented with other drugs sometimes. I was anorexic and often suicidal.

Mom lost her job, unfairly. We were still in the big house that was meant for the whole family and was unaffordable. We became essentially homeless. Again, my aunt and uncle stepped in to save us - we went to live with them. My brother became unmanageable for the foster parents, and since we had a relatively stable home by that point, he was returned to us.

We continued to fight to get my sisters back. My mom and I, because I was as invested as she was, they felt like my kids, I raised them too. I attended court every time it came up, more as moral support than anything since there was nothing I could do.

We moved out into our own place again. I was 15. My sisters came back. Just after I turned 16, I started dating my husband, who I'm still with, 21 years later. We moved out when I was 18. Mom developed heart disease, was sent to Vancouver for treatment, fell in love with the city. My brother had gone to his dad proving too difficult for mom to handle, he was lashing out at her and my sisters, he was bigger and stronger than them by this point, angry and confused and hurt. Mom took my sisters and moved to Vancouver. They were 12 and 13 at the time, and they really grew up in there.

My middle sister and I are the most alike, I think, in terms of personality. When I think back, I realize that for all those years, I was the buffer. I stepped in when mom fell down. I cared for the kids as much as I knew how to. And when I left - she had to take over that role, all at once, as a 13-year-old. When the thought first occurred to me, I felt so terrible for her. Because I couldn't anymore, I couldn't handle it and I needed to live my own life. Because somehow when it was me, it was normal, it was life. It was the life I knew, it was the role I had always been in. But when I imagine her in that spot, thrust into it without warning, it seems so awful.

My siblings would say sometimes that they felt I was mom's favourite. And that was what really made me start thinking about this - because it's not that I'm mom's favourite, it's that we have a bond that they don't have with her. Because I was hers, I was always hers, just like she said. No matter what happened, it was us together. We were enmeshed. I felt everything she felt, I was an extension of her. In my mind, for so many years, she couldn't do anything wrong. To me, she needed to be cared for. To me, she was fragile. When she hurt, I would hurt and I wanted nothing more than to make us both feel better. I didn't become my own person for many, many years, in a lot of senses. I was mom's helper. I was the substitute parent. I was the caretaker, the fixer, the sympathetic ear, the friend. What I hardly ever got to be was the daughter or the sister. To my siblings, mom was mom, even when she was flawed, even when she couldn't quite get it together. They were brother and sisters, I was some kind of sibling/parent hybrid. I'm not mom's favourite, it's just that we went through so much shit together, just us, that we ended up melded like metal in flame.

My sisters were gone for so much of my growing up years. My brother, less so. But as the lone boy in a family of females, I imagine it was so, so hard for him. We didn't understand him and we teased him far too much - he had very few role models. He and I were closer growing up than I was to the girls, we were closer in age and we were together for more of the bullshit life threw at us. We were closer as siblings, I should say, I never quite took care of him like the I did with the girls, and I wish I had taken care of him more.

I realize now that we didn't grow up the same at all. We had the same mother, and we were siblings, but we grew up in different times, in different places. I didn't have me as a sibling, and I think that is a huge difference, for better or worse. I wonder about their lives as children and how they saw the world. I'm so proud of who they've become as adults, I feel that they've done much better for themselves than I did and I'm happy for them - because they deserve it. My husband used to call me "the Spartan." That I'd fought for everything in life and it made me tough, sometimes too tough. My siblings are much the same, in that regard we are the same - we have fought for everything we have in life because we had to. Because we never just laid down and took it, we always wanted more and I am proud of all of us for that.

My siblings are everything to me. They are all far away from me now and I miss them terribly at times... but whenever I talk to them it's like no time has passed. They are my family and they are snug and soft, like that old sweater that's worn in just the way you like it, that wraps you up in warmth and comfort...

I cherish those relationships and I hope to one day learn their stories too.