My dad would say the title of this article isn’t true. My mom would have joined in on his defense.
I have a half sister I’ve known about my whole life and I’ve never met her. My dad made sure of it.
When I was 4 or 5, I learned the family history. Literally. His. Story. My dad’s story.
“She tried to kill him!” My dad said at the wooden kitchen table.
My mom gave him a deep glare. I was too young to comprehend what contempt looked like.
That phrase hit a deep part of my childhood psyche.
His story was that my half-sister pushed my brother down in the snow and abandoned him. He could have died.
And then they got rid of her. My dad would never use those words. Neither would my mom. But I have my own voice and I know that they willingly gave up a child. My dad got rid of a problem.
It’s unfortunate for him that he would never be able to get rid of the rest of us. The rest of the problem.
“A broken family is a family in which any member must break oneself into pieces to fit in.”
-Glennon Doyle, Untamed
A broken family is a family in which any member must break oneself into pieces to fit in.
If you wanted to be part of the Marder household, you had to break yourself down into pieces to fit around something the family had to hold as normal — that it was okay and acceptable to abandon a child who caused harm.
It would be the end of the world if any of us caused harm like my half-sister.
It would be the end of the world to share your own perspective, your confusion, your anger, your judgment, your pain, your sadness, your disgust.
I wasn’t allowed to do that. I’m still not.
It could get you written out of the will, just like what happened to my half-sister.
I live life with nothing to lose because truth is the only thing that really matters. I live life with nothing to lose because her story matters so much more than his.
I believe that I inherited my mom’s aches and pains. Her body kept the score. If it was a part of her, it is a part of me.
We all had this deep, terrible burden of his story.
My mom had a broken relationship with her oldest daughter because of his story. My other siblings and I never met her because she was crazy, unstable. On drugs. Seeing us would only upset her. She was my mom’s family, not ours. Okay, so which one was it?
My half-sister didn’t come to any of our weddings because of his story. She didn’t watch me grow up because of his story. I didn’t love her because of his story. She was a psychopathic murderer, right?
It was easier to preserve the story so we could preserve the family. We had to preserve him. We had to preserve the brokenness because it would be the end of the world if we didn’t.
Maybe that’s why one of my brothers doesn’t associate with any of us anymore. He knows it would be the end of the world to share his truth with people who used to mean the world to him.
The end of one world can mean the beginning of another. Maybe that’s what should be normal. That’s what should be acceptable. His story never was.