I am the Skeleton in the Closet

In Closing

In the next coming months, I didn't fix things between Alex and I. I inherited my account without the needed avoidance that Alex would have brought with it and my life got better.

Together Steven and I came up with increasingly clever ways of dealing with the rest of the family. Often times when Dawn and Alex start fights we create a random side topic to discuss loudly next to them so as to not be drawn into their whirlpool of aggression. He's not blind to what's happening around him anymore, if he ever was. If they're not together because of love, they're together because of a lack of a prenup. Fights are more frequent as Dawn's been trying to give away all of their belongings to lighten the load to move to Tennessee so she can be with the rest of her family. She's refurbished the house for the fifth time and has completely redecorated both Alex's and my room to create more of a stereotypical girl/boy room. My once tender blue room with a chalkboard wall turned into a grey painted snobbish hell. Taking down my Einstein poster she replaced it with an image of a set of little girls sitting hand in hand along a bench, dressed as though they were teenagers. She took down my puzzle stacked bookcase and replaced it with a bunch of retro photos of dogs with sunglasses. My orange painted head board, now a white frame. My desk covered in useless trinkets I had made, now swept off for some empty white patterned canisters. Picking apart the glow in the dark star stickers I had carefully placed to match the sky above my room she took out all of the personality to it. Alex's blue room hardly changed, besides the overall cleanliness and a few hanging superhero posters. Whenever I stop by, I feel like I'm in a completely different house for a completely different family. A happy one, one they were probably hoping for.

After I wrote this book I let my biological family read it. I made the decision in part because I feared that they thought I made the decision to drop Kathy because of them. I did not let them read this for some sort of attempt to get pity or an admittance of responsibility. It is clear to me that they harbor a very different feeling towards family members than I and the best way I could think to explain my feelings on the matter was by writing it all down. To this day, it is still strange for me to witness a family that loves without judgment. So I don't think of them as family in the normal connotation. I think of them as closely related friends. For as little time as I've known them for, they've fashioned a much closer relationship to me than Dawn or Steven ever had or could hope to have. Slowly I'm learning what it means to be part of a family, something I never thought I would know.

Dawn found her scapegoat in Kathy. According to her they never gave me the letters because they had lost a singular photo of Kathy as a baby and they attempted to laser off my birthmark because of how much she had mentioned it in the letters she sent. So I finally read them. Kathy did mention the birthmark in a few, but only in response with phrases like "it's good to hear that it's getting lighter" and "we have no idea where it came from". None explicitly expressing a want for it to be gone, just the concern about what it may be alluding to. Each letter was typically short, sweet and to the point about the holiday or birthday it was celebrating. She included a number of photos of the family, Coby included in each. It was strange to me how heavily involved Coby obviously was with the family, yet no one had reached out to me or tried to involve me. A month or so after Sarah finished the book I took a trip with all of them to an RV park. By the light of a fire Brian finally told me his part in everything.

According to him, Kathy had been broken up with him during the year she was pregnant with me. She had me in secret with her family and gave me up for adoption shortly afterwards. She told Brian about me six years into their marriage, suspiciously close to when they split, though no one would ever confirm these suspicions, not that I would ever ask. That would make me about ten or so years old when he found out. Suddenly it made sense why I wasn't in the photos with Coby and Steph, they were so close to each other and not me because they didn't know about me. Brain must have been afraid to contact me because he had been so distant before. I learned that Steph only found out about me from a new doctor she went to who mentioned it during an exam and Sarah found out about me not a half hour before she met me. I have yet to find out who was in the room at my birth with Kathy. Dawn and Steven both seem to believe that Brian was there, but he says differently. I believe him. If he were to lie about anything it would be to say that he was there, not the opposite. Either way, it doesn't change the relationship that we have, whether he was there or not, he's here now.

While I've gotten over all the things that happened earlier in my years, Alex hasn't. Just a few months after I turned twenty-one he took a trip down to Tennessee to see Dawn's relatives and ask about her childhood behaviors and if she had always been crazy. Apparently they encouraged her move up here to escape from her. While it's good to know that I'm not the only one seeing her for what she is, I still don't see the merit in this. There's a certain amount of animosity in it that can only cause the bolder to pin you more against the hard place you've created in your own head. As Alex did his best to prove Dawn an unfit parent, he continued draining them of a hefty cash flow. Everytime I stop by the parents house now I find buckets of halloween costume esk clothing piled to the ceiling with outfits I've never once seen him wear, box upon box of unused makeup, and I feel sorry that they can't see what I do.

Just as they can't walk in my shoes, I can't walk in theirs. I'm sure they see some sort of helplessness that only a mother or a father could care for and I'm sure Alex needs help in some way, but that way isn't financially.

Often times I wonder about who either of us would be if only we hadn't been raised by them, but I don't know that person and frankly I don't want to. Everything that happened to me made me who I am today, and I wouldn't trade that for the world.