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I decorated in shades of white and whiter, and abhorred clutter. At least in the kitchen. Open, airy, and somehow, despite the starkness of the decoration, welcoming, with curved lines and gentle slopes, not a touch of metal anywhere.
Curvy chairs hugged a round tabletop set atop a sweeping center stand, that separated the kitchen from the living room.
And it was a true living room. Wide, comfortable seats, an L-shaped couch nestled into the corner, a big screen tv because I liked my entertainment, and a curvy kidney-shaped coffee table, the shelf under which was stuffed with books. My first indulgence. The places I lived within their pages where the only risk was envy.
More housing for books lined the walls, and every wall hosted a bookcase. Except in the boys’ room. In that room, toys, books, and Lego lined the shelves for when my honorary nephews, the sons of my dearest friends, Amber and Ruby, visited me. Which was not as often anymore as they were getting older.
There had been some changes for those boys recently. In fact, I had just played maid of honor for Ruby when she finally married her first love, Vander. Amber and Gus, too, were finally back where they belonged: together.
The results of good decisions after a series of heartbreaking ones.
If only we made decisions with an understanding of the echo they would make in our lives. Whether they would lead to alienation or belonging.
So long as I could remember, I’d searched for somewhere to belong. Eventually, I found it in the unlikeliest of places.
Myself.
Belonging, as it turned out, came along as the bonus gift attached to the prize of self-acceptance. Who knew, in order to belong, you needed to find home in yourself first?
Ironically, the very thing that stood in the way of self-acceptance was the very thing that led me to my first sense of home and belonging to someone else.
Always a hypersensitive and anxious child, when I hit the age of five, my proclivities morphed into an array of quirks that left my parents at first bewildered, then increasingly frustrated.
They couldn’t take me anywhere, alter anything in the house, or dispose of any of my things, even the baby clothes, without encountering a massive tantrum from yours truly.
By the age of eleven, after four years of their unique forms of discipline and training, a school nurse noticed the bruises and called Children’s Aid. As they could no longer tolerate my behavior, my parents willingly handed me over to the state.
Immediately apprehended and placed in foster care with an older, childless couple who quickly recognized that my distress did not stem only from my life circumstances, they wasted no time in obtaining the help I so desperately needed. Within three months, they successfully advocated for me to see a psychiatrist. Several weeks after that first visit, diagnosed with anxiety and OCD, the real therapy began.
I’d like to say it was easier than the ‘therapy’ my parents subjected me to, but it wasn’t. Effective, yes. Easy? Not at all, although it was never cruel.
I opened the glass door of the hutch, the only non-essential piece of furniture in my home. It belonged to my mother, my real mother, the one who raised me.
Only two things resided on the glass shelves inside: a China tea set, and a beat up set of art tools belonging to my father. In the long days when I first landed on their doorstep and was unable to attend school, he taught me to draw. He never once balked at the number of times I had to touch each brush before I picked it up. He never once reprimanded me for the time I wasted counting brushstrokes. And when it came time to wash my hands of paint before dinner, he stood beside me and carefully measured out small amounts of detergent into my greedy palms.
I obsessed about washing my hands, imagining the invisible germs on my skin to be as difficult to shed as the dried-on bits of paint that worked their way into the lines of my dry, cracked skin. Fearful of spreading contamination to my new family, I touched nothing and scrubbed my hands raw.
Science class the previous year taught me about invisible germs. If I couldn’t see them on my hands, how did I know they were clean? Did I scrub in between my fingers? All of them? So many cracks and lines, hiding places for germs that could make people sick. I couldn’t lose them.
Wash again.
And again.
I remember my mother leading me into the kitchen where she opened a brand-new bottle of hand lotion and added a generous amount of liquid soap. Replacing the lid, she shook it violently before passing it to me.
“There, dolly. Now you can moisturize and clean your hands at the same time.”
The obsessive handwashing eased, and the practice of adding a squirt of detergent to my moisturizer continued.
My birth family refused to relinquish all their rights. This turned into a blessing because instead of Children’s Aid trying to find an adoptive family for me, an almost impossible feat for a mentally ill eleven-year-old, they left me with my foster family.
On the day I turned eighteen, my foster parents took me to their lawyer where I took their name and they added me to their will. While I did not have a new birth certificate and was never officially adopted, for all intents and purposes I was theirs, they were mine, and my new name reflected that truth.
Long before I belonged to myself, I belonged to them.
When they passed, they left me everything.
And it was a lot.
