Self-Sabotage: Part I
It’s the only thing that stuck with me from the other night. Constantly being told you can’t do something, from both your mother and father, can be damaging to some people, especially for kids. When I was younger, I looked up to my brother a lot. It was crazy. I was his shadow, and he let me be. I guess I was about 8 or 9, and a little album called “Dookie” was out. When I hear it, I think of my brother and how he and his friends blasted that album while they were skateboarding, and how I was the one who just chilled and kept an eye on the boombox. Cy hung out with kids older than him – 16, 17 years old. By association, I was a badass. I got to hang out with a bunch of high school kids, and they didn’t seem to mind it much. No one messed with me, thanks to them.
My brother got away with a lot of stuff because he played sports. He didn’t even like sports – my dad had to pay him money to play, and of course, he took it. Even as he got older and learned to like it, my dad kept paying him off, hoping he’d grow up to be some big ball player. Cyrus didn’t have good grades, but he didn’t have to. He went fishing and fixed cars and painted walls and played sports. Me, I just brought home report cards with straight As, every time hoping that someone would tell me I was doing a good job. I made good grades from Kindergarten all the way into my first year of college, and I don’t think anyone in my family was ever genuinely happy with them. I guess I set my school expectations too high from the beginning because if I brought home a C, I got hit and sent to my room. But if Cyrus brought home a B, he was given money and bought enough pizza for him and his friends to share.
After a while, I felt my only recourse was to get into sports myself. In 8th grade, I made the football team, but Coach told me that if I wanted to play in high school, I’d need to gain some weight. I was a puny kid in middle school. Bony, short, little muscle mass. I think I only made the team because they felt sorry for me. That summer, I tried everything to bulk up. I drank half a gallon of whole milk a day, ate lots of meats, started working out at the local YMCA. I wanted so badly to make the team in high school because I thought it would make my father love me more. I wanted him to spend as much time with me as he did with Cyrus. I didn’t want him to write me off like he’d done for most of my life.
When I did make the team, he was excited and genuinely surprised that I’d gone out of my way. “So THAT’S why you gained so much weight. For football.” I never said it was for him because he had a habit of calling me a “little bitch” and he didn’t realize it actually hurt my feelings. Plus, I tried my best to not show much emotion in front of him, which included being overly excited, angry, and especially not crying. If I had to do any of the above, I found a place behind the tool shed to vent my feelings, and a pack of cigarettes I’d stored on the roof of the shed in the event I was stressed. I knew better than to smoke cigarettes in front of my parents (even though Cy smoked out in the front porch by the time he was 16).
Apparently I played ball so well during my freshman year that I was one of 3 to make it straight to the Varsity team. My father didn’t bat an eye. When I started playing baseball, he said, “You’d better be home in time to water the grass.” When I picked up basketball, he said, “If you bring home a single C, you’re finished, understand me?” I did my best to excel at everything I’d ever done, but my father never seemed too impressed. When I made it to college on a football scholarship, my dad finally showed some kind of approval, but by then, it was too late. Instead of trying to tell him I didn’t want to play anymore and risking whatever relationship I tried to build up with him, I purposely injured myself during practice and didn’t get past my second game. At that point, I stopped trying to make him like me and became content with the fact that my father would never love me like he loved my brother.
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