The Story of Me

     I was born on December 13, in the year 1979, to Crystal and Joseph Dobbs.  Though my parents were still married at the time, they soon split up.  I’m not really sure when this happened, since I can’t actually remember a time when they were together.  I’ve never asked when they split up, since it didn’t seem that important.  I don’t remember ever being upset that my parents weren’t together, probably because they’d separated when I was so young.  I suppose it seemed “normal” to me.  It helped that they managed to stay good friends for most of my early childhood.

      I was the youngest of two, born just over two years after my sister, Arianna.  While my sister and I were never really what you would call close as kids, we did get along fairly well.  As children, she was the shy one and I was outgoing.  This was never more evident than when we went out as a family.  I still remember going to the local burger joint, and her making me go to the counter to ask for ketchup.  She was too shy to do it herself.  

      My early childhood was a fairly happy one.  I don’t have very many memories of that time, mostly just “snapshots” of experiences, each with a vague sense of what I was feeling at the time.  Most of my snapshots are of good times… I felt loved, secure.  Of course, things weren’t always perfect.  I still remember lying in bed one night, crying.  I don’t remember why I was crying, I think I’d been punished for something I’d done.  My sister and I shared a bunk bed at the time, and I guess my crying was keeping her awake.  So she told our father that she couldn’t sleep because of me.  Dad came into the room, pulled me out of bed, and spanked me. That’s all I remember.

      My sister and I didn’t always get along perfectly.  She was the “big sister”, too old to be bothered with the likes of me.  She told me recently that she still remembers watching gleefully as our father used his belt to spank me.  In her defense, it was apparently the first time he’d used his belt on either of us, and she was just happy it wasn’t her.   

      Regardless of these brief, unhappy moments, my childhood was a good one.  I worshiped my father, who was the best daddy a girl could ask for.  My mom loved me, though I have to admit I don’t remember as much of her as I do of my dad.  I was a daddy’s girl to the very core.  I remember afternoons spent playing with him.  He’d sit on the couch, and my sister and I would run at him, try to tickle him, and run away as fast as we could.  The trick was to tickle him without getting caught ourselves.  And at night he would cook dinner, and after dinner we would all sit down and watch some TV before my sister and I went to bed.  But my favorite times with my dad were when he would turn on his stereo, put in some classical music, and dance around the room with me standing on his toes.  

      Childhood progressed fairly well for me.  I went to a wonderful pre-school, where I got to cook my very own lunch, all by myself (I was very proud of this).  When I was old enough, I joined the public school system.  This was preceded, unfortunately, by a rather traumatic experience.  Apparently, my parents hadn’t kept me up to date on all of the various shots that children are required to endure before entering public school.  Which meant that I had to get caught up before they’d let me in.  I still remember going to the clinic and having to get a shot in each arm, and one in each leg.  I could barely walk when we left, and all I got for it was a lousy balloon.  To this very day, there’s nothing I hate more than having to get a shot.

      Public school did not start out well for me.  I hated kindergarten.  My teacher was a witch, and all the kids picked on me, calling me names.  At one point I refused to go to school.  My mom dragged me, kicking and screaming, to the principle's office.  If my teacher was a witch, my principle must have been a troll.  As soon as he was alone with me, he threatened to spank me if I didn’t go to class. Well, I was always a stubborn kid, and the more you threatened me, the more determined I was not to give in.  My father used to say that if I ever got into an argument with a mule, I’d win.  Eventually, someone sympathetic must have shown up, because I finally explained why I didn’t want to go to school.  You see, the kids used to call me “Heidi Doggs”, and I hated it.  I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore, they couldn’t make me!  Well, someone went and talked with the kids, and came back and told me they were all very sorry.  They hadn’t realized how much it upset me, and promised they wouldn’t do it anymore.  

      I guess everything must have been ok after that, since I don’t remember having any more problems.  Actually, after kindergarten I loved school.  I couldn’t stay away, I loved playing with the other kids, and more than anything I loved to learn.  I was one of those kids that teachers just love, excited to be at school and hungry to suck up as much knowledge as they could give me.  Being a rather easygoing kid, I got along with pretty much everyone.   Kids liked me, adults liked me, and life was good.

      I think I must’ve been in fourth grade when things started going down hill.  I’d met a new kid at school, a girl named Sara. Her parents were divorced as well, though her dad didn’t live in the area.  She’d grown up in Redway.  Her mom, Terry, her older brother, Tauson, and herself had just recently moved to Eureka.  She was a year younger than I was, and a grade behind.  We were best friends from the moment we met, and spent as much time as we could together.  

      The problems started when our parents met, her mom and my dad.  At first it seemed great, they really liked each other.  In fact, they liked each other so much that they started dating.  I didn’t realize it at the time, since I was too young to really know what was going on.  All I knew was that it meant I got to spend weeknights at Sara’s house, when normally my dad would never let me spend a school night at a friend’s.  But they were spending more and more time together… and less and less with their kids.  Something changed in my dad, as if he’d switched roles.  Being “Dad” didn’t seem as important to him anymore.
At some point in the relationship, I’m not really sure when, they announced that they wanted to move in together.  They gathered all four of us kids around Terry’s dinner table, and announced that we were all going to be living at Terry’s house.  They asked us how we felt about it, but nobody really said anything.  I think we were all in shock, none of us were expecting it.  Besides, by that point we’d pretty much learned that what we said wouldn’t make a difference anyway.  The adults had made up their minds, and asking our opinion was more a formality than anything else.
      
      We hated the idea.  Sara and Scott liked having their own rooms, and Arianna and I loved our house.  It was the house I was born in, and it was mine!  But there was nothing we could do.  So Arianna and I started to pack.  I’ll never forget the day we started packing.  Arianna and I got into an argument, a stupid fight over something completely meaningless, and she slapped me.  It was the first time my sister had ever hit me.  I don’t remember anything else about the actual move, just the shock of that slap.

      Life in the new house was not pleasant.  Tensions were high, and dad and Terry were living in their own little world.  I’d liked Terry rather well before the move, liked her quite a bit actually.  But after was another story entirely.  She’d stolen my daddy from me.  He didn’t play with me any more, we never did anything just the two of us.  His role now was “Husband”, and I resented her for it.  

      I tried to be a good daughter, I was always the consummate pleaser.  I’ve always been very sensitive, especially to the emotions of those around me.  I can’t stand to be around people who are upset, or unhappy.  It makes me downright miserable.  So I did my best to be happy and not cause problems.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure Terry really knew what to do with another woman’s kids.  My sister and I spent every other week at our mother’s house, which may sound more disruptive than it really was.  We’d gone back and forth between our parents like this for as long as I could remember, so to us it was normal.  Terry however, didn’t know how to deal with it.  

      She was always a rather high strung woman, and I think she rather expected mom to hate her.  As a result, she reacted very poorly to everything my mother did or said, regardless of how it may have been meant.  I remember one day, Terry went to my mom’s house, absolutely irate. I don’t know what started it, but she came to mom and accused my mother of interfering in her attempts to raise my sister and I.  Even then, as young as I was, I couldn’t believe this woman was saying these things to my mom!  Who did she think she was?! I don’t remember any of the conversation after that.  Mom probably sent me into the house, as she had always gone out of her way not to influence my feelings towards Terry.   I do remember Terry later telling my father that mom had “verbally attacked” her, when all Terry had done was go over to have a friendly conversation about us kids.  And so went the story of my dad’s new marriage.

      In her defense, I think Terry was simply very insecure in her new relationship.  Unfortunately for all involved, she dealt with it by attempting to poison my father against my mother, telling him that mom was trying to turn his daughters against him.  Even more unfortunate, my father seemed quite willing to believe her.  The friendship my parents had so carefully maintained crumbled as my father and his new wife built their new life together.  

      Times were tough for my sister and I, as we continued to live one week with our mom, the next with our dad.  Arianna coped by spending more and more time with friends, avoiding the house as much as possible.  I withdrew, slowly at first.  Whereas once I had been friends with nearly everyone I knew, I started hanging out with just a few close friends.  My school suffered, it was all I could do to make myself go.  As long as I was still in grade school, it wasn’t too bad.  All the teachers knew me, and liked me.  They suspected something was going on, and made concessions for me.  My sixth grade teacher even gave me a C on a project I didn’t complete, saying that she knew I would have gotten an A if I had done the work.  I think she hoped that if she was sympathetic and encouraging, it might help me pulls things together.

      Everything was a mess by the time I started junior high.  My sister had refused to spend any more time at my father’s house, and now lived full time with my mom.  Sara, now my stepsister, was no longer the best friend I loved hanging out with.  I think we both secretly blamed ourselves for everything that had gone wrong.  Add guilt to the mass of stress we were all living under, and it was hard to be anything but unhappy.

      On top of everything else that was wrong in my life, I was reaching an age of greater awareness.  My world was growing bigger, and I was starting to pay attention to the state of the world at large.  I blame my Social Studies class for part of this, as we had to do regular “Current Events” reports for homework.  Seriously though, it was a very sobering time for me.  Junior high was big; I’d gone from knowing almost everyone in my school to knowing hardly anyone.  I had six teachers instead of one, and none of them knew me.  I was just another face in the crowd.

      I became severely depressed.  I didn’t know how to deal with all the negativity that seemed to be inundating my life.  My home life was an emotional wreck, every time my parents talked my dad ended up pissed off and my mom ended up crying, school was an adolescent nightmare, and the world at large was a chaotic mess of pain and persecution.  It was all I could do just to get up in the morning.  I started avoiding school, at first claiming I didn’t feel well, and eventually simply refusing to go.

      My parents were of course quite upset.  They tried to figure out what was wrong.  My mom talked with my principle, who asked me why I didn’t like going to school.  I actually had no idea why I hated it so much, I didn’t really mind being there.  The only thing I could think of was that I didn’t like PE.  The principal was a wonderful guy, and he genuinely wanted to help.  He told us that the only way I could be excused from PE was with a doctor’s note.  But since I wasn’t physically incapable of participating, I would need to see a therapist.  He happened to know a lady, someone who would be willing to work with me, and in the meantime would write the obligatory note.  

      I didn’t really know what to think at first.  It’s funny, my only real memory of my first meeting with the therapist was the smell of her office.  Maybe it wasn’t her office, it might have been just the building, but there was this overwhelming smell of musty, moldy towels.  I hated that smell, and I hated having to go see her.  The only session I actually remember, she had asked my parents to join us.  It was maybe the fourth session I’d had with her, and she started it out by announcing to my parents that she had discovered why I was “acting out”.  Apparently, I secretly wanted my parents to get back together, and this was my way of expressing myself.  I didn’t say a word, but I remember thinking what an idiot this woman was.  Hadn’t I told her that every time my parents spoke to each other, my dad ended up yelling and my mom ended up crying?  Why the hell would I want to live under the same roof with that?!  Needless to say, I refused to ever see that therapist again.
      
      Perhaps that was the last straw for my father.  He still believed that my mother was trying to turn me against him, and I’m pretty sure he thought my sister had joined her.  He didn’t know what to do with me, and so finally, he gave up.  If there is one memory I will never forget, it’s the day he dropped me off at my mom’s.  I’d refused to get up for school again, and he told me to get dressed.  He promised he wasn’t going to make me go to school, that we were going to go for a drive.  We got in his truck, and drove down to the Adorni Center parking lot.  It’s where we always went to talk, just the two of us.  He sat and stared at the water for awhile, not saying anything.  Finally, he looked at me, and he said “Heidi, you just make me so angry, I can’t deal with you anymore.”  And he started the truck, and he drove me to mom’s, and he dropped me off.  That was the last time he spoke to me for a long time.

      And so started the darkest time in my life.  I was twelve years old, and the most important person in my life, the person I had always looked to for love, and support, and validation, had told me I wasn’t good enough.  That I was such a hard person to deal with that he just couldn’t love me anymore.  

      Thank the gods for my mother.  Though far from perfect, she did her absolute best by me.  It couldn’t have been easy for her.  She was a single mom, overworked and underpaid.  My sister was just hitting her stride as a rebellious teenager, and I was so depressed I must have scared her witless some days.  She wanted so desperately to be able to help me, she tried so hard.  But how could she help me when she didn’t know what was wrong?  I remember the worst thing about that time was being asked, “what’s wrong, why are you so depressed?”  The horrible thing was, I didn’t know!  I got so sick of being asked what was wrong, what could they do to make it better?  I wanted to scream at them “If I knew how to make it better, I would!”  But I couldn’t scream.  I could hardly talk.  By then, I’d learned that talking didn’t help, it didn’t make anything better.  With my dad, it had just made things worse.

      So I withdrew into myself.  Mom pulled me out of school, tried to put me into home study.  It worked at first, but in seventh grade I was assigned a new teacher, and I couldn’t stand her.  So mom signed me up for parent tutoring.  Unfortunately, mom really didn’t have time to teach me, she was so busy working.  But she got me workbooks from Moon’s Play’n’Learn, and set up lesson plans for me.  Of course, being the stubborn kid I was, I pretty much ignored the lesson plans.
From the age of twelve to about the age of fifteen, I lived my life in books and in my head.  I spent so much time at the local library, the librarians knew my name.  I perfected the art of packing books in my backpack, so that I could carry home as many at one time as possible.  I loved to read, I devoured my books.  The worlds I read about became my world, the characters the only friends I had.  It was wonderful.  

      Of course, withdrawing into the world of fiction may have given me an escape, but it didn’t really solve my problems.  I was still horribly depressed, more so than ever.  It wasn’t uncommon for me to cry myself to sleep, and my nightly prayer, more often than not, was simply “please, let me just fall asleep and never wake up.”  
I remember my mom trying to help, and others as well, though I can’t remember whom.  People would tell me things like “you’re aren’t the only one that feels like this”.  I’m pretty sure they were trying to help, to let me know that I wasn’t alone.  It just made me feel worse.  After all, if I was the only one that thought life sucked too much to be worth living, than maybe that would mean I was wrong.  And I could live with being wrong.  Being wrong would mean that life wasn’t really so bad, and that I just needed to realize how silly I was being and everything would be ok.  

      But if other people felt like this… that meant maybe I was right.  Maybe life really was a miserable pile of crud that just got worse the older you were.  Maybe there really wasn’t any point to going on living.
In a way, I’m actually rather grateful that my mom was so busy, that it was such a struggle for her to keep everything together.  Knowing how hard her life already was kept me alive.  Knowing how much worse things would be for her kept me from killing myself.  

      Having the space, and the freedom, of being left alone so much also gave me the opportunity to figure things out.  Although I could never really talk to anyone about what was wrong, I thought about it constantly.  I hated being asked why I was so upset, because I didn’t know!  But realizing I didn’t know motivated me to try to figure it out.  Being in the throes of hormonal teenage angst probably helped.  It was very gratifying at the time, wallowing in my misery and pain.  Having suffered so greatly validated my self-pity, allowed me to justify a sense of having been victimized, and to nurture an unhappy bitterness towards life.

      Except, the more time I spent looking into myself, the more difficult it became to sustain that bitterness.  The angrier I became with my father, the more of him I recognized inside myself.  At first, I was terrified that it meant I would end up just like him.  Soon I realized that recognizing those traits within myself, I could work to change them.  By knowing where my “flaws” originated, I could watch for them, and when they reared their ugly heads, I could see them for what they were and consciously choose not to give in to what they urged.  

      For all that my years of depression were dark and painful, I would not give them back for anything.  Hitting rock bottom forced me to look deep into myself, to find some way to live in this world, even though I was right and it really does suck!  I learned a great deal about myself, about my flaws and imperfections.  I learned to live with the things that have been done to me, and how to be conscientious of the things that I do to others.  I learned to look beyond the actions, and to consider the motivations, to forgive others for their flaws in the hope that they will forgive me mine.

      I’m still learning how to make the world a less rotten place to live.  It’s a slow process, but I am making progress.  Life gets better, and it really is what you make of it. As odd as it may sound, spending all those years depressed, and wanting to die, gave me the tools to make life worth living.