TheBanyanTree: A Friday Story

[Monique Colver]

I love Fridays. I’m not sure why, since I often end them by saying to self,
“Self, you didn’t get enough done, and now you’re going to have to work
tomorrow!”


I don’t always work tomorrow when I say I will, but I’ve had some health
issues that have been annoying me and I use them as an excuse. I’m all
about using excuses to get out of work.


I’m also all about calling myself lazy when I’m not, but that goes back to
some of the early lies, the ones where I was told I was lazy and sneaky and
a bitch. Those lies lodged in my brain in a back corner where it’s really
dusty and the inventory has never been inventoried, so not only is there no
telling what all is back there, it’s also hard to get what is in there out
again.


For my accounting friends, it’s all LIFO in there. Last in, first out, as
opposed to first in, first out. There’s so much last in to get out first
that I never get back to the first in, so it molders back there, huge
steaming piles of shit that aren’t reflective of who I am.


Does anyone else have this problem? Does anyone else keep the remnants of
the early lies lodged in their brain?


This hasn’t been a story yet.


Once, when I was young and believed what people said to me and my father
and stepmother were still getting accustomed to having all their children
living together, my stepmother started yelling at me for being sneaky and
lying and a bitch. I was, what 11? 12? One of those ages where one can be
really sneaky and evil. I hadn’t meant to be sneaky, or lying, or anything
else. I was just trying to survive day-to-day, but I wasn’t the most
intuitive kid, and I didn’t know that stepmom and dad weren’t talking . . .
to each other. Oh, they were talking, but not to each other, and that
little detail went right over my head.


So when I told my dad when my grandparents were coming to pick me up, I
thought I was telling both of them, as if he would let her know.


A day or so later stepmom asked if there had been any changes in the plans,
and I, being the oblivious one, said no.


Except she didn’t know about the original plans.


I may have this whole story wrong. It’s hard to tell after a few years.


But stepmom lost it, and because I was such a sneaky lying bitch, my dad
was blamed for having brought me up to be such a heathen. As if he could
help my secretive bitchy psyche! There was screaming and yelling and
general mayhem. There may have been furniture flying, I don’t know.


Here’s the awesome part of the story: my older half-sister and my older
step-sister, who was halfway between my half-sister and me in age, decided
this wasn’t working for us, and the two of them took me away from the
madhouse for the day. My oldest sister could drive, being a grown up and
all, and so we left the parents to their madness. I wasn’t used to being
taken with them – they were older and cool, and I was the youngest girl
(but not the youngest child – there were boys of varying ages around, but
they had their own private hangout back behind the garage), and I had been
a disappointment to my stepsister when she found out I was 4 years younger
and boring. But they looked after me.


What I should remember from that time is that my sisters cared enough about
me to take me out of there, and that at a particularly low point they were
looking after me. I shouldn’t even remember being called a sneaky lying
bitch because that wasn’t the important part, was it? That was the part
that should have faded away as soon as stepmom said it, but it wasn’t the
first time, nor the last, so the repetition of it made it stick. That’s how
I learned accounting – repetition.


I chip away at it. Sometimes I get back in there where it’s all dusty and
it makes me sneeze, and I pull at a piece of nonsense, like the piece that
says I’m stupid, and I tug at it, and sometimes I fall on my ass trying to
get it out of there. Afterwards, as I stumble back toward the light, I may
feel lighter, if I got any of it out, or I don’t, because the piece was
tougher than I was, and I may wonder why bother? Why not just let those
pieces stay there? Maybe they’re a permanent part of me because maybe
they’re true.


But I go back in anyway. I’m just as stubborn as I am bitchy, and I don’t
want those pieces to be part of me, as charming as living the past sounds.
It’s just not for me.

*M*