A Sister Divided
By: Merrilee Thomas
Tags: Mental Illness, Attachment, Sisters, Attachment Disorder, Love

June 8, 2020

Dear Sister,

As I do from time to time, I recently reached out to you asking how you were. You replied in your normal angry and exceptionally mean and delusional way. You tell me that I am not your sister. That you do not love me. That you have been alone your whole life. That I was never there for you.

And it hurts, and for a moment, I wonder if I am not your sister, if I was not there for you? If I should have tried harder to be a better sister?

The honest answer to this is that I think all of us can always try harder, including you, dear sister. However, I also hope that we all are (humanity as a whole) trying to do the best we can. And unfortunately, the best is not always good enough.

Doctors always told me to remember that it was not my fault. That you had been through so much and that you couldn’t be held accountable for your actions. That was ingrained in me from day one. So instead, I turned the blame on the people who made you the way you were. I am angry with your birth mom because she took drugs while you were inside her and did not care about the damage she was doing to your developing mind and body. Hate is maybe not strong enough a word for those people who abused you and left you in a dumpster before the cops found you. Those awful people who adopted you, who tore you apart and destroyed those very fragile first years of your life. I hate your social worker who did not check up on you often enough when maybe she could have saved you sooner. All this, before we could adopt you and call you ours. Then as I grew up with you, I turned the blame on myself. I was too young to understand, but I blamed myself when you didn’t get better. I blamed myself for your mental illness and anger and rage. I have had many years now to let go of all that trauma, and yet, here I am, silently crying while I write this letter to you.

Shaya, you say that I am not your sister and that I do not love you. Oh, dear sister, how very, very wrong you are. I love you so much that it tears me apart when you say that you are not mine. I know that I knew once, the true you, the girl who would have been. If life had given you a chance, the life that you should have lived. But life wasn’t fair to you; it stripped that chance from you before you were five.

Do you remember when you were five, and I was six? And I came with our then foster parents to get you from the Denver children’s hospital? Do you remember how excited I was to have a new sister? I remember! I remember trying so hard to make you happy, play dolls with you, play outside, and make up games. I did this even though I knew, in the end, you would end up yelling at me, or screaming, or chase me with knives. Do you remember how I tried to protect you from the kids at school who would bully you? In the end, I got the brunt of their words.

Do you remember all the times you stole my things, sometimes my most prized possessions, and you would destroy them? You would cut up my clothes, and cover my barbies with some kind of weird slime, and cut off their hair. You would steal my figurine horses and jewelry. You used up all my makeup or scratched my CDs to the point that they were unlistenable. Many times, I would never see them again; my things would just disappear forever. Yet dad favored you! He bought you everything you wanted. If you broke a walkman, he would only buy you another. In the space of my single walkman, you had nine! And every single time, I forgave you. I forgave you because I loved you, and I believed that the real you wouldn’t do that. That it wasn’t your fault.

You embarrassed me in front of my friends, in front of my teachers, our neighbors, and strangers. You would have these insane freakouts that were terrifying, and I would have to call our older siblings, or the neighbors, and sometimes the cops. I would beg mom to let me call them even though I knew she didn’t want to be a burden on them because we already were probably asking for help too often. It had to get really, really bad before she would say OK, call them. Our mom was so strong for how often she took the brunt of your anger. Sometimes, I would come home from school, and you would be rolled up in a rug to protect you from hurting yourself or others.

Do you remember when we had to hide the knives from you? Do you remember when you would bite me and hold on as if you were a rabid dog? I remember. I remember one time you chased me with a knife, and I barely escaped as I slammed the door in your face. And I had to sit in that bathroom wondering if you were going to hurt mom and dad. I knew if you weren’t coming at me, your anger would then turn on them. I felt so guilty about hiding there because I wanted to come out and protect them, but I was so young and so scared. I remember listening to you screaming at them, and then I became terrified as it grew silent because I wasn’t sure if you had killed them. As I got older, I would get in between you and mom and take the brunt of your rage because mom was tiny, and I was bigger than her. Sometimes you would have this maniacal laugh that was too high-pitched and crazy that I knew an “episode” was about to proceed. It was almost like a canary in a coal mine. To this day, that laugh sends chills down my spine. I forgave you for all of that because I loved you. I believed, one day, you would get better.

We fought a lot about you lying, about you stealing my things, about you hurting our parents. Every time you told me hateful and mean things. Yet, I would forgive you. But it took everything from me. As I got older, I started to figure out how not to take the bait and not get aroused by your insidious language. Even today, I still trip up and get too aroused by your mean words. It’s hard to always smile and say I love you to someone who is literally spitting in my face.

I tried so hard, for so long, to save you. Even when the best psychiatrists, therapists, and group homes in multiple states said they could no longer help you. That there was nothing else that they could do. Even after the rest of our siblings had all but abandoned hope on you, I still believed in you. I blindly thought that one day you would be my sister. That you would love me back the way I have always loved you. I believed deep down that the real you loved me back. I was told that you were unable to attach to people and that you would do things to push them away so that you were abandoning them first, not the other way around. But I didn’t want to abandon you.

I believed that trying to keep the door open to you, even though I knew I would be the brunt of all your insane anger, was worth it in exchange for you knowing that I hadn’t given up on you. But recently, I’ve been thinking and feeling that I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been thinking, and I cannot keep my heart open any longer. I cannot keep allowing my heart to be bulldozed by someone who has no respect for me. I have thick skin, but I am tired of sewing up old wounds.

I am not giving up on you, but I will not allow you to say mean things to me anymore. So I will not put myself out there for you to just smash into a million pieces. I will not reach out anymore. I am here for you if you ever decide you want a relationship, but I can’t keep allowing myself to be verbally beaten. It is not fair to myself and my emotional and mental health.

I know the real you, though, the true you when anger and disillusionment doesn’t cloud everything. I know the brilliantly artistic and emotional you. I know someone who is physically talented and could outrun me in a sprint any day. I know the real laugh in you, the one that accompanies a glowing smile and eyes — the girl who used to laugh with me about TV shows and stupid jokes. I remember a girl who used to rewatch silly moments on DVD repeatedly as we fell to the ground giggling to movies such as Big Fat Liar and The Princess Bride. We could quote the movie word for word. I remember a girl who got to eat all the sugar in the world and never gain a pound or get a single cavity! I know a girl whose voice is incredible and should be famous for it! I remember a girl who would play at the pool with me for hours or explore the creek with me. I remember a girl who was sorry when she hurt me or stole my stuff. I know a girl who has such a fantastic fashion sense and beautiful hair. I pale in comparison to you!

This story isn’t complete if I don’t acknowledge that I had bad years too. My teen years were hard. I was struggling with my own problems and mental health. I had to get clean and sober and try really hard at school. I was just trying to survive back then. And honestly, I was exhausted. I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep living during those years, but I made it through, and when I did, I came back to you! It wasn’t just you I abandoned during my teen years, it was everyone, including myself. I count myself lucky to have made it through.

I want you to know that even now, despite everything and in many ways, I have dedicated my life to you. I have devoted my life to science with the end goal of curing mental illness. Not with the delusion that I will be able to heal you, but hoping that I will bring the world a better understanding of mental illness. With a hope that I will move the world forward, even just a little bit, towards finding a cure for mental health. Every day that I wake up to a failed experiment, every time science gets hard, I think of you and keep going. I think of you when I get out of bed too early to start experiments. I think of you when thoughts cloud my mind, such as, “I cannot do this, I am not smart enough, I can’t be a neuroscientist. ” I think of you, and I instead ask, “if not me, then who? I must do.”

I love you babe,

Your Sister