This Will Only Hurt a Little(10)

I didn’t understand my sister. I didn’t know why she hated me so much. I know now that she didn’t. But that’s what it felt like for so much of our childhood. When she was mean, she was so mean. There were times when she was beyond scary, like when she got mad at me for some reason and flipped over everything in my bedroom. Or when she threw me into a giant potted cactus and I cut my leg so badly, I still have a scar running lengthwise down my shin. I remember my dad telling me to hide in their walk-in closet while they tried to calm her down. Our fights were almost always insanely physical, which was unfair given our age difference and hence our obvious size difference.

But it wasn’t always like that. Leigh Ann was also incredibly creative and smart and funny and weird and occasionally sweet to me as a kid. And that was part of what was so confusing for me, especially since I was so much younger than her. She managed to fashion a pulley system between the shared air vents in our bedrooms so that we could pass notes back and forth to each other. She would always cast me in her video projects for her high school religion class and would laugh so hard at my Jim Bakker–like evangelical pastor impression. She was sweet to me when the girls in fifth grade were mean. She came to all of my plays.

I remember as a kid thinking she was an anomaly in our family, not yet recognizing my father’s deep depression and occasional rage. Not yet understanding that not all mothers break down in tears telling stories. Not yet knowing that shaking my head to feel my hair hit the sides of my face over and over again until I got called to the teacher’s desk, or ripping out my hair at the roots in a little patch on the top of my head wasn’t exactly a “normal” thing for an eight-year-old to do.

I feel like my parents knew they should try to instill self-confidence in us, but at the same time, they still thought that spanking, or even a hard smack across the face, was acceptable. We were all on vacation recently (a Disney cruise, if you must know), and one day at lunch, all the kids were kind of cranky.

“You girls are lucky it’s not like when Busy and Leigh Ann grew up,” my mom said. “You’d get smacked right across those mouths!”

And then she proceeded to tell everyone about the time she hit me while she was driving because I had talked back, and my gums got caught on my braces and my mouth started to bleed.

“And I just felt terrible!” she said, shaking her head. “Can you imagine!? Your mouth full of blood?!”

My husband’s and daughters’ mouths dropped open. They couldn’t imagine. But of course I could.

For years, my own narrative of my childhood was that my sister was the one with the “problem” and we were all just swirling around her, trying to stay above water. Yet I’ve had anxiety for as long as I can remember. I would lie in bed at night as a kid and imagine the worst possible scenarios: my entire family being murdered, house fires, plane crashes, car crashes, my parents dying, my sister dying, my best friends dying, myself dying. I would become paralyzed with fear and unable to even go to my parents’ room. Instead, I would just lie in bed, tears streaming down my cheeks until I finally exhausted myself enough to fall asleep, despite my worst fears. And what’s so strange is that I don’t think I ever really told my parents about this. Part of the reason may have been that Leigh Ann took up so much of the emotional space in our family. And another reason is, I think I just thought it was normal. Like probably no one likes bedtime and most likely everyone thinks horrible morbid thoughts before falling asleep.

I went through a period of time recently where I would become convinced right before sleep that my heart had actually stopped beating and I was seconds away from death. I would patiently wait for hours thinking that death was imminent, while my husband slept soundly next to me. I’ve always had issues falling asleep. But I’m also afraid of dying from sleeping pills, so I would never take anything to alleviate my fears or help me. I recently started using medical CBD and THC (pot, y’all) to help with my sleep anxiety, and it’s legitimately the only thing that has ever helped and not made me feel like it would also kill me.

So, what I guess I’m getting at is that maybe my anxiety had to do with my volatile family. Or maybe I was just born with it. I used to think it was the former, before I had kids of my own. But now I’m not so sure. I see my daughter Birdie and her horrible sleep anxiety, which so closely mirrors my own, and I have no idea where it could have possibly come from for her. I think it must just be something she was born with. Or I somehow fucked her up when she was a baby. Either/or. Or maybe both.

My mom has one sister, who’s quite a bit younger than she is, about six years. To say their relationship has always been strained is an understatement. My mom and her sister have never gotten along, as far as I can tell. The comparisons between my sister and me and my mom and her own sister started as soon as I was born. Leigh Ann looks exactly like my mom and was always a little on the chubbier side. And like my aunt, I was tiny and blond and blue-eyed. There was a feeling, especially from my mom’s side of the family, that I was the cute one and Leigh Ann was the smart one. At my baby shower for Birdie, my mom actually said out loud, “Well, I know we’re all hoping the baby gets Busy’s looks and Marc’s wit and intellect!”

She somehow managed to insult both me and Marc at the same time. No easy feat. But of course, when I expressed that maybe that was hurtful, she just laughed and said, “Oh, Biz! You know I’m just kidding! Everyone knows how smart you are!”