Pain and suffering
knew the softball was a distraction of having to deal with me and they thought it would make me and Dana get along if we had to play on a team together. But it did the opposite Dana would scream and demand I was embarrassing her as I started off as a catcher as she was a pitcher . I caught her balls and played well until she started yelling at the mound and I hit her with the ball or would refuse to catch for her if she persisted to try to hurt me on purpose. Then I was moved to the outfield . Then the coach realized he had two pitchers as I also saw how Dana did things and could mimic it. I had always had an act of watching someone one time and be able to do it on my own a few days later.I didn't need much instructions to mimic what I saw . Me and Dana fought like cats and dogs and my mother and David dried another approach which if you ask me was absolutely the worst idea for a thirteen and fourteen year old child. Dana was boy crazy and had tried double dating with Paula and was yanked half way across the yard out of the backseat of a boys car. Paula was faster than Dana and them two together were playing catch up with each other's slutty behavior. Melina on the other hand the idea of human interaction with another human being and one of the opposite sex was absolutely torture. No girl should be dating at thirteen or fourteen that is just children trying to be grown. It was stupid to say. We were too young to know how to properly clean ourselves little less be dateable material. In my personal opinion thirteen year olds were just now growing tits and pubic hair so dating boys was the furthest from my mind, but my mother being my mother as she forced me to involuntarly join softball she also made it where if I didn't date Dana wasn't allowed to date either. Which put a huge target on my back for my sisters ire for her need to be a teenage slut. My sister Dana started introducing me to her older guy friends who were in college where she would sneak off to parties with my sister that had no business hanging out with thirteen year old girls at all. But I suppose being a lose moral girl had no age limit.The year prior when my sister Mia was sixteen she lived in a house with four guy roommates. Yes you heard me men as roommate in a house of one female. Paula was fifteen and had moved in with her live in boyfriend after my mom told her if she didn't like her rules then to leave . So Paula booed up with a man none to say of nineteen. Paula had lived with mia for a few months where she got a cat named nico an orange tabby with psychologic issues. When I first came home from the system my sister Jamie was engaged to her first husband at age nineteen. She had dated another guy prior . Do you know that person who couldn't stand to be alone and always had a break just in case of emergencies relationships. Jamie was this type of person. You never saw her alone and when she was ready to end it she would have a guy in place to slide into another relationship. Jamie got married to a man at nineteen and made her way to spending time with me often. One weekend she gets a brilliant idea she wanted to take me shopping which was coincidentally the same weekend her husband left for basic training in North Carolina. At the time she lived with her husbands mom as this dude was a real mental case. What Jamie didn't tell my mother was we weren't going shopping locally but on the military base in North Carolina. Her reasoning was because it had no taxes on base. So at fourteen she basically kidnapped me mid school year and went on a rode trip.At the time my sisters newest trick was making me get addicted to cigarettes because I had a job if I got addicted to cigarettes then I would always buy them and she could borrow them off of me without having to pay. I would have to admit it was a brilliant plan except for three days while we went on our rode trip she didn't anticipate me not even wanting to smoke at all. Not only that she kidnaps me while I during my menstruation. So imagine a cranky hormonal teenager being tricked into going across state lines and smoking cigarettes influenced by her oldest sister while driving to see her husband who only left three days ago for basic training. This all loops around to the her not being able to be left alone issues deep down inside of her .We get to North Carolina and are two miles from the military base as my sisters car nose dives on the road and breaks the Axel of her car. So now we are stranded here in North Carolina. Instead of calling off the entire trip and go home she decided to call a recker and wait by the car while sending me with her military identification to get in the military base to search and find a man I had briefly met once when I had first came home. She told me to tell the guards my name was Jamie because in actually me and Jamie didn't look a damn thing alike and I was fourteen not twenty years old and married. The front gate was empty so I walked right in as I walked around to realize it was a massive university looking base with building and things looking like a training center . I saw people running in sweats as I knew right then I stood out like an outsider in my civilian clothes on .was not supposed to be here none of us were. I immediately went back to tell my sister what I saw and instead of abandoning her mission she wanted to me to show her what I saw.So here we are both walking around a military base and it wasn't to far in when we found her husband running with a female trainer. At the time I thought it was odd he was training with a female recruit as Jamie went up to see him like a love sick girl. Her husband's face explained it all as he was not happy she was there when he was in basic training. We walked back to the car as she was brimming tears as the tow truck took us to a local mechanic shop that cost us seventy dollars . Then we went to check into a hotel . We were stuck hee until the car was fixed. It came out to nine hundred dollars in repairs and of course Jamie didn't have that money and she refused to leave the car there and abandon her mission.Jamie was always a social butterfly and a gypsy at heart. She always did things on a whim with no plans behind them . She was a we will see what happens sort of person and right here right now was one of those moments.Jamie knew she didn't have the money to pay for the repairs and her husband got paid once a month . Her plan was to stay in the hotel until he could wire her the money for the car as she really didn't realize I had school that Monday and she made a call from her cell phone as she coached me to tell my mom we were having so much fun shopping and would be home later on. Jamie smiled on the other side of the phone as I lied to my mother knowing I would be punished not her for what she did. Jamie looked at me for money as I knew she would do this as we moved from a good hotel to a shab motel in a matter of days as I suspected she didn't have money and was almost out. She kept asking me to get cigarettes with a promise of sharing a pack as she chain smoked . When I refused because I had had enough smoking cigarettes as it never took she looked like I just betrayed her. In my thoughts buying cigarettes were the last thing on my mind. A week passed and I urged her to call our mother and tell her the truth because she wasn't the one who had to live with her . Jamie stalled as my mother started getting calls from the school as I had been gone almost two weeks. Jamie tried to lie and said she forgot about i was in school as I grabbed the phone to rectify the situation as she didn't realize how cruel our mother was and who was going to pay in the end.Jamie was married and got to go home to her husband . I had to be home with the monster I called a mother. My mom was upset with me of course and went and took a payday loan for a Greyhound bus back to Alabama. Jamie treated our ride on the bus as an opportunity to socialize me to random strangers as I knew this was a mistake because two young women traveling alone in a bus isn't the smartest idea to make friends. When I got off the bus my mother didn't even look at me but at Jamie as she knew I had no choice what Jamie did. This would be a dilemma Jamie often did though out our life time. I didn't get punished that time for Jamie's grand idea but I was never allowed to go with Jamie ever again. Melina had to get a special request that excused her two weeks of missed school as a emergency to prevent her mother from getting truency . Her mother blamed Jamie for dragging her little sister into her shenanigans and it was that moment when Melina realized the relationship between her mother and Jamie was a bit more broken then her relationship with her . Her mother had been cruel and disconnected her entire life. The only sympathy she ever experience from her mother was when she would pull at the strands of her hair when she slept in her lap when she was a small child but it was fleeting. It occured to her her mother only knew her as the child frozen at age five and didn't really know her at all. She still bought her dollar tree water paints for her birthday's and the color green in her personalization of items as my favorite color really stayed the same. When I was a small child my mother made matching dresses for all us girls to wear and mine was always green. Jamie wore pink , mia peach because she wanted pink and pink was Jamie's color and they had to be neutral to color preference so mia ended up with peach color and Paula wore purple . I remember most of my childhood pictures were me in a green matching outfits with my sisters with mounds of ruffles and fabric with poofy sleeves and the god awful church hats with color coated ribbons. I had always hated wearing those hats . I suppose Jamie and my mother's relationship was due to Jamie becoming a whistle blower to her step-fathers abuse. This set forth the catalyst to the downfall of my mother's happiness. Many rumors swirled between the couple many years later of her cheating on him constantly and we all knew he cheated on her as having a home phone was also a tragedy. A trigger if Iay say. I remembered when we were allowed to have a phone in the house because my father's mistress would call the house from time to time and we were not allowed to answer the phone. One day I did answer it . It was late and my parents were at the table arguing about something that happened and the phone rang. Usually my grandparents on my father's side called at night and they were busy and I answered it. When I told him who was on the phone my mother exploded because it was one of his girlfriends calling. He answered btue phone and ended it quickly as I watched him then he paused and yanked the chord from the wall as he hit me with the receiver and told me to never answer a phone call ever again without permission. I didn't understand what I had did wrong but I knew it had to do with something that happened earlier that week. My mom had taken off a day of work to surprise my father with lunch at his workplace because he had held this job for five months. Most employees are their lunch in their cars or was allowed to go to the parking lot for lunch. My mother gathered us all up one day to go see him at his job as she drove in the parking lot and she drove by to see him sitting on the hood of his car already eating lunch with a blonde hair woman he met at his job. They were kissing and talking when we drove up and my mom lost it and it was a big fight . Eventually we went back home and she had thought the affair had ended but that night she knew he continued on with that affair the entire time. He later on married the mystery blonde as his second wife after he got out of prison. My mother was like a horse with blinders on with certain things. She saw what she wanted to see and was blocked to what she didn't want to know . You could say my parents relationship was toxic and a two way cheating progress . Jokes were made I wasn't even his child as many years later he would swear up and down she cheated on him all the time. But as they say cheaters never prosper and the guilty shall always deflect their own guilt. I saw with my own eyes my father infidelity and in return he swore she was the same as him. Regardless of who cheated on whom you could say neither of them had any business being in a relationship if both were aiming to hurt each other . When he abused us her blinders made her refuse to believe everything that happened to us was credible. She took her husband's side and gave us up to be with him. To me that doesn't sound like a unfaithful wife running around and cheating on the man she protected over her own children. The patterns of the hearsay stories didn't added up when it was given air to breathe. When I saw how differently she treated Jamie compared to her husband's children I did remember the nights Jamie didn't eat so we could eat . I did remember the nights where she would be so hungry that she stabbed my hand for reaching on her plate for food because she hadn't eaten for days. Now I thought about it Jamie was always treated less than us . Our condition of living were the same ,but the difference was made apparent. Which explained the rivalry between Jamie and Mia was. Mia was told she was the first born of the McNally girls and Jamie was the first born of my mother's children. The rivalry was preset to make them in competition to their role in the family. Instead of recognizing Jamie as a full sister she was treated like she was a stranger in the home she had always known. My mother was cruel and disconnected to the people who need her the most and now I am fourteen I saw her for the person she was. Yes she had the right to be mad for taking me over state lines without permission but how much let me rephrase how many times must she punish Jamie for not being his child? It was not Jamie's fault who her parents was or the fact her mother was a weedo who decided to sleep with her best friends brother in the gully behind her parents house thus making her a teenage mother. None of Jamie's existence was her fault she was not that mans child. But I suppose looking in from the side of a sister verses a mothers point of view clouded both of our assessments in this situation. Had my mother been a better mother and chose her children and not her husband we would have came back with bare minimum trauma growing up and had some sense of normality. Jamie was adopted out . She didn't have to come back and be a part of our lives anymore but she did, because her love for her sisters even though she felt unwanted outweighed her fear of her own mother's rejection. Now let's get back to the present where I was forced to date because my thirteen year old step sister Dana wanted to be a fast girl introduced me to a boy that was nineteen at the time named sharpie . Yes sharpie like the marker. When my sister Jamie was down here visiting Mia since her and her first husband divorced soon after that runaway incident to North Carolina. Jamie was on husband number two who she married after three months of knowing him and she left him and took his car. Jamie was never one to stay still long enough to be in relationships. Her and her current husband was seperated and she was leaving him after six months of marriage. And she had a brief sexual encounter with who other than the blind date of the evening Mr. Sharpie . Although my sister all knew this they were all still wanting me to date a man not only five years older than me as I was a minor and he was nineteen but someone every one around me knew had slept with my sister Jamie on her running away from husband number two. My step- sister Dana was so intent on getting her way she set me up with my sisters EX-lover. This would be a constant when dating was forced upon me . Most girls dated on their own volition but not me I was forced to date to keep my sisters entertained . This was one of the examples where her mother didn't make sound decisions. Melina was forced to go out with Dana and her sisters one night stand she had in one of her moments. Dana decided that disco bowling was a thing they could do. Dana was always showing off her athletic side as she was using this as a chance to be competitive but as there was supposed to have been two dates and Sharpie was meant to be mine her date bailed on the last moment. So it was me, him and Dana. A season before Dana and my mom joined a bowling league together with another failed attempt to do mother and daughter things with her new daughter. I just came for the food. I read a book and sat in the food court as I ate my food. Dana and my mother would fuss at each other for Dana wearing acrylics to bowl with and Dana using bandaids to prevent them from breaking. When Dana got into boys the frequency of her wanting to family bowling night was slim.
That's where Melina was forced to take her spot to fill the slot required for an equal team. Melina wasn't bad at bowling she was actually a natural ,but she didn't want to bowl because food was calling and she just ordered food. This was also around the time where Melina was experiencing some really bad cramps where her cycle hurt to much to move and her friend Jessie told her her mom put her on birth control to even out her periods as Melina was having a period every ten days now . She knew it was because of her damaged ovaries but she had a week when they were so bad she could barely move.