The Truth About Meri

[Juder]

The Truth About Meri

Chapter One

My early childhood is something that, like most people, I can only remember in small bits and pieces. Now as a young adult, I often find myself straining to revisit my past, always with the uncomfortable itch one gets when they visit someplace foreign. Still, as I stare hazily at my bedroom ceiling, trying to tape back together my childish whims and experiences, I am left with only a fragment of what was, like a puzzle of which I am missing most of the pieces.

Perhaps the piece of the puzzle I remember best was the year I was four. At the time, I lived at a small motel in Milledgeville with my father, where he also worked. Where my mother was then, I don’t remember; all I know is that she wasn’t there. I can’t remember ever missing her. I guess I just accepted things the way they were, like most children do, without concerning myself with them at all.

Life at the motel was simple. Sundays I went to church, and the rest of the time I either entertained myself by chasing some poor, small creature outside or playing with the motel owner’s daughters (Destiny, who was five years older than me, and Amber, who was my age.) Most often, however, I was at the pool.

The pool was, by far, what my childhood self loved the most about the motel. I never swimmed in it—it was never clean—but I was astonished by the frogs. Yes, the frogs! In the summertime, the pool was always filled with thousands of tiny frogs, at least until the turtles came and ate them all. I would spend countless hours at the edge of the water, gawking at them and grabbing at them with my small little fingers, only to have them slip away from my grasp. And finally, when I became frustrated with my lack of success, I would go get my net and rush back to the poolside, scooping up dozens of frogs at a time to keep as pets. My father didn’t approve, of course, and would march me back to the pool so I could return them.

Life went on in that carefree manner until the hot summer day the motel was torn down. I remember my dad taking me to a picnic table outside as the demolition started. Someone had taken it upon themselves to bring a watermelon and cut it open. The motel owner, my dad, Destiny, Amber, and I munched on it as we watched the machines do their work.

“What are they doing to our house?” I remember asking uncomfortably as the machines picked apart our roof.

“They’re tearing it down,” my dad answered, holding tightly onto my arm as I twisted and squirmed, trying to go back to the motel. Soon after that, we all left. I can’t remember where my dad and I went next—I think we went to stay with my aunt, who also lived in Milledgeville—but my last memory of being four is our Mercedes rolling slowly down the motel’s rocky driveway.

Looking back, I know why those days seemed so different, why the motel’s driveway feels as alien as the streets of Germany or France. Back then, I was happy. Purely, completely, one hundred percent happy.

[Juder]

The Truth About Meri

Chapter Two

There are plenty of things I remember fondly about my mother. She was a gorgeous middle-aged latina woman with thick, wavy, dark-brown hair, clear, smooth, tanned skin, and deep hazel eyes. She was gifted with an incredible artistic talent and a lovely soprano singing voice. She was an amazing cook—even now, the thought of my mother’s lasagna makes my mouth water—and she was highly intelligent. As a young child, she seemed like a goddess to me, a perfect being incapable of doing wrong.

I can’t pinpoint exactly how or when she came back into my life, but I seem to recall that it was shortly after my father and I moved out of the motel. I was five, and about to start kindergarten. I stayed with my father on the weekends, but on Mondays he would wake me up early and haul my tired, cranky self to my mother’s apartment in Macon. As soon as my dad left, my mother took me upstairs—we lived on the top floor, in the third and final apartment complex in our building—and try to coax her bleary eyed, very uncooperative child out of her pajamas and into her school clothes. Though I was dead set on wearing my night clothes to school, eventually she would succeed in getting me into my uniform, and I would sit grumpily in front of the television until the time came for me to go to school, watching cartoons and making faces at my cereal as if the milk were sour.

School wasn’t the only big change for me. I was no longer the only child. While I was my father’s only daughter, my mother had two older children: my sixteen-year-old brother, Constantine, and my eleven-year-old sister, Ciara. The apartment was small, so my half-siblings and I shared a room, while my mother had the room across the hall to herself. Constantine would be the one to get us up in the morning, and upon my refusal to wake up, would toss my shoes across the room so that I had to crawl out of bed and fetch them. And in that didn’t work, he would jump into bed with me and shake me ‘til I got up, pouting, and reluctantly got dressed for school.

I know now that he was more of a parent to me and my sister than our mother ever was.

Despite our mother’s exquisite beauty and many talents, parenting was a skill that she had never managed to master. She had manic depression—a mood disorder that she refused to take medicine for—and was also an alcoholic, a combination that did not bode well for her three children. Every once in a while, she would hit her manic phase—it was times like that when she would enthusiastically drag me to the mall or the park—but more often than not, she was in an almost perpetually foul mood.

If I were lucky, on one of her bad days, she would lock herself into her room for most of the day and stay there, silent. My brother and sister told me that on these days it was best to leave her be. Occasionally, however, I would find myself thirsting for her attention and knock on the door anyways, ignoring my siblings’ warnings. Mother, instead of getting out of bed, would simply shout at me through the door to leave. When I finally realized that no amount of persuasion would coax her out of her chambers, I would slink away, disappointed.

But there were also times when, like a demon possessed, she would come out of her room and insist on taking her frustrations out on us, namely my brother and sister. The combination of alcohol and her mental illness often led her to violence (she threw things frequently: cups, trash can lids, even an ironing board once), giving her an irrational temper that was not easily assuaged. Most often, it was Constantine who bore the full extent of her wrath, calmly taking the hits and trying, in vain, to reason with her. Ciara’s job, on the other hand, was to keep me out of harm’s way. When I would try to throw myself in the middle of the conflict, screaming “stop! Stop!” she would be the one to grab me by the arm and take me down the hall, warning me that intervening would only make things worse. Eventually, I learned to stay hidden underneath the covers in the mornings, when the screaming interrupted my sleep, and also at night, when my mother would return from the bar—inebriated, of course—and stumble clumsily back to her room.

Still, my mother never hit me. I was the youngest, my mother’s princess: while she seemed to detest my siblings, she doted on me and spoiled me rotten. Whenever I squabbled with my siblings, she took my side; when I got in trouble with my teachers, she would baulk at them. What could her little angel possibly do wrong?

When the weekend came, and it was time for me to go back to my dad’s, she would rouse me from my bed and get me dressed. She would brush the tangles out of my hair, brush the dust off of my shoulders, and lead me to the apartment door.

“Don’t tell Daddy what happens in the house, okay?” Mom would tell me, eyes serious. “If he finds out, he’ll take you away from me.”

So with that, she would send me down the stairs, and I would nervously slide into my child’s seat in the back of my dad’s car. And I didn’t. I didn’t tell my father what happened at my mother’s house; I couldn’t bear the thought of it, of losing my mother, the woman who I loved and worshipped so much.

Even still, the ghosts of that part of my childhood—my mother’s voice, the shouting in the mornings at night, my brother taking the blows that should have been mine—haunt me, bringing back with them whispers of sorrow and guilt. Every time I drive past our old apartment in Macon, I wonder. What might have happened, if only I had spoken up a little sooner?

[Juder]

The Truth About Meri
Chapter Three

I was not normal.

That fact became painfully clear as I went through school. In elementary school, most of my classes bored me. I would sit, uninterested, in the corner of the room as the teacher talked. Often when we were given homework, I would simply neglect to do it and shove the papers to the back of my desk.

Then, when progress reports came, I would bring my grades home—I was usually failing, and failing badly—and my mother would gawk in horror at my grades, almost instantly grasping for the phone so she could schedule a teacher conference. She would drag me to the school and the teachers would send me back home with stacks of my missing work. Mother would stand over me, watching, as I completed every assignment and placed them in my backpack; I wasn’t allowed to do anything else until I was finished. After I turned the work in, my teachers would correct my grades, and they would jump from low Fs to stellar As.

Eventually, my teachers had me take tests—“special tests,” my teachers said—and when the results came back, they told me I was “gifted.” That meant that, despite my grades, I was ahead of the curve, smarter than the rest of my class. I was immediately placed in the school’s gifted program—the REACH Club, which met on Tuesdays and Thursdays—so that I could engage in activities that better suited my abilities.

My intelligence, however, was not the only thing that set me apart. I was unusual in both the academic and social sense. I was shorter than the other kids, so much so that I hardly looked as if I belonged in school at all. My mother didn’t do the best job of encouraging me to maintain my hygiene, resulting in long, greasy hair and oily, blemished skin. My experiences at home had also left me with an odd sort of maturity, one unusual in someone my age.

The combination of these traits made me an outcast among my peers. The other children either avoided me altogether or made sport out of taunting me, calling me “medusa head” for my oily, snakelike hair and “pizza face” for my acne. They even mocked my singing voice—the lovely, clear soprano tone that my mother had passed on to me—likening it to the sound a cat made when it was trapped in a dumpster. The constant rain of insults would leave me sobbing on the floor, whereupon the other children would ask me—as if they did not know!—what was wrong; and when I told them that I felt as if though no one cared, they would reassure me that they did care and promise to turn away from their insults.

Such promises rarely lasted long, and when I told my mother of my plight, she asserted that they were simply jealous of my intelligence. Somehow, that explanation never made me feel any better, only leading me to curse my “giftedness,” and eventually I withdrew from being social altogether. Instead I retreated into my vivid imagination, trading conversations for writing and storytelling, fact for fiction and make-believe. I remember my younger self as a small, impish creature always with a notebook in hand.

Luckily, I still had my siblings. I was almost always with Constantine—playing video games, going with him to the theater to catch a movie, going to the bookstore to buy more manga—and he became not only my brother, but my best friend. He had been the fun big brother, the one who could turn even doing the dishes or cleaning our room into a task to be enjoyed. Ciara was often with us as well, and—though at that age, we mixed with each other like oil and water—I am more grateful, more grateful than anyone in the world possibly could be, that I had the privilege of their company.

I remember a particular instance when Constantine had taken me and Ciara to the grocery store, holding my hand tightly so that I did not wander off. He was seventeen then; Ciara was twelve, and I was six. A young couple had been admiring us from afar, and complimented my “parents” on their adorable and well-mannered (they obviously had not seen me at home) child. Constantine didn’t correct them, simply responding with a chuckle and a polite “thank you” and continuing on his way, but somehow I think it appropriate. While only half-siblings by blood, our shared experiences had made us much more than that, and perhaps—Constantine, who took care to discipline me when I acted out of turn, and Ciara, who regarded me always with motherly concern—they had become adults, as well as parents, at a very early age.

And while my experiences may have aged me beyond my years, I look back on them—the sacrifices my siblings made for my sake, so that I could be a child even after they could not—and realize that maybe my childhood was not nearly half as bad as it seemed.