My Lost Sister

My parents have been at war for as long as I can remember. My first memory of this war was when I was about 5 years and my dad was telling me how much he still loved my mother and that afternoon they had a huge fight, similar to a lover’s quarrel. Now perhaps all divorced fathers tell their children that they still love their mothers. In my case I believe that my father continued to love my mother long after my mother had stopped loving him.

The war between my parents that involved me as a casualty of war started when I was 10 years old. I was spending the weekend at my father’s house. I hated going there. It was a combination of things; my father’s house has always been disgustingly dirty. I have never been comfortable around such filth. My dad openly did drugs around me at that age, but then again so did my step-father. I was treated very different than my youngest sister who lived with my father. I am sure as a child I was very jealous of her, but that jealousy did not survive adolescents.

During this one particular weekend my father and I got into an argument. I can’t imagine what it was about. Given that I only saw him twice a month and he had no control over any aspect of my life. Besides at that time I was a great kid, I was in advanced programs at school, I received prefect grades and I was a dancer with a very prestigious company. In the course of this fight he screamed at me what a horrible person my mother was and that I did not know her at all. All the things he told me were true. I did not believe it at the time and was sobbing through this attack on my mother. Among the things he reviled was that my mother had numerous plastic surgeries, which is true. But the other thing he said that haunted me from that day forth was that my mother forced him to abandon his other daughter. It turned out that 9 weeks and one day after I was born my younger sister was born. He just screamed it at me, that I had this other sister wandering lonely in the world without a father and it was all my mother’s (and my) fault.

From that day forward I would look into the faces in a crowd and see if they were my face staring back. I continually asked question about her to my father. I would get a new friend or an enemy and I would call him and ask him is her name such and such. Through out the years I was given just enough information to locate her on my own, which is exactly what I did when we both turned 18. This was not the happy moment that one might have imagined; in fact it pissed a lot of people off, including the mother of this girl who at one time loved my father only to be spurned by my dad. They had developed a pact, no contact between my sister and my father and she would not ask for or seek child support, but thanks to me the no contact thing did not work so well. It turned out that my father knew where she was the entire time and did not tell me because of the pact. All the evasive answers he had given me over the years painted a pained and tragic image in my life of strange faces in the crowd searching for love and family. The pained and tragic face of my sister was only in my imagination, in reality she looks a lot like me. Fifteen years later everyone is still estranged, and in the end it turned out how every one wanted it too.