What have you and your family accomplished together?

Mikella Vermaire

            I have three families. Most people only have two: their mom’s side and their dad’s side, or maybe they split it into immediate family and extended family. I have three: my extended family, my immediate Illinois family, and my Oklahoma family. My extended family is normal. I have cousins, great-grandparents, and aunts and uncles. My Oklahoma family is also mostly typical: a mom, brothers, a grandma, the god-parents, and all the aunts, uncles, and cousins. I also have “aunts” and “uncles” and “cousins” that I’m not actually related to. Due to my mother’s irrationality and irresponsibility, I don’t have a “dad’s side”. Also due to my mother’s irrationality and irresponsibility, I have an immediate Illinois family, which consists of me, my grandma, and my grandpa.

            The story of my immediate Illinois family is long and dramatic, but I’ll make it short. My mom and father-figure went to prison because they liked to sell drugs, so I had to be placed with a family member or DCFS. My biological father wasn’t an option because my mother won’t tell anyone who he is, but I do have family in Illinois, so that’s where they sent me. When the transition was beginning, no one was expecting it to go on this long. We were expecting a year or two. It’s been eleven. The first two years were some of the hardest. I had art therapy and was forced to “talk about my feelings” and I cried at least twice a week. My grandparents purposefully tried to not get too attached, because they didn’t want to be hurt when I left. In the beginning, I wasn’t attached to them because I wanted my mother. Eventually I became exhausted and just wanted the situation to be fixed. I wanted my mom to call, like she promised she would, but she only called a few times a year. It put a strain on my relationship with my grandparents. My relationship with them was carefree on the surface, while very dysfunctional at the core.

            As I got older, that dysfunction was displayed more prominently. Both I and my grandparents were tired of pretending that my mother was going to pull her life together and bring me back. We were tired of pretending we were a perfectly happy family, so things started to change. I was getting older and held on to a lot of anger at the whole situation. It frustrated me that my mother continued making bad decisions and that I was forced to explain to  people why I didn’t live with my mom and why I had a different last name than the people that I lived with. For about three years, these problems tore my grandparents and I apart. They didn’t want me to hate my mother, but I wanted to cut her off and put them into the role of “mom” and “dad”. It was painful. I started to think they didn’t want me anymore, and that affected how I treated them. I distanced myself from them so that I wouldn’t be as hurt when they gave me back to my mother because they couldn’t handle things anymore. They started to think that I didn’t like them and didn’t think of them as parents, causing the whole situation to tumble in on itself. The effects were devastating. I cried all the time, didn’t enjoy things I used to love, and started doing things I never thought I would have done.

            Flash forward two years to current day. We still fight, we still hurt each other’s feelings, and we still have issues. My grandparents still sometimes think that I don’t care about them or am embarrassed if them, and I still sometimes think they want to send me back to Oklahoma. It’s rough, and sometimes our conversations leave very deep scars, but there’s an understanding we’ve reached. My grandparent’s know things about me now that they didn’t know two years ago, and I know things about myself that sometimes make situations easier to comprehend. We both know that there’s love on both ends. Sometimes we take three steps forward and two steps back, but we are still progressing forward. It hurts, but we’re moving, and I think that’s amazing. Especially considering the fact that two years ago I would have been crying on a weekly basis, I’m content for now with that one step forward.