As I've gotten older, I've started to recognize in myself a desire to meet another person who is like me. Or maybe not like me, but who has been in a situation like mine. My sister has problems, some or most of which look very familiar: drug abuse, body image issues, mental health problems. But her particular combination of...stuff is very different from anyone else I've ever met. Her psychologist informed us she had never met anyone like Lauren, which is really the thing every parent dreams of hearing about their child from a trained mental health professional. And her uniqueness makes us, her family, unique in a way. And with uniqueness comes some measure of aloneness. And my pickiness doesn't hurt that, either. Who else in my sphere of contact could meet my crazy criteria? Older biological-child sister of an adopted toddler with nebulous but disturbing psychological issues that manifest themselves in drug use, self harm, and the occasional weird psychosomatic symptoms like seizures and hallucinations?
Sometimes reading about or meeting family members of mentall ill people or drug/alchohol addicts can be helpful. But they tend to be all-biological families, and as such some of their very key fears are not mine, like the worry of genetic inheritance or the legacy of a chaotic family history. My sister and I share no genes, and my family is on the whole scarily normal. Sometimes I think my sister was given to us because otherwise we would have been too perfect. As it is I feel overwhelmingly blessed.
And some of my fears are not theirs. Did she feel pressure to live up to her adopted siblings? Do I love her enough? Some of my anger, too, isn't the kind a "typical" family feels. I know I should be grateful to their birth mother for making the right decision, a terrible and selfless decision, but most of me is just angry that I and my parents have had to pick up the pieces of her abominable parenting. And that's both pathetic and childish, but there we are.
Anyway, all of this came from watching Intervention, a show that I love like crazy. Sometimes watching Intervention is like therapy, in the best possible way. (And cheaper!) There was this guy on, an older sibling of a drug addict, who talked very briefly about his sadness and anger. "I tried so hard to be this role model for my brother, and it didn't make one bit of difference." And even though I knew I felt this way and had articulated it to some extend in my mind, hearing it out loud from another person was kind of a revelation. Someone else was like me.
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