LENA
To some, my life might have seemed miserable, but I didn’t mind it at all.
I felt like my life was a definitive upgrade from my childhood.
Now, I didn’t have a horrific childhood, but it wasn’t great, either. It wasn’t made of memorable holidays full of baking cookies with my mother and bonding with my father.
Well, maybe I did have a few memorable holidays when my grandmother was around, but I was too young at the time to still remember them. She was the only person in my family I really missed, and she’d been dead for more than two decades.
My parents…well, my parents were a different story. There wasn’t much to miss. In fact, sometimes I wondered if my life would have been different had I not gotten stuck with some of the most uncaring parents.
I knew I had issues when it came to trusting people, and I knew all too well where they stemmed from. Yes, I had tried to get over my paranoia with the help of a doctor—twice actually. I had seen a counselor in school for some time after an accident involving me and another student—I wasn’t the bully, I was the one being picked on, imagine that—and I had tried going to therapy after the accident, but talking about my problems with a shrink never seemed to make a difference.
It never brought me the sense of peace I was seeking, and after a while, I gave up.
It’s never easy to accept the fact that your parents never really cared for you, and the only two people you loved died too soon.
You can only cope with that.
So, that’s what I did. I decided to learn how to live with my issues. I learned to self-medicate, and I learned to appreciate that being alone wasn’t the worst thing after all. I found joy in my work and tried to fill the hollowness in my heart with other things.
Drinking was one of them. One-night stands were another.
The sex wasn’t always the best. I learned through experience that most one-night stands could not rival a glorious, battery-powered orgasm, but I lived for the adrenaline high that came with getting naked with a stranger. The kisses, the clashing of tongues, the undressing—I loved the rush I got when I saw the guy open and vulnerable, completely at my mercy.
It wasn’t lost on me that I kept people away because every important person in my life was either dead or had deserted me.
Losing my grandmother had been the first blow. I remembered being ten and crying my eyes out to the point of annoying my cold-hearted mother. Fed up with my tears, she slapped me across the cheek when we got back from the funeral. I still remembered how much my skin stung, and how it affected the way I regarded my mother.
My father left three years later. After my grandmother’s death, funds started dwindling. They didn’t have her pension coming in anymore and he couldn’t keep a steady job. I wasn’t sure if it was because of his terrible attitude or the fact that he’d started drinking a lot more.
Probably both.
My mother was no better. She waitressed in a couple of different places, but she never aimed for anything better. She never tried to do more with her life.
Later on, I remembered a conversation I’d had with my grandmother once. She’d said my mother had never reached or even come close to her full potential. I couldn’t understand it at the time, but it made sense to me now.
She was right. My mother was a smart enough woman and I was sure she could have done so much more, but when she and my father got together and subsequently got pregnant with me, they got stuck in a life they didn’t want, living idly for far too long.
When they got married, they relied on the help of my grandmother, but then they ran away with it. They shrugged off commitment and never learned to make it on their own. They got themselves stuck in a mediocre situation because it was easy and comfortable. After my grandmother’s death, their relationship started to crumble; suddenly, life wasn’t so easy and comfortable anymore.
Their lousy jobs could barely keep us afloat.
It was a miracle we had the house, or most likely we would have ended up homeless, too. My grandma had left it to my mother since she had no other living children, but she hadn’t left behind any money.
At least, at the time I thought there was no money. What I didn’t know was that my grandmother had transferred all her remaining wealth—mostly money from oil wells my grandfather had sold years prior—into a trust fund for me.
The trust fund was nothing too fancy, but it was enough to cover my college education and then some.
My mother’s resentment toward me only intensified in the years to come; I was the culprit of all her misery. I was the reason she had been left high and dry and was now stuck with a kid and a semi-alcoholic husband.
Maybe at some point in the past she’d enjoyed being a mother, but I had no memory of that. What I remember from my teenage years was the omnipresent scowl on her face whenever I was around. She and my father started arguing more often, and I started spending more time in my room, trying to stay out of their way.
I wasn’t allowed to have a TV, but I had an old yellow Sony Walkman. It was the late ’90s, but I had no money and couldn’t afford a CD player. The headphones still worked, so when they started fighting, I would turn it up as loud as I could.
When they fought, my only objective was to escape reality.
I began daydreaming before I began drawing.
I would dream of faraway places, of a different reality, one where I could be happy, where I would have a loving mother and father who doted on me as I sometimes saw the parents of my classmates doing.
One night, I picked up a pencil and started drawing in my composition notebook.
At first it was just doodles, then it turned into some sort of abstract drawing, and then I started trying my hand at drawing still life. I started enjoying drawing more and more, and at some point I started sketching the characters of cartoons I saw on TV.
Without me realizing it consciously, drawing became an integral part of my sad, lonely evenings.
I guess I could have gone out, but I felt too ashamed to hang out with the neighborhood kids. I already felt awkward enough, and then one day a girl who lived on my street, Jessica, teased me about my parents, telling me how everyone knew they fought all the time.
I shouldn’t have been surprised since they screamed loud enough for everyone in the cul-de-sac to hear, but I was still hurt.
When my father left for good, it was one of those spectacular spring days in Saratoga. There were blue skies for miles, the promise of spring was in the air, and I held on to the tiny hope that my thirteenth summer was going to be the best one yet.
My father was supposed to get a job at a new electronics store chain, but then he wasn’t asked back after the second round of interviews. He and my mother fought all night that night, and I heard him scream over and over about how he was done. I didn’t believe it, because I’d heard it so many times before.
The next day, it was past noon when he finally rolled out of bed and started collecting his things. My mother was out at one of her waitressing jobs.
I didn’t say a word to my father that day. I knew better than to talk to him when he was mad about something. Part of me was shocked he was really going through with it, that he was serious about leaving.
Until the moment I saw him drive away, I thought he was being overly dramatic to get my mother to beg him to stay—they were both champions at that.
If they’d handed out awards for most toxic relationship, my parents would have won first place. They seemed to thrive on getting each other riled up.
I remembered my father avoiding my eyes, head down, shoulders slumped.
He looked defeated.
For a moment, I did feel sorry for him.
For a moment, I wished we could wind back to a time when he and my mother were happy.
Would have they stayed together if I hadn’t come along? Probably not, was what I used to tell myself. Despite circumstances—getting married and having a baby too young—I couldn’t forget that my parents were the cause of their own misery.
They had been freeloading on my grandmother’s living arrangements for years, and now that they had to rely on their own resources, they couldn’t deal with it.
They were thirty-somethings who didn’t know how to be adults.
I opened the door of my room when I heard him start his car—an old sand-gold Chevrolet from the early ’80s—and came out of the house just in time to see him start to pull out of the driveway. The sun cast a golden glow over the car and his face. I couldn’t see his eyes because he was wearing bottle-green aviator sunglasses. His hair was a rumpled mess, his moustache and five-o’clock shadow giving him even more of a disarrayed look.
I walked toward the car, unsure of what to do.
Was my father really leaving for good? Was he leaving without saying goodbye?
I stopped two feet away, stunned, waiting for him to say something to me.
But I got nothing.
My father’s last gesture to me was a nod.
He nodded goodbye.
There were no words spoken aloud, no speech.
Nothing.
He reversed down the driveway, turned the wheel, and drove away without even giving me one last look.
My mother wasn’t too heartbroken about him leaving. I understood later on she’d been ready for him to move out for a while.
Divorce papers followed months later, and even though he let us know where he was living, I never felt the need to go after him.
I thought about looking for him. Even years later, as I graduated high school, I thought about reaching out, but I knew in my heart it wasn’t going to be pretty and wasn’t going to make me feel better.
It was just going to be like in that Kelly Clarkson song where the estranged father who’s already failed you once does absolutely nothing to make it better.
If all I got from the man when he left was a goddamn nod, what could I possibly expect from him years later?
I knew I was better off without him.
He had never been a father. He wasn’t cut out to be one.
I didn’t need therapy to figure out that you had to accept people at face value.
My parents were what they were.
What I learned from them was that being a slacker will only make you miserable, and sometimes being alone is better than having to live every day of your life with someone you despise.
That summer, not much was different except for the fact that I started riding my bike around town a lot more. My father was gone, and my mother started caring less and less about my whereabouts, and it was then that I began hanging out at the public library.
It was the only place that had all the requirements for a weirdo like me: free, safe, and quiet.
It was during one of my solitary trips that I discovered Japanese manga.
I had seen comic books before, had seen kids at my school reading them, but they were mostly DC or Marvel comics centered around a caped superhero.
These comics were different—pocket-sized, slightly smaller than a paperback.
They were bound like a real book, not just with staples like American comics, and there were an array of different subjects.
Yes, some had superheroes and robots, but most of them were about teenagers.
Crushes, falling in love—those were the main subjects. A lot of them talked about feelings of inadequacy, the struggles of being a teenager, the peer pressure.
Some talked about family issues. Some talked about loneliness and depression.
The artists were able to encapsulate what it felt like to be a kid my age.
I was still lonely, but I felt less alone. When I read manga, the weight on my heart was far more manageable.
My thirteenth summer was indeed the best summer of my life.
It was that summer that I fell in love with shojo manga.
For the very first time, I found something I really cared about, something I absolutely loved.
It was that summer that I decided what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.