10. NO CONVERTING A NOMAD

Enter Mary. The nanny from hell. She would drag me to her evangelical meetings no less than three times a week.

I had a rough relationship with religion. My dad was Jewish and held zero interest in his faith at birth. My mom, a cafeteria Catholic wasn’t religious at all but because of social pressures found herself needing to take her children to church every Sunday to minimize the gossip when we moved up in the world and entered a well to do neighborhood.

The day I entered Sunday school I knew at 5 this was not for me. The bad vibes reverberated through me like a wind tunnel. I immediately ran from the church and hid out for hours. I wanted nothing to do with these blank faced ghouls. It’s hard to put into words the evil I felt coming from them but even as young as I was, their intentions were clear as a bell.

Church attendance ended that day. I went to church on occasion with my mom’s friend’s kids when sleeping over at their house but only to receive communion cause for some odd reason I took getting it as a challenge,

I complained about Mary, whom I didn’t like, non-stop. I hated attending these revivals and even to this day don’t think that was something I should have been attending at that age or any age. Mary stayed but the religious rantings ended for me.

Then our world was upended again. My oldest sibling was found dead in bed. Still to this day I don’t know if it was suicide or overdose. A very complicated life for a young adult, metastasized by a cruel history in the familial and romantic circumstances that would make your skin crawl.

It destroyed my mom. She became a completely different person. Too young to appreciate my mom’s personal challenges losing her first born only 4 years after losing her husband. I was left unable to be of any solace due to my lack of maturity.

An older sibling, hereafter referred to as “the narcissist”, pounced. Knowing exactly how to manipulate my mom in her most vulnerable time, took the opportunity to insist my being sent to boarding school was the best solution.

I hid on the floor in the back of the car under a blanket. As they drove to the store, I heard the entire conversation, with some pushback from my mom, voicing her concern I was too young to be sent away however “the narcissist” maneuvered the arguments for with precision, ultimately taking a broken woman’s spirit during a time where another sibling had disappeared when threatened with being sent to a disciplinary school for bad behavior.

It was the perfect mix of circumstances that “the narcissist” seized to get their way. Me out of the picture.