“She doesn’t live here anymore”. Losing my sister, twice.

The worst losses are the ones we don’t see coming.

If you’ve been reading my recent articles, you know by now that at age 6, my father left my mom and I, and took my older half-brother and half-sister to go live with his new wife who became my stepmother.

Until that point, my entire life had been spent with my mother and father and these two half-siblings in our little suburban house. We had a park behind our house where we’d play everyday, we had safety, and we had each other. And despite the fact that they were both blonde and fair skinned and I had my dark hair and Mediterranean skin, I had no idea in the world they weren’t my full siblings. Which made losing them even more confusing and painful.

When my father took my half-siblings (I’ve changed their names here to Alex and Mindy to protect them) with him leaving a mostly empty house behind, I didn’t understand why I wasn’t taken along too. Why would he take them and not me? I must not be good enough.

As a result of my parent’s divorce, I had to visit my father and new stepmother’s house every other weekend. When I wasn’t being either yelled at or ignored, I was quickly learning that I wasn’t the only one getting abuse in the house.

Alex and Mindy had to deal with the consequences of being forced to live with a woman who both hated children, and yet had three of her own.

What resulted from this pairing of families was the Cinderella story without any of the happy ending; keep the evil step mother, jealous stepsisters, and the abusive treatment. To this day, I have no idea the true extent of the abuse my siblings (especially Mindy) endured.

I know Mindy was kicked out of the bedroom she shared with my stepsister, and forced to sleep in the dirty, dark basement. I know that she was a straight-A student and the best player on her travel soccer team. And I know that teenage girls, in this case my new stepsisters, get very jealous. And I know that my stepmother hated children.

One of the only saving graces of my trips to my father and step mother’s house was getting to see my siblings. They were the only thing that made it better. They were the only two people in the house that I knew loved me, and that even bothered to spend time with me.

I abhorred going to my father’s house because of the way I was treated, ignored, and honestly, abused. But probably the most painful and confusing thing I suffered was losing Mindy.

On one random visit to my father’s, I remember coming into the house, saying hello to my stepmother and three step siblings, and excitedly trying to find Alex and Mindy. I was told Alex was off at work at the local Amusement park, so I’d likely see him late at night or in the morning when we both woke up. I searched around looking for Mindy, and asked one of my step siblings, “Where’s Mindy?”

“She doesn’t live here anymore. She lives in Canada now”.

I struggle to even type the correct words to explain how confusing those lines were for me. First off, I’m 8, so I barely understand what a Canada is, and definitely didn’t understand why she’d be living there and not here with her brother and father. She doesn’t live here anymore? – that simply didn’t make sense to me.

I’m going to save my reader the full explanation of why she was sent to Canada to live with her birth Mother, and the process of explaining why that was a bizarre choice, and instead focus the rest of this story on my experience of what happened.

First, I want to mention that at no point did my father tell me that Mindy wasn’t there. He just waited for me to find it out on my own. So l was completely unprepared for the emotional loss of my sibling – for the second time. My father’s codependence and willingness to bend to the whims of his new wife who hated children reveal to me more and more over time his cowardice. His relationship pinball game left me with whiplash from the constant changes in direction and collisions.

Being uninformed of the major life changes that happened to me not only was the completely wrong way to parent, but also left a powerful influence on me. As I grew up – and still to this day – I have a constant desire for knowledge, because I fear that if I don’t know something, there’s a good chance life is going to change without me going to be able to do anything about it. Also, I still get triggered when people make plans or talk about things without me, because I’m simply afraid I’ll just be left out.

Next, for the second time I had had Mindy taken away from me without knowing it.

I’d already become the world’s leading expert on crying yourself to sleep at night, after the first time I had lost Alex and Mindy. I remember almost every single night crying to my mom as she tucked me in, “when am I going to see Alex and Mindy again?” So losing her a second time only meant the pain and loneliness would deepen. Again, I was losing one my best friends.

The first few years, she wrote me letters from Canada telling me how much she missed me on pink lined notebook paper with kittens on them. I never would have admitted it in public in front of my friends, but those few pieces of paper were my most prized possessions. On the worst nights, I remember grabbing them from my drawer, holding on to them as I laid in bed, and sobbing until my pillow was soaked.

It would be eight years before Mindy moved back to the states, and I only saw her a few times in those years in-between. She was no longer the freckled preteen who loved playing with her little brother, but now a 20-something year old woman whose friends meant everything to her.

I can’t even begin to fathom what things were like from her perspective, losing her home and her brothers twice, enduring abuse from jealous stepsisters, and boarding a plane at age 13 to go to a new country.

But what I do know too well is that the worst losses are the ones we don’t see coming.