Not So Lovey-Dovey
by: Teresa Schindler
I was born into the typical middle-class family.
We lived in an older neighborhood of cookie cutter houses, North Fountain Street, a neighborhood with big, beautiful trees lining the street, cars on both sides. As your’re driving you can hear the rattling of the brick roads. On your left there is a navy-blue house with lavender accents, a big oak tree in the front and colorful plants along the side of the house. In the driveway there’s a blue van, a blue van that traveled many miles carrying so many children. On the windows, you can still see residue from the stickers we put on there as children. As you walk up the steps of the porch a cat will rub against your leg to welcome you, to the right there are wooden chairs that my dad made with his old buddies. The front door squeaks as you open it. On the floor in the corner is an air vent, this is where competition with my siblings started, who could get to the air vent the fastest in the morning and who was ready to fight over the imagined territory. Around the corner there are stairs. The stairs creak. Downstairs, there’s a bedroom where, from the ages of 3 to 16, I shared a room with my sisters. Long nights of quietly arguing so Mom couldn’t hear us and tapping the wall just to annoy the other sister. The air is thick from the 6 loads of laundry my mom would do daily. It was normal. Real normal. Lots of brothers, sisters. A successful mother and father. From the outside, you might’ve said it was happy too, except that I was always fighting with my Mom and Dad.
I learned it from my brother. He started his rebellion first.
Late night my sophomore year of high school, I saw my brother get arrested. Shivering in the cold sitting on my bedroom floor worried if he was OK. Next thing I knew the front door was closing and my dad was yelling, his voice only getting louder, screaming: “This is not how I raised you!”
My brother sat in silence. He had nothing to say. These actions only got progressively worse through his senior year and on to college. I started to take after him, but not in the same ways. I rebelled in smaller, quieter ways that slowly made my parents lose trust in me. Throughout my high school years, I slowly kept digging a hole for myself with my parents, my mom especially.
Year after year my brother slowly became less of a problem at home, and I started to become more of one. Every step I took I was walking on eggshells, it felt as if the whole family was against me. I was always being criticized for how loud I am, or why I was never at home.
We fought, often.
“Just be quiet, you’re such a spaz.”
“I’m sorry that this is who I am, you guys just hate me!”
“We do not hate you, Teresa!”
Every single time these little fights would happen I felt helpless and scared, thinking,” aren’t my parents the ones I’m supposed to talk to about the mean girls at school saying this to me? Not my parents.”
Volleyball and weightlifting became my way of taking my anger out and distracting myself. I started to competitively lift weights, like my brother had. I started to lift more and shut out my family little by little. My world got smaller, and my thoughts got deeper, every time I stepped in a gym, weather it was a volleyball gym or weightlifting gym, my head left the real world and I shut down. I used these as my escape from reality. I continued to do this for 3 years. On the outside, we looked fine. My parents still came to every game and competition. Like I said, we were normal. But once we got home, I just went to my room and shut them out again.
This all had gotten so bad, that my own parents had no clue what was going on in my life. I was looking at colleges without them and applying, sending out my volleyball film, and talking to coaches, and yet they had no clue. Until one day in January, I asked my dad to go on a college visit with me. He was shocked because he had no idea I had been talking to colleges about their schools and volleyball programs. He was hesitant to pack up and go visit a college he had no clue about, but after talking with him and telling him about the school and how the coach had expressed their interest in me, he said yes. The next weekend we traveled to Independence, Kansas and toured the campus. I was ecstatic and full of joy, and he saw that. That same day I was offered a scholarship to play volleyball.
On the way back home, my dad looked over at me and said, “I don’t think I have ever been this proud, and disappointed in you at the same time.”
“Why are you disappointed?”
“You never shared an ounce of this with your mother or I.”
I waited a few moments to respond. I truly just didn’t know what to say. “You just didn’t act like you cared, and I didn’t want to feel like I let you down if I didn’t go to a four-year college.” It was scary. I had opened for the first time in months to my dad.
At home, while my dad had soon told me he was happy for me and would love to go on more visits with me, my mom was still giving me the cold shoulder. I felt like no matter how happy I was about a certain college or volleyball program; she wasn’t ever happy with what I was saying. I had tried to have conversations with her about colleges and what I wanted to study but she was never interested and never acted like she cared. I stopped trying with her after a while and started only telling my dad. I knew he would relay the information and she would eventually tell me her opinions.
After I had graduated in May and summer came along, I wasn’t home much because of work and sports. I continued to lift weights and was working two jobs all summer. My mom started to get even more relentless and act as if she was holding something in. I asked her one day why she was always mad at me.
She looked at me in the eyes. “I’m not mad at you, I’m mad that you chose a school so far from home.”
All the pieces slowly connected, every question I had in my head vanished. My mom didn’t hate me, she didn’t despise me or my actions, she just didn’t want to have to say goodbye to another one of her babies. This is when our entire worlds changed. In the blink of an eye and as if a switch flipped, I started slowly interacting with my family again.
I would take off work on Sunday nights, so I was able to have dinner with them, and I talked to my parents every day after work about how my day was and how theirs was too. This became a habit and I loved it. Interactions like this didn’t always happen, we still had rough times and still fought, quite frequently, but for the first time in years I enjoyed their company and they seemed to enjoy mine.
As I was taking these last few months to prepare for college, and gather everything I needed, the role my mom played in my life grew bigger and bigger. I asked her about everything and started communicating more. She became my best friend the last 3 months before I moved to college. On August 1, I moved into my dorm and left my mom at the door. This was the hardest goodbye. After years of fighting, screaming, and a lot of hateful arguments, I never thought that I would cry seeing her drive away. As much as I didn’t want to admit it or even come to terms with, my mom shaped and molded me into the woman I am, even if she did it without words. All those times she told me the truth about myself or didn’t let me spend the night at a friend’s house, those were the moments where I was making adult decisions and was being prepared for my future.
Even though I grew up in a middle class, cookie cutter house, life wasn’t always lovey dove and hearts with kisses. I had to learn who I was through my mother, to find out she was the best friend I needed the day I moved away.
Teresa Schindler is a pre-dentistry student working towards her degree. She is from Wichita, Kansas and enjoys playing volleyball and working out.