I'm having to divide the next several years of school up into parts because a lot of stuff happened. This time period is very complex for me in terms of emotional and intellectual development. I really became ME during these years, which is kind of ironic considering I shifted who I was a couple of times.
My fourth grade year coincided with us moving to a new town on the other side of Oklahoma so that we could suffer as my mother's new husband failed at things. All of my mother's husbands possessed the trifecta of lazy, arrogant, and controlling. This seemed to be the qualities she looked for in men.
Her third husband was unique amongst her husbands for two very headfucking reasons. For one thing, he was smart and, when he wasn't being a totally cruel and sadistic bastard, rather fun to be around. He had good taste in music, books, movies, and comics. He encouraged my interests in these things, mostly so he had someone to talk to about the stuff. He encouraged my mother as well, and was probably the first of her husbands to recognize how intelligent she was. He wanted her to go to college (once he was finished) and bought her books over stuff that interested her.
Of course, this was all in the midst of the trifecta of horrible. He couldn't hold a job, but Mom worked. He never did anything at ALL around the house, but thought that we should. He felt he was in charge of everything and could use any means he deemed needed to make sure we fell into line. So yes, he was still a completely awful person . . . just one who happened to be likable at times, which only made it worse.
The other unique thing about this marriage was that he came with a family. Well, okay, my father came with a family too, but of all the stepfathers, he is the only one who brought family into the mix. When they married, we also got new grandparents, an aunt and uncle, a great-grandmother, and a bunch of great-aunts and great-uncles and tons of cousins.
The crappy thing is, I really LIKED these people. I think they really liked us. It's just that when things fell apart with this stepfather, they fell apart so badly that we just could NOT be around his family anymore. It hurt, but it was necessary. To this day, I still kind of regret it.
Anyway, how all this factors into the school thing, aside from the fact that I would be starting a new school in a new town for the first time in my life, is that the stepfather and his family (mostly his family) were making plans to have him adopt my brother and me. It was decided to save the confusion of everyone later in the year that my brother and I would start using his last name instead of the one we currently had.
On the surface, changing your last name doesn't seem like much. You are still you, after all. You still have the same first name. However, and maybe this is why I will always believe Numerology has some validity, it does CHANGE things. You now have a new identity. I went from being this one girl who had been treated one way and suffered certain things to being this new blank person. This was completely liberating to me. And I decided that I was going to erase all the Bad that had happened before.
Because I deemed the so much of my life and past would no longer matter to me, I had to find new things to grasp onto. I dove headlong into music. It was the early 1980s, so it was a very good time to do this. My mother had an old stereo system in the dining room and I would spend almost all of my time in there. I would listen to music, dance, sing, write my own songs, and dance more. I loved it.
The New Me also was going to be a writer. Despite everything else I allowed to shed away from me, my love of books and writing did not go away. The New Me began to work on plays and stories. I started my old hobbies of drawing out characters and designing worlds. I read everything I could get my hands on.
When I went into the new school, I did so with the new foundation I had connected to the new name. Sure there were things I couldn't change. I was still a fat kid. I was still poor. But now I had more direction. I had a stronger voice and I knew that no matter what happened during this school year, my voice would not leave me. The old person with the old last name might have suffered under the teachers she had, but the new person would not.
Interestingly, even though I eventually returned to my father's last name (because I never got adopted thank fuck and yeah kinda spent like three years using a false name, heh . . .), I still retained everything that I built into my new identity. When I returned to the old name, I did not return to the old girl.
You know, years later, I'm a person who truly dislikes it when people change their name when they get married. I hate it because I feel like you're sublimating your identity to become this new married THING. But any time I start to get too critical of it, I remember how liberating it can be to change your identity. Sometimes it isn't about making a family or being traditional. Sometimes changing your name is about shedding your skin and seeing what lies underneath.
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