Pink Unicorn - A Short Story

Another childhood memory, hold your pants!

My memory is not what it was, so I'm just going to guess this was the second time my mother and step father moved us away from Ohio to Michigan without telling my father where we went. I'm telling you this for context, I guess. I think I was about nine years old.

So wherever we moved to in Michigan, we lived in this trailer park. This was actually a pretty cool place because there were only like 6 trailers on this huge bit of land. This married couple, Chuck and Bobbi, who owned it all lived up the hill from us in a house with a horse barn behind it.

I would mostly entertain myself my climbing trees and hiding from wild turkeys that would land nearby. There were no children around besides my 2 year old brother and the unborn brother in my very pregnant mother, so I was mostly alone. I think this was my Mother's first attempt at home schooling me. All I really remember is I had no friends.

Somehow, I ended up taking riding lessons from the landlord, Bobbi. She was a rugged looking lady, with tan, leathery skin. A petite lady with short blonde hair and these bulging, bird like eyes. I would help her feed and clean the 13 horses and 2 goats in exchange for my lessons, so I ended up spending a lot of time with her.

Bobbi was stern, but also very kind to me in her way. She would take me with her on errands and to get our nails done. Once she even took me to a horse show. I would study horse books and sing to Jewell in her living room. I remember thinking she must be very lonely to be spending so much time with a little girl like myself.

Something changed in December, so Christmas always brings me back to this lovely little memory. She had been yelling at her husband far more than normal. She always seemed to be angry at everyone, but him especially. But their house was beautifully decorated and cozy, a giant tree waiting for ornaments and gifts.

My family being weirdly religious and very poor was never huge on Christmas, so this tree was awesome to me. As were all her treasured ornaments, each with a special sentimental history. She took me to the mall with her one day to pick out an ornament of my own to put on the tree.

I chose this pink unicorn made out of glass. It was everything my little girl eyes could imagine to be perfection. So we put it on her tree where it honestly looked kind of stupid, this one pink ornament, but it brought us both some weird joy.

Then one day soon after that, my mom forbade me from going to Bobbi's anymore. And shortly after that, we moved. Before we left, I was allowed to say goodbye to Bobbi. She was distant, almost cold to me. Her eyes were hard in a way I couldn't comprehend.

I asked if I could keep the pink unicorn to remember her by.

She said "No, I bought the unicorn to be on my tree, and that's where it will stay."

Years later, I found out that Bobbi wanted to buy me from my parents. I still don't really know how to feel about this. Child me wouldn't even have minded forsaking my family to live with the horse lady. But yeah, a grown woman making this offer is a bit weird in retrospect.

I wonder if she still puts that pink unicorn on her tree, or if she threw it away a long time ago.

Cathartic

I recently engaged in a conversation with the local Fed Ex guy that made me feel somehow finally understood. Has there ever been a more absurd sentence? But years of slowly opening up to close friends has never had quite the impact this brief conversation did.

I forget exactly how it started, but something about working all the time and how he had been working and paying rent since he was 16 because his step dad made him pay rent to live in the garage.

To which I responded, "I thought I had a shitty step-dad."

Which of course spawned further dialogue about our respective shitty drug addict step dads. Which to me is sort of a revelation. I mean, I obviously know others exist, I've just never had a conversation with anyone who has also experienced this. My close friends who have step dads mostly feel as if they got an upgrade. This frank discussion about being yelled at for no reason, wondering which version of him will walk through the door each day...I almost wanted to cry with relief that I was not alone.

Because if you haven't been through it, you can still understand it. But you can't really understand the impact it has on your psyche. You can't actually feel it. The underlying dread of each day. What nonexistent facial expression will I be punished for today? What tiny chore left undone will be treated like the end of the world? What terrible things will he say today, and will they make me cry? That constant apprehension.

I have a friend who experienced emotional abuse during her marriage. She sort of understands. She felt and withstood the insidious nature of it from 17 to 27. Terrible as that is, and terrible as I am to distinguish, I'm still going to say that it is vastly different when it occurs to an adult rather than a child. I was a child, literally molded by this man I had not chosen in any way to have around me.

I wonder if there are support groups for the children of addicts? Probably, there should be anyway based on how cathartic it was for me to have one small conversation about a shared hell.

My First Superpower

When I was a child I used to think I had an ability no one else did. Certainly no one in my immediate proximity. I had the somewhat limited ability to know what would happen in my future, and the future of those around me. All I had to do was think of every most logical scenario for any given situation, and I'd get an approximate idea of the future.

Because of my shitty upbringing, wherein my parents never seemed to think beyond their present circumstances, I thought this was somehow special. Being able to comprehend cause and effect seemed like a superpower. That is literally the only way I could justify why they kept making the same terrible decisions over and over again. They didn't have this special ability.

This all seems rather absurd to me now.

However, the actual realization here is that my superpower was not just self awareness. It was a heightened awareness caused by the instability and chaos my parents inflicted upon me. My superpower was ANXIETY!

Fucking bullshit superpower if you ask me.