Where to Call Home

I don’t go outside. I don’t hang out with friends. I don’t have a social life that is not supported by the internet. But this is all on my own choices. The problem is I don’t like going to my aunt for permission. I know there are plenty of parents that are harsher and this article/story may come off as a privileged child's complaints.

*sighing in Japanese* (The language I am currently learning)

Here are what my living conditions are.

Family-

I live in a four bedroom, three bathroom house with six other individual human beings. Two of those are younger than me and the rest are older than me. Of the two children, the older one has a mental disability and the younger makes you want to give him a mental disability. He is selfish, spoiled, and with a side of not enough care that I was raised with. The elders are listed in the following overall traits starting from the youngest. This side of the household consists of the lazy, the ambitious, the borderline paranoid schizophrenic, and the doubtful. Then there’s me, in the middle of it all, the neglected young adult. These people are not my immediate family, luckily. My mother is in Florida with her husband and my older fetal alcohol syndrome half brother, while my dad is taking care of my two older half-sisters and his wife. There is no room for me in either of their households, but there always has been substantial living space with my aunt. She has the biggest house out of all of them, along with the schools in the area that climb state standardized tests and district property values.

Finances-I don’t think we have much if the the head of the household continuously says so and her words are backed with conclusive evidence. For example, the kitchen sink is continuously leaking and we cannot pay a plumber to fix it, the main shower has a massive hole engulfing the shower handle, the master bedroom's toilet is sinking into the ground with the tiles around the bottom being cracked, pipes in the house are falling apart and there has been a leaking pipe in the dining room that has been there for eight years, and in the corner of the laundry room ceiling the pipe there has started to leak. I personally think that this is all her fault. In the truest form of honesty, I think we are in such ‘poor man’s pocket’ because the head of the house is a prioritized mess. For months now, she has been buying eighty dollar cases of bottled spring water for herself and her husband, but once I took one, however, she drove me to Costco to buy her another one with the money I saved up. Expensive water is the least helpful and the most selfish decision one can make in a house that is falling apart. Here is another story that has enraged me. I go to a very nice school, but I don’t have an hourly paycheck nor a work schedule. She decided that free school lunches were no longer a necessity, so how does one pay for lunch when they, themselves, do not have any money to do so? They make their lunch late at night when they could have been studying Psychology 101. This happened to me months ago, because she found it unnecessary and we were some how ‘afloat’ in the financial department and were no longer qualified for the lower middle class status, once she got the raise she’s been pining for. Speaking of school, all my other siblings all had the finances to go to college, but the youngest, me, sadly do not have the same luxury.

Values-

I am the odd little duckling of the family. I was raised as a middle child while living with my aunt, but prior to that I was told that I was my mother’s one and only, then later on in life I found out I have siblings. What a phenomenal upbringing to put a child in. The only good thing about being a middle child is the amount of self-awareness. This has guided me down a road closely related to my father's ideology of what a god is and atheism. On the other side of the family is my aunt's logistical standpoint, which is in line of Catholicism (pro life/ homophobia), democracy, and an ‘out to get you’ worldview. This, somehow, did not hinder the way I applied science, the acquisition of knowledge and facts to my life. The truly messed up thing is that along with me being a pro choice, culturally accepting, sex positive, republic idealist, second wave feminist, pan-sexual, Presbyterian want-to-be, I could get me kicked out. If my aunt did know me as a human being with individuality, much like the rest of my mother’s side of my family, I would have n where to go. I have to hide within the walls of conformity and never express what I feel.