I'm 56 Years Old and a Total Loser

Memoir Series

Fifteen-Year-Old Me During Pajama Day - Homecoming Week

Content Warning: Abuse, neglect, abandonment, etc

I mean, I’m not, a loser that is. I know I’m not, and yet………….am I?

His voice in my head, long distant, mostly gone comes roaring back in moments like these. “You’re fat” “You’re ugly” “You’re stupid” You’re a piece of shit” “Your friends don’t like you, they are just using you” “No one will ever want you” “No one will ever love you” “You’re fucking worthless” “You’re a fucking idiot” “You suck” “You’re a loser” and on and on and on, the verbal and psychological abuse relentless. The eleven-year-old me shocked, the twelve-year-old me fighting back, the thirteen-year-old me depressed, the fourteen-year-old me resigned to it, the fifteen-year-old me numb.

My sense of self shredded by the time my stepfather was done with sixteen-year-old me, leaving me suicidal and almost empty.

I’d sit in Trigonometry, failing, completely overwhelmed by the numbers and symbols and formulas, my oversaturated central nervous system in the red zone, unable to compute.

“Late bloomer” I fucking hate that term. It’s been applied to me many a time. More like too broken and damaged to do the regularity of life only getting to those moments of regularity sometimes decades after my peers.

At 56 I am a renter, probably embarrassing from the perspective of many who took the more traditional corporate route, embarrassing to the younger me who had big dreams. Embarrassing to say it out loud here.

I do finally feel capable of owning a house of my own. Now. At 56. The landscape is just not cooperating due to the outrageous place we have found ourselves in where the cost of housing is concerned and the ever-widening wealth gap.

“Don’t you have family you can ask for help?”

No, I don’t. They are alive, both of my parents, but showing up as a system of support for my sister and me does not happen. After the divorce our father focused on amassing as much wealth as he could while doing the bare minimum for us, following the letter of the divorce agreement, paying out a monthly child support that never increased despite his increasing wealth, our mother never going after him for more due to what I believe was her guilt at forcing him into marriage via her pregnancy with me, quickly having another child after, and then eight years later throwing it all in the trash with affairs and drinking as she realized she was living a life she no longer wanted.

He crossed the million-dollar threshold while I was in college, that was a lot of money in the 80s, promising us back then $10,000 annually once he retired. Instead, he spent it on women, cars, and vacations, the dollars he did not gamble away that is, forsaking any support he may have given us as adults to his addiction. He was a regular at the riverboat casinos, poker games, Las Vegas, the lottery, the stock market, and the like, as was his mother before him.

“Don’t let your mother buy us groceries!” I would scold Jon early on in our relationship when he would come home with a few things for us after taking her shopping each week.

“Why not?” he could never understand why I had such resistance to accepting something so simple from her as a few items of food for our fridge.

It wasn’t until we were living in California and my neighbor mentioned that she was traveling down to visit her son in college that it dawned on me. I was the weird one here. She talked about how she would stop at the grocery store for him and fill his fridge, her twenty-four-year-old son, while he was still in class, as she always did every time she visited him.

I could not fathom it.

I was nineteen when I moved into my first apartment. The plan had been that I would commute to Columbia College in downtown Chicago from my mother’s suburban townhome in Wheeling. She had sold off our childhood home in Mt Prospect that summer per the final piece in the divorce agreement, that once I was eighteen our father would get his payout. My sister was still in high school. I don’t know why things played out this way, why the sale of our home did not wait until she graduated.

We moved into the townhome. College started. My sister was commuting to her regular high school in the beater car our mother got her to enable her to continue going there, and I was driving and/or taking the train downtown.

Two months in, my mother was offered a substantial promotion and raise which included a relocation to St. Louis, MO. I was the one who took the call from her boss. He asked me how I’d feel if she moved away. I was all for it, believing her needs were much more important than mine and feeling like the doubled salary would benefit us all. So, I knew about her promotion before she did. I mean, she knew she was being considered, but he was calling to let her know she got it. He got me instead. I did not recognize the manipulation at the time as he talked about how good this would be for her in the guise of pretending to care about my sister and me.

She took the job with all of the money and perks and status and left my sister and me there in the townhome as she moved to another state while my sister was still in high school, completely upending my housing as well. The plan was that my sister would join her in St. Louis once she had graduated from high school. The townhome would be sold at the end of that summer, and I would get an apartment in the city with a college friend as I was heading into my Sophomore year of college.

She’d leave us $40 on the counter for groceries for the week and come back on the weekends at first and then less as time went on. My sister and I lived mostly on hashbrowns and ice cream and thought we were having the time of our lives. We were finally free from the woman who threw us away.

I was the one who took the phone call from the high school regarding my sister skipping out on her classes, and she was the one who left her job at the mall in mid-shift when I called her crying hysterically because my car had been towed, getting herself downtown, taking the two of us to the sketchy part of town to get my car out of hock. We took care of each other as best we could, neither of us truly capable of even taking care of ourselves.

Our father was completely absent, never once coming by to see how we were. His hatred for our mother and feelings of rejection by her coupled with the truth that he never wanted to have children made him retreat further into the ethers, reappearing on his birthdays and holidays when gifts were due, often forgetting my own birthday, sometimes coming through with help here and there but never someone I would call for any real support.

“She’s G.U.” he would sneer about a woman he was no longer dating, “geographically undesirable” or “She has too many hangups,” another of his favorite excuses. He went through as many women as my mother went through men, “He’s a loser” my mother’s favorite excuse for dumping another one.

I thought as their wealth and prosperity increased, (my mother went on to become President of a company) their support would as well. I thought that without the financial hardships she had endured post both divorces, our mother would show up for us more in our lives.

Two and a half years ago I read these words in my mother’s will as I was trying to show up for her due to a diagnosis of dementia. The will was forwarded to me by a relative. ”I specifically make no provisions in this Will for my two children named Nora Eileen Herold and (insert my sister’s name here)”.

I have not recovered.

I’m the loser.

If you’re not a paid subscriber to my Substack and would like to support my ad-free and independent writing, you can use the donate button here, or consider becoming a paid subscriber if you’re reading regularly and enjoying it. Every little bit helps.