I Cannot Substantiate This

I wrote a piece a few months ago in January suggesting that my sister may have actually murdered her first husband. It was written a few weeks after writing a piece about my actual first boyfriend, "Alex," a 21 year old college student I met through my older sister while visiting my sister the summer I turned fourteen.

I've written other pieces about bits and pieces of this on various blogs. I'm not intending to link to them. If you really want to dig them up, there's more to be found.

My brother molested me until the end of February that year. His birthday is late February and he turned eighteen and never touched me again.

Because I am such a brilliant smarty-pants, decades later in my thirties or forties, I expressed my bafflement to some man I knew who went "Duh, the consequences go up when you turn eighteen."

So a mere four months later, I meet Alex and get involved with him and we have a summer romance. At the end of the summer, my family has a secret meeting behind my back without telling me and I am informed that I am to never contact Alex again, he will go to jail if we ever contact each other etc.

So I felt like my brother who had raped me two years earlier was the obvious villain in this scenario and I spent more than 46 years just assuming that's what happened. 

I can't possibly overstate how much it turned my entire world upside down to realize that most likely my sister's "abusive" first husband was the victim in an abusive relationship rather than my sister. Plus, I was homeless last December while having this epiphany and a few months later, I'm still homeless and I have survival issues. Rehashing family history is not my highest priority.

But I've spent a lot of years with a particular concept of who my sister was and it made me view a lot of her choices in a very charitable fashion as "Wow, she's neurotic because of our bat shit insane family." And now I am rethinking a lot of those assumptions.

She initiated a divorce, got involved with a co-worker supposedly as soon as it was legally okay to date prior to the divorce being final and her supposedly possessive, abusive first husband violently assaulted her.

What if he had a better motive than "Bitch, you're MINE and I am not letting you go!!!"

She was in her thirties and had a history of fertility problems and her biological clock is ticking very loudly and she framed her desire to get remarried in a hurry as rooted in that.

I never understood that. I chalked it up to "She's traumatized and not really thinking."

But she used to send me fertility research articles and the research she sent me and discussed with me said roughly "The hands down most effective means to get a baby is skip all this fancy pants modern medical crap and just sleep around. If you roll the dice with enough partners, you will probably eventually find a good match, genetically speaking."

And she made money like a man. She didn't need a husband to support a child.

So I spent years going "WOW, that was STUPID. If I had made money like a man and wanted a BABY desperately, etc., the smart thing to do is go bar hopping, cry on the shoulder of random strangers about how you CAN'T have a baby and your husband brutally assaulted you and blah blah blah until some fool takes you home with him. And the minute you are unexpectedly pregnant, call it a miracle and 'get religion' and clean up your wicked ways and stop being a ho for the sake of the baby."

But her very first conversation at work with her second husband who was in IT was him telling her "Looks like user error." 

That's their socially awkward, ha ha, meet cute story, which is why I know it. Gosh, what an awkward thing for a socially awkward programmer to say when he meets his future wife!

What if it was user shenanigans? What if she was a criminal who did something bad at work and wanted to move away in hopes of covering her tracks and felt he had seen too much and could be a problem for her and was desperate to marry him to get him away from that job so he wouldn't put it together?

My sister was a contracting officer for the federal government. That means she spent money in large sums for the government.

Her first husband supposedly had mountains of unpaid student loans bleeding them financially.

Did I ever see these loan statements? NO. She was my sister. I just believed whatever she told me and frankly I don't know if any of these conversations about his mountains of student loans ever occurred in front of him. 

I probably have absolutely no corroboration for these stories. It got used to explain why she couldn't afford to visit me while I was living in Germany. And other than that, I can't say I can remember a single bit of evidence that she was coping with crushing financial burdens while she went on annual vacations I could never afford and bought a house etc.

How those things might hypothetically relate, I don't know. But some kind of money laundering scheme comes to mind.

I also have to wonder about a story she told me.

My sister was twelve when she was all "Okay! When are we MOVING?!" And Mom was like "Um, we're NOT. You're dad retired from the Army. We bought this house. We LIVE here. This is home."

Perhaps like my ex-husband, she was a socially dysfunctional asshole who counted on frequent military moves to give him a fresh start socially on a regular basis.

At fifteen, she supposedly vowed she would get a scholarship and get out of town. And we both were STAR student -- that means we both had the highest SAT score of our graduating class -- and we both won a National Merit Scholarship to UGA based on that.

And she DRAGGED me for years like "I WORKED for my scholarship. You just lucked into yours." As if just waking up with the highest SAT score in my class was dumb luck and somehow made me not as smart as her because I had no such goal.

So the story that gives me pause is she once said she took the practice SAT and the actual SAT so many times that she got bored and just made pretty patterns on the answer sheet and must have intuited a pattern or something because that's how she got her high score.

So she's playing it off like "I'm so so so smart and practically memorized the test from taking it so many times." But it always struck me as an odd story.

And since concluding she is probably the villain responsible for the incident with Alex -- an incident that is one of the most scarring events of my life -- and may have murdered her husband, I'm wondering if the subtext of all this smack talk is really "By WORKED for my scholarship I mean I ARRANGED it with cheating and such. It was a GOAL. I needed out of Columbus."

She wanted to major in psychology because our parents had baggage and she was constantly trying to mediate their arguments. She got a scholarship in Journalism and so she double majored in Journalism and Psychology.

She came home for the summer after the first year. She got a job and worked and stayed in Athens subsequent years and claimed it was because it was too stressful to come back home to our nutjob family.

The summer is the slow season at college. She got a job with the college.

Perhaps she needed to do crap like tweak her grades and attendance record to keep her ill-gotten merit scholarship.

I say that in part because she was given a special award when she graduated high school for "missing ONLY one day of school in four years of high school." And I remember that because I had serious health problems and routinely missed the maximum number of days I could miss without being automatically held back no matter how good my grades.

Her getting that award stuck in my craw because Mom constantly was verbally abusive to me about how I wouldn't be sick all the time if only I would eat my vegetables like your sister and her attendance record was thrown in my face like she was the picture of perfect health and I was just lazy or something for not being healthier.

And it was absolute BULLSHIT that she had a near perfect attendance record.

The truth is she practically singlehandedly ran the school paper and skipped any class she felt like skipping "because I'm working on the paper." And she routinely went to school late with a doctor's note as an excused absence or left early to go to a dental appointment as an excused absence.

It was a fiction that she had an uncommonly excellent attendance record and additional fiction that this was why she made good grades. So she was dummying up her school records as early as ninth grade.

And given that she was never in class, perhaps that included her grades as well.