Sunshine -
21 years ago today you were born and I remember this day as if it was yesterday. You came into this world just shortly after 9am and when I saw you for the first time that same afternoon you were the tiniest person I had ever met. I held you for hours while your mother made sure that your big sister did not feel left out, setting a trend that has continued throughout the years.
Having dealt with your sister from the time she was two months old I only expected that you would follow in her footsteps of screaming down the house, not to mention the neighborhood. But to everyone’s surprise you showed us that babies can be happy and content. From the moment you came home you were nothing but smiles and full of joy, only crying when you were hungry. A new, but very much welcomed concept for all involved.
From a very early age on you were just content with being by yourself and once you became old enough you happily played with your toys for hours on end.
As a toddler you had the most beautiful blonde curls (that your father refused to cut off for the longest time) and since your general happiness showed all over your face people were drawn to you wherever we went, other kids wanted to be friends with you. There was just something about you that made loving you so easy. You were easily pleased and the smallest gifts made you happy, if only you could be home. Home was your favorite place and every time we took a trip you would ask us at the second street light when we would go back to the house or you would inform us that we were “really far away from home now!” To this day change remains one of your biggest challenges.
The biggest change in your young life came when your parents separated. You were only five at the time and the blow was so significant it almost broke you. The world as you knew it had shattered and you had a very hard time dealing with the consequences of your dad no longer living in the same house as you. We tried our best to ease the pain but we could not overlook the impact it had on your young soul. Those first couple of years after you had to deal with two homes and going back and forth were definitely not easy and it certainly did not help that you started school at the same time.
And school turned out to be an issue from day one, a place where you had to follow in your sister’s footsteps, a straight A student only a grade ahead of you. The teachers all remembered her when you entered their classroom. In 1st Grade it was even said with a factitious chuckle in one of the parent teacher conferences “And you thought you had another Boardman on your hands!”… But it wasn’t a simple hand off. You were never a teacher’s pet and paid the price. In a school that prided itself as being a “blue ribbon” school. I couldn’t stand it! I remember walking into your 2nd Grade classroom to pick you up one day only to observe your teacher yelling at you and telling you that you would never amount to anything. YOU WERE IN 2ND GRADE!!! It broke my heart and I was only happy to find out when in 3rd Grade you finally had a different teacher than the one your sister had and for the first time you started to thrive.
But you never did like school and who can blame you for this after the experience you had in 1st and 2nd Grade. It is unfortunate and appalling that this set you up for a constant struggle with school and caused endless and countless hours of aggravation over the years. It also made me lose all respect for the school system in this country.
But when I look back on your childhood I mostly remember all the good times we had and there were plenty of those. One of my fondest memories was the year that your sister decided we were not worthy her visitation and you came to stay with us by yourself. We spent a lot of one-on-one time together especially during your summer break. You only went to camp for a few hours in the morning and every afternoon I took you to the YMCA for swim camp and watched you take the pool like a duck to water. We always cooked your favorite meals each night and talked about the great day we had. This was also the first summer you walked home from camp by yourself, although I did meet you half way and you made a friend across the street which opened up your world of playing outside in their vast backyard and exploring the neighborhood, doing what boys do.
When your dad got a job offer in Santa Barbara we wanted you to move with us and even though you were torn for a while in the end such a drastic change was just too much for you to handle and you decided to stay with your mother, sister and stepdad. Looking back I often wonder if we should have pushed harder, it might have changed your whole future but hindsight is always 20-20 and we did not want to tear you away from your familiar surroundings.
We saw you as often as we could while we lived in Santa Barbara but by that time your sister’s illness had fully taken hold and consumed most of your family life. When you finally did move to Santa Barbara a few years later the lack of attention that had been part of that life was more than apparent. Your dad and I made it our mission to make up for lost time and although it seemed to have an effect at first it became clear very quickly that it was just not enough and that you would always seek the attention that you could never get. I am not lying, that year was hard. Hard on you and hard on us. It was almost as if you could not handle being the center of attention and having us try to help you move on from the past few years was more than you could handle. Instead you kept going back to it and trying to reverse the path. I often found myself at work during that year not wanting to go home. I recognized myself less and less and was turning into a person I did not like.
In the end it became so painful you decided (with the help of a more than willing instigator) your only way out was to just leave our house literally overnight and move back in with your mother without telling us. You had never been good at covering things up and the warning signs had been there for a while. Your move did not come as a surprise but that did not make it less painful. We had invested so much in that year you lived with us only to be pushed aside by pure selfishness. A selfishness you are paying the price for to this day.
I told you back then: only those you love can hurt you! But in the end I got over the mess you had left behind and moved on only looking forward. For you this decision, which looked so brilliant at the time, marked a turning point and your remaining high school years ended up in a downward spiral of getting in trouble at school and at home. As always you found out that chasing the past was an impossible fantasy, the past could not be recovered nor would there be any change for your future. Life was just what it had been all along before you moved in with us.
And then you came back. And although we welcomed you with open arms I had my reservations. I tend to learn from mistakes and this just looked like the past could repeat itself very easily. But I wanted to give you a chance, I wanted to see you have that chance. It was not to be. What started out again as a promising set up turned into absolute emotional turmoil and home wrecking chaos which in the end, after 13 months of utter frustration, forced us to do something I never though I was capable of doing: kicking you out. By that time you had not been home overnight for six weeks, had ignored your father’s calls, had decided not to take the help your dad had offered of setting you up with your own apartment and after trying just about everything to have you respond to us we were literally at the end of our rope. I can say without hesitation that the day we kicked you out was one of the hardest, if not the hardest, days of my life. I know we had reached a point of no return, but it was by no means easy to follow through with what we had decided was the only thing we could do. We were about to move to the desert full time and this day would have come sooner or later anyway. I had envisioned it differently but you left us no choice. It broke my heart!
It has been over two years since that fateful July 4th and looking back we did make the right decision. You still live in Santa Barbara and made it through the rough part of moving out on your own and making it.
Over the years I often looked back to your childhood and how much I adored you, how much I loved spending time with you and one of the hardest things has been watching you struggle in your later years. At times that little boy was still visible, allowing me a glimpse of what could have been. I realize you did not get a fair shake in life, not even close but you had always been your dad’s and my first priority, something that was unfortunately not enough in the end. We did love and care for you to the best of our ability but did not live up to your expectations of what life should be like, something that is impossible to live up to. I wish it could have been different, I wish you could have found what you so desperately sought, I wish all the grown ups in your life could have seen you the way I saw you, as someone who literally brought sunshine into a room!
I love you and I only hope that the future will treat you better than the past!
Today’s Running Tip: Dealing with Anxiety
Feeling anxious before a race? Try to only focus on yourself not the other runners. It is all about your run not the run of all the other racers. The saying “you run every race by yourself” rings true!
