The Lost Child

family roles & re-vision

In its current state, my memoir does not offer a whole lot of background about my siblings. I have five. All older. Their relative absence is not just because I’m sensitive to their privacy, but because the memoir’s written in present tense and so much of the early chapters are from my young perspective. Writing in present tense from a child’s perspective has some real limitations. Plus, owing to the notorious self-centeredness of a child, I wasn’t really paying attention to them—unless they were making me cry.

At its essence, the memoir is about this young, sensitive soul—i.e. me—growing up the sixth of six in a chaotic Catholic family with a father who liked alcohol, gambling, and sex. Oh. And, bonus!, he could also be violent. 

As a kid, I felt worthless. Not just like I didn’t matter but like I had to make up for my existence. I’ve learned that’s called SHAME. 

Growing up, I thought it was THE TRUTH.

When I was 16, I unintentionally rebelled against my parents in the most good-girl way I could. 

I hooked up…

with Jesus! 

And evangelical Christianity. And a nondenominational organization called Young Life. It gave me belonging, community, structure (i.e. rigidity), rules—mainly things I thought if I did them would make me GOOD. I felt So Bad. 

It had the added bonus of making me feel RIGHT, which is pretty fucking seductive—especially for a vulnerable teenager. But in a few short (very long) years, after a lot of things changed in my world, I found myself more lost than the found I’d been promised. 

And super depressed. 

Thankfully I also found my way to therapy.

In the care of an amazing social worker named Lisa, I started learning about denial, dysfunctional family systems, and all sorts of other things that helped me ever-so-slowly see what the fuck was what. And the WHAT I slowly saw was pretty awful. For one, I’d been sexually abused. By my dad.

So, in thinking about ways to address the relative absence of my siblings in the early part of the memoir, I’ve been looking for ways to show who they are. But succinctly. Because this bitch is already too long. 

In the past two years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the roles my two oldest brothers have played in my life and in our family and in general because they’ve both died. It’s always been obvious Michael, the oldest, who died in July, was The Hero, The Golden Child, and The Parentified Child. Eight years older than me, he was a way better father than ours even tried to be. 

And Daniel, seven years older, who died in July of 2021, was unquestionably The Scapegoat and The Black Sheep. 

I had heard of these roles before, but I especially remember them from a bunch of psychoeducational classes about dysfunctional families I took in the early 90s. In these classes, they used this most excellent mobile to show how the members in dysfunctional families have roles—The Addict, The Chief Enabler, and all their poor children who cope by being someone they’re not or being way more than they ever should be asked to be. Then this mobile showed what happens when one person in one role opts out—sometimes on Opening Night. The balance of the whole system is thrown off and the mobile can’t function. The family is in crisis. Or more crisis. So someone, say The Clown, fills in for The Hero, and the balance, which is to say the insanity, is restored. 

All can relax back into the comfortable stress and tension of the hell they know well. Phew!

So I thought, Hmmmm, maybe I can offer a snapshot of each sibling by showing how they embodied their roles. But I couldn’t remember what all the roles were. Yes, Golden Child and Hero and Parentified Child. Yes Black Sheep and Scapegoat. And I remembered Clown. But the others? What was my sister’s role? Or my third brother’s role? Brother Number Four was definitely The Clown. But he could be The Black Sheep, whenever Number Two was unavailable because he was being Scapegoated. And what was my role? How did I get to be 53, with more than 30 years of therapy under my wing, and not know what the fuck my role was? I felt like a therapy fail. So I did what one does and I Googled it. 

I was surprised that one site only named five roles, while several others only had seven. I guess, thankfully, most families don’t have that many kids to fuck up.

Michael and Daniel must have read all the books in the How-To-Be-Perfect-Dysfunctional-Children series. They seriously deserve Oscars for their performances. But then their roles killed them so… too late for that.

I’m still figuring out Number Four and Big Sister’s roles. They’re both middle children. Maybe they’re both Mascots? I’ll have to get back to you.

And what about me?

What a great question!
Thank you. It’s so nice someone finally asked.

My role should not have been the revelation it was because it’s so obvious. But I didn’t realize it before Tuesday. Or I completely forgot it, which is the gift that 53 seems to want to give. 

I was The Lost Child. 

The Invisible, Easy, Ask-for-Nothing, Cause-No-Trouble Child. I tried so hard to be Good. Then I became a Martyr. And while that cost me—because apparently kids are actually supposed to have needs—it also served me well. Since I hardly asked for anything, when I got older I didn’t feel too beholden to my father. This made it a lot easier to, effectively, divorce him and my mom when I was 21. I’d been in therapy for six months and felt claustrophobic. Like I couldn’t figure out who I was with them insisting I was theirs. As soon as I decided I needed some distance and no contact, my stock went through the roof.

Yes, memoir writing is about going back, remembering and telling the stories that shape the arc of a life and best show how that life grew into a beautiful but gnarled tree from doing its damnedest to get at least a little bit of the light it needs. 

But it’s also about making sense of the choices a soul made—i.e. the role it played—in order to grow and become, despite the rocks heavy on its tender shoot, or the lack of water or light available to it.

In researching roles, I was able to name my part in a family that left me feeling like my purpose was to give but not take; to see but not be seen; to feed but never be hungry—or at least not tell anyone when I was.

In identifying my role, I am able to see myself and my story with more clarity. It’s provided a corrective emotional experience to the part of me that felt invisible and worthless.

By laying claim to my role as The Lost Child, a young part of me is found.

one- or two-year-old me, circa 1971-1972