today is my little brother's birthday

i'm so excited for him.

12 years old.

i remember when i was 12 years old. actually life sucked really bad then. it was the year that my mother decided to pick up our family, put our belongings on the bottom of a greyhound bus and head for Oregon.  she was tired of california, tired of the gangstas, tired of the no-count family members always asking for money that we didn't have, and she was tired of never really getting a promotion. she needed a new start and a new life. so, she took us with her (of this i am glad, now) and bam! we were oregonians.

i hated my school. i had these braids, blue timberlands and a ghetto booty and neither the black nor the white folks in oregon could handle it. i got teased constantly. i was geeky looking (i've always been, i'm okay with this now) and my half-white cousin made sure that i knew she was prettier than me. even though now she's walking around looking like a two-dollar ho without a clue. 

i had a complex about myself. my self-esteem was in the toilet. i preferred to eat alone. i didn't really know what kind of personality i would have or what kind of person i wanted to be. i just needed some friends. i cried almost every day for the first couple of months. i was tired of feeling new and out of place.

i finally made friends. i hated a few of my teachers, but one really took interest in me. she let me work ahead and she would talk to me, like i was just a regular old friend, after class. after all, it was normal in my life for me to be closer friends with my teachers than with people my own age. it still is.

anyway, right when i thought i was getting used to oregon, i left to live with my dad (for what i thought would be a permanent stay) in d.c. again. this would be the continuance of a life pattern--my parents had the worst custody agreement ever. in my life, i've gone to 10 different schools, partially because my mom moved across districts a lot and also because i've lived in d.c. several times in my life. makes the "where are you from?" question really fucking complicated. I mean, I was in D.C. for preschool, 3rd grade, 8th grade and 9th grade. L.A. for 1st and 2nd grade and 4th-6th grade. And then Oregon for 7th grade and 10-12th grade. 

By the time I was 12, I had been to 6 schools already and I was tired. I had suffered some abuse, seen more domestic violence that I could care for, and was exhausted emotionally and mentally by the environments my mother was trying to keep me out of. Can you imagine being tired at 12? And then I had spent the past 4 years of my life (by this time) raising this beautiful little boy as my son, since my mother worked so many hours. I was his sister-parent. He called me Mom for years. So he and I have a very special bond. To him, I am his sister and his second parent. I provided for him when I could. I potty-trained him, fed him, cleaned him, took care of him, and was there when he learned his first words and when he learned how to walk. I swear his first word wasn't mom or mama, but it was "sisi." But that's just my version of the story.

When I think about what it meant to be 12 for me, I wish and hope that my brother's life (as it seems it has been) will be much easier than mine. 

I will always love him as my brother and like a son. And I feel really, really, really old now....