A Scapegoat Escaped

Every dysfunctional group, generally large families or large work places, has their appointed scapegoat. In my family that’s me. Perhaps I was the easiest to use since I’ve always refused to play nasty in return. Perhaps I was singled out simply because my personality singles me out from the rest of them who are all alike and all my exact opposite. Regardless of why, everything negative in my family is my fault to them.

My senior year of college I ran down to my hometown for a day and night, and in an effort to get along with my oldest sister I stayed on her couch. Nothing of significance occurred while I was there. But I was only on the road a couple hours before my phone began to explode as one by one every member of my immediate family called to cuss me out. With each call I would ask what I was being accused of doing, and with each call I was told, “You know!” “No, I don’t. I have no idea why I’m being eviscerated.” My middle sister who lives on the other side of the country called and said, “I’ve never liked you. I’ve never liked you and I never will.” I was back in my apartment when my mom called to tell me, “Your evil plans to ruin this family have succeeded!” “I have no idea to what plans you are alluding, but I can tell you this family was ruined the moment it was conceived over thirty years ago.”

Many years before when I was about 12, my father came to me furious about his phone bill. I never used his phone for any calls, let alone charged calls. Regardless, I was in significant trouble and given his history of physical, emotional, and mental abuse I was scared. According to him I had called a psychic hotline (I neither knew what a psychic was nor knew what a hotline was) and run up several hundred dollars in a long psychic reading. Now, I have no actually history of lying to anyone, but, sure, let’s going with me lying about not making that call. And naturally my complete confusion was 12 year old acting skills at their finest. Oh, and the phone call was on a night when I wasn’t even physically at my dad’s. Despite all that master planning, I was dumb enough to give the psychic my first and last name and that’s all the proof my dad needed. A week or so later the voice recording of the psychic session my dad had requested arrived. Interestingly it was not a 12 year old me but a 19 year old who had the exact same voice and speech pattern as my oldest sister. No one apologized to me. She didn’t even get in trouble for the call or the lying.

My mother is habitually late. Hours late. Everything she does is last minute and frantic. So when she needed to make a double layer birthday cake for my middle sister’s birthday dinner at a restaurant, she of course frantically made it at the last possible moment. Fresh out of the oven she ices and stacks the two layers then put them open-air on a plate and tells petite pre-teen me to take it and the gifts to the car and wait in the backseat. With too much to carry and no one even willing to open the car door for me, the slightest shift sent the piping hot top layer sliding off the melted icing and landing on the driveway. “DAMN YOU, [MY FULL NAME]! YOU CAN’T EVEN LET YOUR SISTER HAVE A NICE BIRTHDAY!” The rest of the evening was spent with no one being allowed to speak to me because I threw her cake on the ground in a temper tantrum.

That is adequate to convey my role as the scapegoat. It’s been this way my entire 35 years of life. If anything isn’t perfect in the family, somehow it’s my fault. And if everyone is getting along my older sisters will fabricate a lie new about me just for the drama of it.

But no more. This scapegoat has left the herd and is never returning.