My mother was my first bully.

Other people saw her differently than I did, but other people were not the product of her husband’s affair. The audacity of the situation led to it.

Never, ever—not even once—was my birthday celebrated. It was always postponed to another date.

One year, I celebrated it with my father. I was so happy at the time to share my birthday with him. Both of our names were on the cake. My birthday was in December. My dad’s was in March.

You have no idea what that will do to a child.

When I was three, my mother tried to change the date of my birthday. So sad, really.

She was present at my birth. She was a pediatric nurse and was there. She told me that my birth mother screamed over and over to her husband, “She is your baby!”

Truth be told, I wasn’t.

The truth would stay silent until after my father passed away.

No one would take me to his bedside. I had to pay a family member $400 to take me, and by the time I got there, he had already passed away.

My assistant at the time came along to drive me home. She said it was the cruelest thing she had ever seen.

It was nothing new to me.

When my son died, I heard from none of my father’s side of the family. No cards. No calls.

I asked my mom, “Why is no one sending condolence cards?”

Years later, I called my father’s first cousin just to say hello. She asked me how my children were.

I told her about my son.

She said she had just had lunch with my mother the week before, and my mother told her Korey was doing fine.

He had died five years earlier.

I had no obituary. That was my choice because I didn’t want so many people to know he had taken his life.

I found my mother’s cruelty even more extreme after my father was gone.

My daughter and I had no chance when we became homeless. My family wouldn’t even answer the phone. They didn’t care what happened to us, and no one even told me when she died.

When I was little, my brothers would do whatever they wanted to me. I was told to ignore it.

That was when my father told me to be like a duck and let whatever your brothers do to you just roll off like water on a duck.

He even called me Duckie.

The only problem was, I wasn’t a fuckin’ duck.

I was a five-year-old girl.

Before I could even walk, my brothers dumped an entire container of baby powder on my head. I was crawling around on the floor with it in my eyes, and I was coughing.

“Boys will be boys.”

But a pediatric nurse does not then get your father to film it.

I was regularly taken to the ER because I would stop breathing and turn blue. So they filmed this and proceeded to play the reel every Friday night to my brothers’ delight.

I would cry, and they would call me OCK because when I cried, my eyes went slanty like a Chinese person, they said.

These are all facts.

This was the way it was.

My father never intervened.

One time, he told me, “Stay down when your brother hits you so he will stop sooner.”

WTF!!

I started buying items at yard sales and storing them in the attic at the age of 14. I was buying things for my apartment.

When I turned 18, I left.

Just in time.

My oldest brother had graduated to butcher knives. He would wake me up with them. He said he wanted to kill me or himself.

The police came and left.

Nothing happened.

I knew it was time, and I left right after that.

No one ever did anything about what was happening, and most people never knew.

Back then, you didn’t air out your dirty laundry.

My mother hated my artwork. I was self-conscious about it for many years.

When I started Hopscotch Couture, she said I should have gone into marketing. If I could sell my work, I could sell anything.

That was who my mom was to me.

Not a fan.

So imagine people trying to bully me now.

My mom said I used to cry so much as an infant that the neighbor would come and check on me. My pediatric nurse was having a hard time taking care of me.

I had a serious heart defect and Chiari malformation Type I, a serious brain defect, and I regularly couldn’t breathe.

I was never supposed to survive.

In 1999, I had massive open-heart surgery at UPENN in Philadelphia.

I drove myself to and from that surgery.

I had no visitors, and it was one of the scariest things I ever endured.

Today, I have to prove I even had it because the surgery scar is on my back, something that was done in 1999 at a teaching hospital. This was a thoracic procedure.

Since people cannot see that scar, they assume I am lying and have mental problems.

It is so bad that I had to have my records sent to me from so many years ago. They had to get them from microfilm.

Can you imagine going to the ER with complications from pneumonia and being treated like a psych patient, denied medical care until you consent to a psych evaluation?

Well, that is my life right now.

Quite scary.

And yet, oddly familiar.