You're Not Special

by Meghan Rienks

  As I got older, the feeling that I was a burden got stronger and stronger. My mom worked from home, which meant she was around more, but she was mostly in her office and not available. My dad wasn’t around a lot. He left for work before I was up in the morning and didn’t get home until late at night. I loved every moment I got to spend with my dad. They came few and far between, but when they happened, I was the happiest kid in the world. My mom used to say that I was his little princess, but she didn’t seem to say it with pride or love. I think she detested the fact that I loved him so much, and she constantly reminded me that he was not a good father. She said he loved his job more than he loved us, and no matter what, I was never going to be his first priority. She would bring up my half brother with an eyebrow raised, as if she was reminding me that my dad might walk out on us. My dad and an ex-girlfriend had a kid when they were teenagers. Despite that my brother and my dad made amends over the years, my mom liked to remind me of his past. I tried not to listen to her. It was hard when she’d remind me Christmas morning that my dad had nothing to do with the presents. She’d sign only her name, so I could be assured he had no part in it. Over the course of my life, I’ve kept a box of everything my dad has ever given me. Some things were just pens from his office, some cards, a cloth doll. One year he bought me a Bratz motorcycle and I loved it—not because of what it was, but because he gave it to me, and that meant my mom was wrong. At the end of the day, I knew my dad loved me. I also knew he loved his job, but I just chose not to participate in that competition. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

  By the time I was in middle school, I was spending more time hanging around my friends’ houses than my own. My friends’ parents always invited me to stay for dinner. They’d ask, “Your parents are okay with that?” I’d say that they were and that they had a meeting that night. Which sometimes was true. Other times it just sounded better than admitting that we rarely had family dinners. If I was lucky and I begged enough for a sit-down dinner, it wouldn’t happen until nine or ten p.m. Truthfully, I think my parents didn’t mind if I ate elsewhere. My dad wasn’t home anyway, and this way I was out of my mom’s hair.

  Despite this, I think my spending time at friends’ houses also made my mom feel threatened. She’d dissect a story I told about what we did that day, and she’d twist it into me, saying that I liked these other parents more than my own. She’d lash out and call me ungrateful, say how she worked more than these other mothers, and she had bigger things to worry about than they did. I loved “frivolous” things, like clothes and the arts, whereas she valued things that required her to use her brain, and she thought that I didn’t use mine enough. She told me that I was selling myself short—I was smarter than the grades I got, and if I actually put in the effort, I’d realize that. But I was putting in effort. It felt like nothing I did was ever good enough for her. If I did something well, it was ignored; however, if even the smallest thing was not to her liking, it was the end of the damn world. All I wanted was validation and praise and for her just to notice how badly I wanted to make her proud. But most often I would get the words “That’s it?” or “Is that all?” I brought it up one day. I told her it felt defeating, that I thought maybe if she could point out my successes as often as my shortcomings, maybe it would give me greater incentive. She patted me on the shoulder and said something like, “Oh, sweetie, I just know you’re more capable than this. I’m not impressed with it because I expect better than this.” I pretended she meant it as a compliment.

  My mom would never be considered a “warm” person. As a kid I used to screen her calls, hoping she’d leave a voice mail in which she said she loved me. By the time I graduated high school, I think I had accumulated about three. Truth be told, both my parents have always been confrontational. That’s probably why their fights were always a tug-of-war over getting the last word. If they weren’t fighting, they were talking about a previous fight or what the other person did wrong, why they hated them, and how vile they were. With a household of three, I became the audience. I probably asked them not to bring me into it about ten times each day. Eventually, I could just recite it by memory: “I love Mom/Dad and it makes me feel uncomfortable when you talk bad about my mom/dad in front of me. I don’t think it’s healthy for me to hear about this. Maybe you should talk to a friend instead?” Every time I said it to my dad, he shut up and apologized. “You’re right, Meggy,” he’d say with genuine remorse. My mom said she’d stop after she said just one last thing. “Don’t marry young. Don’t marry someone broke,” I remember her telling me. “Don’t end up like I did.” To which I’d nod, trying really hard to tell myself she didn’t regret the choice she made in having me.

  The tumultuous relationship between my mom and me settled down my senior year. I was sick with mono for almost the entire school year; it sentenced me to house arrest. With her working from home, it forced us to be around each other almost 24/7. I used to think her yelling eased up because of how ill I was, but in hindsight I think it may have been because this was the most control she’d ever had over me. By summer I was given a clean bill of health, just in time to get ready for college. I’ve said it before, but it deserves restating: I did not want to go to college. Period. I settled on UCR not because it was the best school I got into (lol); no, I chose it purely based on its proximity to Los Angeles, the city I intended to live in once I inevitably dropped out of school. By the time August rolled around, I had no idea how I had gotten to freshman orientation. I knew the second I stepped on campus that this wasn’t the school for me. My assumptions were confirmed when members of my orientation group made loud comments about me. Boys were spitting gross sexual remarks, and the girls were laughing along, all the while refusing to call me anything but Malibu Barbie. I quietly reminded them that they all lived closer to Malibu than I did. “I’m from NorCal,” I said. I should have thrown in a “hella” or a “hyphy”; maybe then they would have dropped it. I remember texting my mom about all of this in all caps, ending with the definitive: “THERE IS LITERALLY ZERO CHANCE IN HELL YOU’RE LEAVING ME HERE.” She was across campus at the “parents’ ” orientation, where she was having a similar experience—not the creepy remarks, just her utter disdain for the school I had haphazardly chosen. But I had already committed to UCR, and enrollment for all the other schools had started, so I really had no other choice. I was stuck, at least for now.

  When it all went downhill sophomore year, my parents were the first people I told. They tried to reason with me, asking if I had in fact done anything wrong to deserve this exile from my friends. My mom suggested making more of an effort, as she thought I was stubborn to a fault. I insisted that I was trying as hard as I could, but my efforts seemed to go unnoticed. I called my parents every day in hysterics, pleading with them to let me drop out, but they refused. I had been crashing on the couch in another friend’s apartment, but with the school year just beginning, it wasn’t really a permanent solution. After Thanksgiving break my parents and I agreed on a compromise: I would move out of the shared apartment and into my own, I’d stay in school, and I would be fine. They came down to Riverside to help pack my room up. Despite my pleas with my mom not to stir the pot, she couldn’t resist. She made passive-aggressive snaps at my roommates’ parents who were visiting for the weekend, and aggressive-aggressive comments at the girls. I begged her to just be the bigger person, but that wasn’t in her wheelhouse. When she started greeting them with “Oh, look, the bitches are back,” I excused myself to focus on unpacking at the new apartment. I like to think that this was her way of expressing maternal instinct, but in reality I suspect she just thrived on the drama. I lasted in Riverside for the remainder of the school year, but I lasted at UCR for only a quarter of that. Undeterred by the protests of my parents, I dropped out of school. I was nineteen, I was financially independent, and they knew they couldn’t stop me. Despite their objections, they helped me move to LA, something I will be eternally grateful for. They didn’t li
ke it, they didn’t support it, but they still helped unpack my boxes and build my furniture.

  While I was going through the roughest part of college, I had gotten into the habit of talking to my mom and dad multiple times a day. As I began to acclimate to LA and make new friends, I called them less and less. I realized that so much of our communication was initiated on my end, but I was okay with it. My schedule had filled up tremendously, and now I didn’t have time to keep them updated on every aspect of my life. We still talked on the phone once or twice a week, and I cut down my visits home to just Thanksgiving and Christmas. I loved going back to Marin for the holidays. My friends were all on college break, and we’d plan weeks in advance for everything we wanted to do in the short amount of time we were all home at the same time. While most of my friends’ schedules were filled with family time, mine wasn’t. I didn’t let much get to me in regard to my parents; I had given up being disappointed long before that. If I came home to visit for a weekend, I might see my parents for dinner only once. If I asked them if we could spend the day together or hang out, their schedules were already full. I rationalized the first few times as flukes, but as it became clear that this was just how it was, I finally said something. It was Christmas break and I had asked my mom if she wanted to watch a movie with me that night. She was going hiking all day with her friend, a Friday tradition they’d established when I was a kid. It was something she didn’t reschedule, even if it meant missing something important of mine. She begrudgingly agreed that if she had time that night, she might be able to “watch an episode of something.” We watched an episode of Gilmore Girls and then her phone buzzed. Her friends were all going out together, and as she made moves to meet them, I asked if she could stay. I wanted to spend time with her. She let out an exasperated sigh and said, “Fine, Meg. What do you want to do?” I offered a smile and said I just wanted to stay in together. She spent the remainder of the night agitated and looking at the clock. I tried to ignore it. The next morning was a Saturday, and I made my way into the kitchen to make tea. I called to her and asked if she might want to do something together that day. Before I could even suggest ideas on what that could be, she cut me off and reminded me that her life didn’t stop when I got home, and that she couldn’t just drop everything and hang out with me. You could hear a pin drop. Then she continued to do her crossword and eat her scrambled eggs. I just stood there in the kitchen frozen, tears streaming down my face. I tried to tell myself that she didn’t mean anything by it. Later that week I woke on Christmas Day to an empty house and not a note in sight. When my parents came through the door with the guests from out of town who they were entertaining, I asked where they had gone. My mom looked at me in surprise. “Oh! We forgot you were here!” She laughed, ushering everybody inside. “We all went out for brunch,” she said, smiling. Merry Christmas?

  I’d been completely financially independent by the time I was nineteen, and by about twenty-one I was living pretty comfortably. I felt so lucky to be making a living off something that used to be a hobby, but by no means was it easy work. Sure, it wasn’t brain surgery, but it also wasn’t a cakewalk. Suddenly, I was getting professional opportunities I never thought possible. While many of these opportunities had no monetary value, some did offer compensation. Money is not something I like to talk about. There’s this odd idea out there that it’s okay to ask “influencers” how much money they make, because to internet trolls, it’s not a real job. On this point, my mom would agree with them. She seemed to bring up my bank account balance at any opportunity she could. We’d be at dinner with her friends and their kids, and my mom would do that gasp you do when you’ve got great gossip you forgot to spill. She’d grab the arm of the friend across from her and say something like, “You’ll never believe how much money Meghan made from a hair tutorial!” I’d try to cut her off, but she’d howl with laughter as she heckled my job. She’d shake her head in disbelief, saying she couldn’t fathom how something so unimportant and frivolous was better compensated than her job as a psychologist, which “actually made a difference for people.” When our extended family would come to town, some of them would drunkenly comment about how I didn’t deserve the success I had. My mom just sat there, never once defending me. She even managed to shit-talk me, my profession, and the entire industry surrounding it to my boyfriend, Mats. It was the second time she met him. (The first was when he dropped a package off at my apartment. She invited him in for tequila and proceeded to show him embarrassing home movies of me, heckling the whole time.) At the time, we weren’t dating; he was my manager’s assistant. I had a work event to attend, and I brought my mom as my plus one. Mats congratulated her on raising such a talented girl—his words, not mine—and he said how impressed he was with my success in the space. My mother rolled her eyes and said, “I feel like anyone could have done it.”

  From the start of my YouTube career, my parents both expressed their opinions on my channel. They said I was “feeding into capitalist America” even when my content was things like advice and humor. My mom chose to focus on the “consumerism” I was perpetuating. I guess you could say it made me develop a thick skin quicker than most, as I was facing “h8rz” both online and at home. Compared to my mom, my dad has always been my cheerleader. Even in high school, when I’d work my ass off for a mediocre grade in stats, he’d scream and jump up and down in excitement and pride. He was the first person I’d call if I booked a role or landed a major campaign. He didn’t always understand what it entailed, but he was always happy for me. I stopped telling my mom the exciting things that were happening because her responses would just put a damper on it. She would find out through my dad what projects were in the works, or else she’d see them when the content was live. Her responses came in the form of either a phone call or a text message, and I often sensed a change in her priorities, as if my work would translate into something for her. In fact, when I gave her gifts, her excitement in receiving them seemed to directly correspond to their price. When she came to visit me in LA, I remember her inquiring about how much each designer purse in my closet cost. When I wouldn’t tell her, she’d look them up herself. She’d ask why I didn’t give them to her, why I didn’t spend that kind of money on her. I’d feel guilty, and promise to keep her requests in mind for Mother’s Day. This feeling of guilt got worse and worse as time went on. I no longer got excited about the opportunities that came my way. Instead of basking in the pride of my hard work and accomplishments, I dreaded what that success meant. The better I did, the worse I would feel about it.

  Even through all of this, my parents were still prominent features in my YouTube videos, and across my social platforms. Initially, when I first started in 2010, they both were strongly against ever being shown on camera. But as it became more widely accepted as a medium, they eased up on that. I didn’t go out of my way to include them, but when it happened, I noticed a shift in their behavior. If the camera was on them, or even in their vicinity, they didn’t fight. They plastered on smiles and put on a show. My mom would refresh the comments on my videos. If she found that the viewers found my dad far sweeter and her far bitchier, she wasn’t happy. My audience had taken a liking to my dad and his excitement to be on camera. Somehow that felt like it was my fault. So I started to include my mom more in filming, and she started matching his level of excitement. It didn’t feel genuine to me, but I didn’t care. Filming carved out a part of the day when I was guaranteed not to be yelled at or become collateral damage in one of their battles. But more than that, the footage was something tangible for me to hold on to. It was like the voice mails of my mom saying she loved me. It was a sliver of time caught on tape when I could pretend this version of reality was true.

  This is the part of the story where things began to break down. It was September, and my mother had come to visit LA for the weekend. This was the first time she had ever come to visit just for “fun,” which probably should have been a red flag. Her agenda became clear on her second nigh
t. It was probably ten or eleven, and we had already said our good nights. She nonchalantly waltzed into my dark bedroom and plopped herself on my bed, startling me out of my half-asleep state. She said that she had something to tell me, but she didn’t think she needed to say it. She said I surely already knew. I sat up and nodded. I did. I had been expecting this conversation my entire life. I just thought my parents would have the decency to sit down together to tell me they were getting divorced. She said it anyway. I think she liked how the word “divorce” sounded. She said it without emotion, waving her hands as if she were brushing off some useless gossip she had heard that day. She didn’t even pause for breath before she began rattling off all the terrible things about my father and their relationship, including references to their sex life and how she wanted to explore new men; I found it all startling and grossly inappropriate. She spoke as if I were an old friend she was grabbing cosmos with, rather than her daughter. She went on about how she deserved more and how my dad had never been her soul mate. She had settled for him, and when they got pregnant with me, she thought it would get better. As soon as I was born, she realized it wasn’t going to. She had always wanted to divorce him, but she had seen how much divorce affected her friend’s kids in middle school, so she put it off. She had wanted to do it when I reached high school, but then I got sick and the timing was bad. Then she was going to do it when I went to college, but because I had such a hard time with bullying there, she didn’t think I could handle it. When I dropped out of school, moved out to LA, and got settled, she was going to do it then. But then there was that whole “depression thing,” she said. The bottom-line message: If they had not had me, she could have ended it sooner, and she would have not been so miserable for the past twenty-two years. She owed it to herself and her happiness to make this change. She said that I owed it to her. She had stayed with my father for my sake, and now that I was an adult, I needed to act like one and support her decision. She told me that in order to maintain her lifestyle she needed “somewhere between $250K and $500K” to get a condo. She said it was kind of for me, too, as I’d be spending the holidays there. She didn’t ask for a loan or even ask for the money; it was said like a statement I had already agreed to. (Sometime later, she left me a long voice mail touching on a variety of topics, including that she wasn’t after my money and saying that she was not a “moneygrubbing bitch.”) I hadn’t said a word this whole time and she didn’t even seem to notice. She ended with the same “piece of advice” she always left me with: Don’t marry young and don’t marry broke. She smiled without a trace of sadness and said good night.