Broken

Our family is what my father would like to say as "broken." Each one of us is different in our own ways. We're not broken in a way that a family can be; my parents are still married and all of my brothers and I are pretty healthy. I know we are somewhat different, but why are we "broken?"

My parents were a cute kind of couple; they met at Travis Air Force Base as they were on the same intramural softball team on base. After a few months of dating, they decided to elope because it was much easier than trying to bring my mother's family from Spokane, Washington and my dad's family from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, together. My father is of average height, with his balding hair very short and has dark brown hair with large speckles of gray hair interspersed upon his head. He has a large build and people view him as a bit intimidating, but it depends on the mood--at least with his children anyway. My father can be a bit hot tempered, but has simmered through the years because, I think, we have gotten older and will only show his disappointment. My mother is almost the opposite; she’s very calm and soft spoken with her being around five foot eight or average height with short, light brown hair with streaks of gray if she didn’t dye her hair in a while. Her medium brown eyes are very calming and I get along best with her, personality wise and just in general; she was the one to tell us if we were likely to go to a friends house and to calm us down if our father said things he didn’t mean and so on.

They then had three sons, P.J., Matt, Danny (in order from oldest to youngest) and one daughter, me. People say we are a rich family because we live in beautiful brown house, right next to an alfalfa field with an acre of space surrounding it. Living near cornfields and a few other houses in the town of Greene, where they only have a volunteer fire department, town hall, and a church. The "Big Brown House" (which was what people called it in town because of its distinguishable nature on that country road) that is named as our own, has a dark brown coat on the vinyl siding with beautiful trees that my father put in himself, now very tall maple trees that litter the front yard surrounded by marigolds of oranges, yellows, reds, along with other colorful flowers.

The inside is filled with beautiful coffee colored walls and the wooden banister leading up the stairs to an open kitchen and living room to the left of the stairs. The yellow colored kitchen and dining room area was purposely set up in the house because of its happy color, but seems almost ridiculous now to see. The house throughout the years has been fixed up with different colors, every room, except for my own that still has the light pink wallpaper with a cute little border of light blue houses repetitively along the walls. But with the added touches of several collages of pictures over the years of friends and trips along with several posters of guitar chords, art I made for classes, and a big kitty poster, it adds a nice touch--at least I think so. My father tried taking down the wallpaper border, but gave up because he knew it would be too much trouble for me to go take it all down off the walls. So my room is the only one with its wallpaper still intact. It could be that my father was too tired of re-doing the walls of the house by the time he got to mine, but I think he just didn’t want to upset me and always had a kind of sore spot for me being the only girl of four children.

Everything seemed alright; our family was never really rich, but we never had too many financial problems or anything. Except this one time when I was about eleven, my mother had to take a trip to Puerto Rico to fix a plane over there (she is an electrician for cargo planes like C-70s) and they get some free time. Well, she decided to go to a casino with other co-workers and I remember it was a hot summer afternoon, and my father was on the phone with my mom. He started to get this angry tone that he gets and face got very tense as his brown eyes grow darker with sweat shining his forehead and balding head, he starts yelling and goes to his room down the hall and slams the door. You could hear his voice and he comes back out with our jar of coins and had us starting to roll the coins and kept ranting about how my mother has made us go bankrupt. I remember sitting there trying to roll up pennies, and wondering what’ll happen if we don’t recover from this. I seems to remember a lot of the bad memories just as well as the good ones, which many people may suppress, which is why I’m not surprised that I remember this random memories.

Not much was said after this incident and we kept the handsome house. The family evolved in personality while the Wagner kids started to grow up. Matt became the dedicated student, being on the Dean’s List a few times last year here at Ohio University. Being the shortest of the family, his five foot and eight inches stature is athletic, with wavy, short brown hair with matching eyes that could pick out anything wrong in anyone or anything. When we were younger, we were close in age being the middle children and got along quite well. Today it’s the opposite though; I’m more easy going and take life as it comes while he is the one who worries and prepares for everything. I noticed things weren’t the same between us when he was driving us home an hour-ish after midnight after getting the last book of the seventh year of Harry Potter and we were having a good time. We were driving in the summer night air, with the windows slightly open bringing in the chilly air as we kept driving the half an hour back to our home. I don't remember what really sparked it, but he got upset with me and started yelling at me. "I can't believe you. . . you are so stupid! All you think about is yourself," and a lot of other horrible remarks that I was trying to tune out at the time until he said, "Lisa thinks you're selfish too!" That really hit me hard; Lisa was our foreign exchange student we had my junior year because my father didn't want to have a male foreign exchange student because he was scared by his coworkers that he was "bringing a date for Becca" and that changed his mind immediately (my father felt and still feels a need to protect me, so me being the only girl can have its downfalls too). This led to Matt dating Lisa secretly for a few months and he was still with her during this drive home after what should’ve been a wonderful night getting the last of the Harry Potter books. I was upset because we were such good friends and I thought Lisa thought well of me. And yet, I said nothing to him, which just made him more angry. Agreeing with him makes him angry also (Danny and Matt inherited this anger trait from my father, which would always get them in trouble with others or even each other). Later, I find out that Lisa never said anything of the sort when I asked her on Skype--using a computer and webcam to talk to someone--and Matt denied ever saying it. As flustered as I was, I thought it was just him being angry and he still loved me and we pretended it never happened. I am more social than my brother and liked to help out my friends, which he finds is a fault. Don’t get me wrong, I try to help out my family, but I feel differently towards family and show better interest in helping out my friends if I can. It could be the lack of unconditional love that my friends have for me, them choosing me to be with and accepting me, that I need; all Matt finds in me are faults, which makes me think he doesn’t love me and he definitely doesn’t say or show it, especially as the years progress. You could say Matt is broken because he has had severe ear problems with two ear surgeries and received Ulcertificus Colitis, which means that he had to suffer through an ulcer in the lining of the large intestine during his freshmen year of college (WebMd).

There is Danny, the youngest of the siblings, and is the most social of us. He’s very gifted in sports; it could be baseball, basketball, football and he could play those and more pretty well. That's why I think Danny is the most outgoing, being somewhat close to the "Jock" kind of personality, but being smart also. His hair being straight and wacky from the innumerable amount of cowlicks, he's very tall and skinny, but has a very athletic toned body. Danny goes from sport to sport a lot, so you'll find him sleeping most of the time he's home and not really doing chores that my Dad would end up doing for him. I’m getting along better with Danny as I’ve drifted away from Matt, most likely because of his more fun nature opposed to Matt’s negative and pessimistic views of everything. The thing that makes him “broken” is that he’s smart yet, doesn’t apply himself. Unfortunately, that’s how the eldest of the Wagner children, P.J., ended up being.

P.J. was a very smart guy; getting perfect Math ACT scores, the test consisting of 60 questions “with 14 covering pre-algebra, 10 elementary algebra, 9 intermediate algebra, 14 plane geometry, 9 coordinate geometry, and 4 elementary trigonometry,“ according to Wikipedia (and he also got a perfect Math score on the SAT). My parents were so proud of their brown-haired, hazel eyed, first born son, except when he started not doing homework, that would then lead to him averaging C's and B's instead of acing all of his classes. P.J. managed to join the Navy ROTC at Penn State University. And one winter night, he was
watching "Passion of the Christ" in a local movie theater with friends when he fainted in the men's bathroom from all the blood from the movie. After receiving a concussion from hitting his head on a sink in the Du Bois movie theater, he's never been the same; P.J. eventually dropped out of Penn State to
a local, community branch of Kent State University, and started working at Kraft Maid. After not finishing it at the Trumbull campus of Kent State, he continued working at Kraft Maid until he was laid off and moved in with my Grandmother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania working as a waiter for a Japanese (or sushi) restaurant. I know that P.J. is above such things, but I feel useless because we all know his smarts should not be wasted, and yet they are wasting away . . .

When coming home for the long winter break, I really enjoyed being with my family after living four hours away from them in Southeast of Ohio. We were talking to my father about his knee replacement surgery (he busted his knee years ago doing sports and finally brought up the courage to replace his knee after doctors telling him he needed it) when my father said he had to talk to us about something important. Of course, I got really worried, inheriting the “worry wart” trait from my dad’s side, and he explained to Matt and I how they spent my college loan money. They told us that my mother and himself got into gambling to hopefully help pay for college and ended up using so much money that they took from the Athletic Boosters fund--my dad was treasurer--and eventually paid them back. I was totally stunned; they never mentioned any problems on the phone and acted like life was good. It brought me back to a time where I was away at band camp for two weeks and when I got back, my dad told me that my kitten accidentally ate driveway sealant and the other kitten was all by his lonesome. Except this was my loan money, that I needed to get through college. I was just in disbelief as my father asked me to “forgive” them. I did because they are my family, as I forgave Matt for not helping me study for the Psychology course that my parents thought would be beneficial to me to have my smart, hardworking brother help me.


“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go by any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material” (F. Scott Fitzgerald).


As for me, I know that I’m definitely broken; who isn’t? Within our family, the meaning of “broken” means more to me. I have my faults, as I well know that the rest of my family does, but I’m willing to accept them for who they are. It’s just frustrating when you feel that you are in a room of people that you thought you knew, and now feel detached from. My father says that we’re “broken” in a joking manner, but I think he believes in it. Our family doesn’t feel like a family anymore; throughout the whole break my father explained that we need to show affection towards one another and spend as much time as a family as we possibly could, but we hardly knew any of this. Our family wasn’t affectionate to start out with--we would say “I love you” on the phone, at least if we remembered and helped each other out on occasion--but we really didn’t hug each other, unless the occasion could’ve called for it, but not likely. That could’ve been my parents fault, but we should’ve known better because other families knew better; parents would always go to their child’s events. I remember getting first chair clarinetist in honor bands my senior year, and my parents couldn’t make it to any of the concerts. I had two solos when I attended Akron’s Ohio Band Director’s Conference Honors Band, and Matt and Danny arrived late and missed me tremendous solo in a Bach piece that I can’t remember the name of. I’ve just never really felt that kind of love that Danny would get; my father would go to every one of his basketball games and feel awful when he didn’t and I had to pretend that everything was okay when he couldn’t come to Solo and Ensemble contest for six years, every year having a solo. I’m still bitter about the whole ordeal, even though I know that my parents don’t know much of anything about music, I just thought they could be like other people and their families and go and support their child. I never got the “Great job Becca” that other people would get from parents as I wondered around waiting for my ride to come or just leaving the scene in general. I tried to forgive my parents, but after spending my loan money and now money that my grandmother was going to give me money that could help pay towards doing marching band next year or even towards college, will be used on the family (I’m not sure towards what, but I’m hoping it is used wisely. . . Fingers crossed).

This family could never be the same happy family I once thought it to be. The simple, loving family was gone; it was replaced with bitterness of the cold hard reality that my parents have tried to keep hiding from us for so long. For my family, finance was the final blow that has shattered our delusive perfect picture into an empty frame.


Works Cited
The Quote Garden. 5 January 2008. Guillemets, Terri. 7 March 2009 http://www.quotegarden.com/family.html.

WebMd: Ulcerative Colitis Guide. 3 November 2008. Healthwise Incorporated. 9 March 2009 http://www.webmd.com/ibd-crohns-disease/colitis-guide/ulcerative-colitis-topic-overview.


Wikipedia: ACT (examination). 2 March 2009. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 9 March 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_(examination).