Lost and Found

Lost and Found

By Alexis Trevino

            One time I made a wish. I wished that Tabitha was my mother and Alana was my sister. This is one of those ‘be careful what you wish for’ circumstances.

            I love my mom. Most people love their mothers. I love my dad too, and all my brothers. I grew up a normal girl. My parents wouldn’t let my brother and I cross the street, so all the neighborhood kids came to our house to play. We had a jungle gym with a rock climbing wall, a slide, some swings, and a rope. Daddy built a bridge that led to the deck he also built. Tasia, my best friend at the time, overheard an argument I had with mama. I don’t remember what the argument was about, but it made me mad.

           

I had come back from visiting Tabitha and Alana. Daddy told me she was a friend from work that wanted to see me sometimes, and he would let me spend the weekend with her. She had a daughter, Alana, and we were friends for as long as I can remember. I loved Tabitha. She drove a dark blue Thunderbird convertible. The last time I remember seeing her, she looked like an angel. The sun was setting when she finally arrived at my house, and the light was hitting her perfectly. She had on her sunglasses and a plain white shirt, her perfectly waved hair glowing. She called me “Lex,” and when I think about it, I still hear her voice saying it. Even just that one word was angelic. I never actually spent that much time with her. All my time was with Alana. She was only two years younger than me. We played that game “Go Fishin,’” with the fish that had magnets in their mouths and the fishing poles has magnets too. It was our favorite game. She was the reason I wanted a sister so badly. Tabitha was never around too much. She stayed in her room mostly, and I wouldn’t see her again until she took me back home. I don’t know why I looked up to her so much.

I was telling Tasia about the argument and I said “I wish Tabitha was my mom.” I wonder if my wish had come true. That maybe if I hadn’t wished it, it wouldn’t be so. I thought maybe it was possible that my wish changed the past of everyone in my life, that history was rewritten to make it true. If I didn’t wish it, maybe Tabitha never would have been my biological mother.

            I found out the truth when I was eleven years old. Daddy received a phone call one night, and then I had a sister. When my parents found out that Alana was in a bad place, they sat me down and explained to me what I hadn’t known my whole life. Nine years later, I’m still having a hard time figuring it out. We went to the CPS place to see her. I was five the last time I had seen Alana, but here she was again, right in front of me. We looked like twins, except she was really short. My parents earned full custody of her right before Christmas in 2004. Tabitha was a meth addict, among other things. All this time visiting her, I never knew she was the lady that birthed me, and all this time knowing Alana, I never knew she was my sister. My wish was now a confusing reality. It took a lot of time, a lot of counseling, a lot of tears and a lot of heartache for my parents to try to teach my newly found sister right from wrong. Tabitha taught her to steal and lie. She made Alana cook her food, but she was only allowed to eat the leftovers from her plate. Alana grew up in a sort of hell, never knowing what real love felt like. Although my parents gave her everything, she left a couple weeks after she turned eighteen this past February, and hasn’t come back. She lived nine years in almost-hell with Tabitha, and nine years in sanctity with my parents, my three brothers, and me. I haven’t heard from her, neither have my brothers. It doesn’t make us sad because when she came to live with us for good, she brought a piece of her old life with her. Now that she is gone, our home feels like a home again, but my parents have a capacity for love that makes you cry when you feel it, makes you want to save the world, makes you want to give the same amount of love back in return. Their love for a broken child is so pure that only God could give them peace for her leaving, which they haven’t received yet.

            Throughout the years of thinking about this craziness, I’ve learned that Tabitha has nine children, none of them in her custody. I have met four of them and I will probably never know the rest. Mama has three boys of her own. Two of them are not my blood, but love is what makes a family. My youngest brother is the best boy (soon to be a man) that the world has, or ever will, create. During this journey of my twenty years of life, I feel like I have experienced things some people never will, and it makes me who I am. I grew to despise Tabitha, hating her at some points because she abandoned us for drugs and maybe even worse things. I have felt unloved and unwanted, and lost since I was eleven years old. But what has taken me almost twenty-one years to learn is that in Tabitha’s selfishness, she did the most selfless thing: she gave me my mom. This brought me to the conclusion that I was never lost at all and I didn’t need finding, because I had the one person I needed the most in my heart the whole time. Blood does not make a family, love does. I never called Tabitha mom, but I know who my real mom is.