TW for incest (no details)

When I was younger – I’m a 12 year old part – my parents made me understand that my brothers were smart. In fact they were smarter than I was and as such I was supposed to be less taken care of, I guess. They needed more help because being smart was a tough job, in fact they were born that way (how lucky) and they needed support to be “smart”. They really spoke to me this way, I swear!

It seemed very abstract to me “being smart” (maybe that was because I was dumb). Wasn’t I smart? What did that even mean? Was I slow then? Or just “normal”? So I invented a meaning for myself. I would be in the same room as my brothers but I would think to myself “they are understanding everything faster than I am”, “they are seeing things I am unable to see”, “they must be reading the room and getting things correctly and I am not”. I believed that they would do studies I was never going to be able to do and that they would make better everything (better money, better friends, better relationships, better parents to their future children, own bigger houses), that if I had an opinion, it probably wasn’t their opinion and I was probably wrong (my thoughts in fact were probably useless). I was very far from their all-powerful intelligence in every way in my own head.

It also meant that when I needed something, if my mother was taking care of them, I couldn’t ask for help. I very quickly gathered that being smart meant needing time from my mother to help with homework and I had to figure it out myself. In fact, they probably needed help because contrary to me, they were going somewhere in life. They would achieve great things. I would probably not and it was pretty normal in these conditions that I would get less help in my homework. As time went by, I self-taught myself how to learn and ended up angry at my mother when she would disturb my learning process. She thought it meant she wasn’t needed and backed away. I thought it was sad, but I was also proud to be independent.

A few minutes ago, I talked to an adult part about how smart they were and she asked me “did they ever say anything smart?” and I thought to myself very hard if they had ever said something smart to me, in particular the one who gloated so much about being smart and I realized something, I have never actually heard him speak about something serious or read something serious. He likes playing violin, and I always assumed that was exclusive to smart people, just like music was (in fact, my father was into classical music and I thought I was definitely not at his level so although I could enjoy it, I would never know classical music like him – my brain would simply limit me in my understanding of the music you see?). I also very much thought being forced to do something and for someone to be that involved in your learning process, it must be because my father saw something in my brother and his violin that I didn’t have when doing my piano lessons. As my father focused on my gymnastics, so did I. It was the right thing to do, right?

But come to think of it, I have never heard my brother be smart. I have never seen him be smart. It was all put in my head by my mother and father, as a fact. His IQ being higher, I had to be the village joker, or the servant and he was the master (fun fact from the adult part, his IQ was 1 point higher than mine).

When I was really 12 (not now), I would rarely speak my mind and would usually only talk about facts, describing reality was my thing. Analyzing, judging and discussing it were things that belonged to smart people (a private club my parents and older brothers belonged to, that I apparently and according to them, failed to join at birth and be part of). So I would describe what I saw, instead of making connections. I would describe my day and limit it to what I could understand. If I had questions or didn’t understand something (in particular emotions inside my own head), I would never say it, because it was risky; they may then show me the powerfulness of their intelligence and I would find myself eating the crumbs of mine. I never really wanted to show this weakness of mine, but I did, every day, by simply existing with them.

I felt a lot of shame, I was like a poor addition to the magnificent team of people who would somehow do great things. Whenever my father would speak up about how smart his children were, I would push myself aside (them, not me). Whenever my mother would speak about me to me or others, she’d point out that I wasn’t half as smart as my friends or her sons and daughter. Somehow, I didn’t need help doing homework, she was useless to help me, she felt she didn’t understand me, it must be that she is so smart and I am so dumb that we live in separate worlds. She isn’t really my mother, and I am definitely not what she wanted as a daughter. What is funny is that I wrote this backwards, she isn’t my daughter and I am not the right mother. I am not sure why that is but it is funny. Maybe I should speak up and ask the therapist.

He believes we are smart. I guess considering we have spoken to him a million times more honestly than with our parents, it’s probably truer than what they were saying. He celebrated us for being smart. He thinks it is very cool to be smart, but it would also be perfectly fine if we weren’t. We’d have other things to celebrate. When we met him, I remember that we kept seeing mistakes in his English that we would never make and in the back of our mind, we could feel our mother’s point of view saying he was at our level. But the truth is, his qualities of mind, heart, and honesty are a lot better than being smart (in grammar). My mother was good at grammar, but her heart is not in the right place.

The same adult part recently told me that our brother assaulted us. When she told me the first time, I thought I understood it wrong, he was so smart. He loved me right? Also, isn’t that a dumb thing to do? I also felt very ashamed of being yet again powerless and weak. Showing them I could do homework right and get better grades than my brothers all on my own definitely was not working to prove my being smart. I wondered often if I’d ever belong with them, I felt so very different. Now that I have written this text, I see how I am different but that’s good. I don’t think they deserved better treatment than I did. My brother didn’t have all-encompassing knowledge. He could be wrong and he was definitely immensely wrong in assaulting us. He didn’t have the right to do that at all. In fact, I am allowing myself to judge him and tell you all that he is a bad person.

Prudence (12)