This art featured in my memoir, Incandescence: Rising Above Darkness is included as a moment of serenity between chapters and does not necessarily have any literal connection to the story.
Incandescence: Rising Above Darkness Excerpt Chapter #28 Heavy Happiness
When I was five, I asked my mother, “Why is my big sister mean to me?”
She answered, “She is jealous, dear.”
“What is jealous?”
“Jealous is when someone thinks you have something they do not.”
“I only have seashells, stones, and feathers. She doesn’t like them. I don’t have anything she likes.”
“Yes, you do, dear.”
“What?”
“Happiness.”
“Why doesn’t she have happiness?”
“Because she doesn’t like herself.”
“Maybe she would like herself if she was nice.”
I thought maybe my sister would be nice to me if I wasn’t happy. My brother wasn’t happy, and she was not nice to him, so I decided to stay away from her but keep my happiness.
Soon after, my mother, brother, younger sister, and my older sister’s four-year-old son came for a visit. My older sister was using drugs, so I told her the family would visit her in town. She got angry and went to the police and told them we had kidnapped her son. The police looked into it and knew about the drug dealing house where she was living. They knew about me because of all the work I did in town. They came to me and said, “You can take guardianship of your nephew, or he will be put in an overcrowded group home.” My brother and younger sister went back to California, and my mother stayed until her asthma got so bad she had to leave.
So even though I moved two thousand miles from my family, I still ended up caring for my four-year-old nephew alone. The difficult part was having to go to court and defend him against my now hostile drug addict sister and her dangerous friends. It took seven months of custody proceedings to decide where my nephew would be placed. At one of the appearances, my sister’s friend came into the courthouse restroom after me and said, “If you were my sister I would kill you!”
I said, “I sure am glad we are not related because I’d be dead, and you’d be in prison, so who would take care of the child?”
Clare Cooley
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