Innocence

    My name is Sara Elkins. You can call me whatever you want though. I really don't care. What you are reading is my life.  This is not going to be edited like a "Harry Potter" book to make more sense and be more entertaining to you. You may, in fact, hate this story. You may read this and immediately give it one star. You may cry. You may smile at some parts. You may laugh. You may think or feel confused. But if anything, I am quite sure it is not a happily ever after tale.
    I popped out of my mother's uterus on November 4th, 1992. Wait...scratch that. I actually didn't pop out at all. It took my mom four hours to "pop" me out because my head was so big. After staying in the hospital for two more weeks (I had an infection) my parents drove me home to a cute, pastel blue house. Life was easy for me. I was a baby. I was in my own world. I was in baby bliss. That's all I really remember. I was your usual baby.
    Well it all changed when my mom sat me on her lap and said, "Sara, a baby girl will come soon from my tummy to play with you. And you will be the big sister. That is a big job! Do you think you can do it?" I don't think I really understood what my mom was telling me, but what I knew was there would be another girl in the house. My clothes that were too small on me would be hers and that my old baby bib that I didn't use anymore would no longer be mine. At the baby shower, when my mom opened the gifts, I cried on my bed the whole time because the presents weren't for me, they were for the baby. I wondered why this baby got all these presents. I wondered why this baby was so much more special then me. After all, she wasn't even born yet. Then...the day came. July 20th, 1995. The first time I held her, I recall sticking my tongue out at her. My mom told me that her name is Becky and that I am her big sister.
    Seven months went by...They actually went quite fine, considering me being very jealous. Then, I remember watching Becky crawl in her crib. I don't remember what I saw, but something was very different about her. I tugged my mom's shirt one morning and told her this. She responded, "Sara, everyone is different, don't worry". Then a couple days after, my family and I were driving in our little Honda Sudan, and we stopped outside a bagel shop to pick up some coffee for my mom. While my dad walked away into the bagel shop to buy the coffee, my mother, Becky, and I waited inside the car. Then I looked at Becky, and noticed her shaking and jerking her body. I said, "Mommy, look at Becky she's dancing". My mother looked back at Becky and started cursing under her breath. She called 911 and the ambulance brought her to the hospital. I asked, "Mommy, what's wrong with Becky bop?" She replied, "Becky had a seizure," I didn't know what a seizure was so I decided to keep quiet. Two hours later, my sister Becky was diagnosed with epilepsy.
    Now I’m not saying that Becky ruined my life, in fact I love Becky just the way she is. But explaining epilepsy to a three year old is basically impossible and overwhelming. You can't just feed the definition into their heads. It's something the child will learn on its own. When my mom first explained it to me, I thought it was something like strept throat that would just go away over time. Then I thought that epilepsy was just a characteristic. Like some people have blue eyes, some people have red hair, and some people have epilepsy. I still see it that way. It’s just a trait that makes her unique, but I didn’t know it would be such a big deal.  Also, as Becky got older, I noticed that she was very different from the other kids her age. She walked differently (because of her poor balance), she developed a stutter, and she took thirty-six pills a day, while all I had was a Flintstone vitamin. That helped me get the point. People came up to me and said, “Sara, you have to be the big girl because your family doesn’t need another problem”. So while red hair and blue eyes were just characteristics that could even be considered beautiful and good, this was supposedly a problem, and I had to be a big girl and shape up. That was when I really realized how serious it was. 
    The thing people don’t realize, is that when they tell a four year old that they have to be a “big girl”, especially someone like me, I listen. What sucks now is I have lost my childhood, trying to satisfy everyone else who thought they knew everything and who thought they knew what would be good for me. I lost most of my innocence before I hit age thirteen. When I was just four, and all the other kids played with Barbies and Legos, I already knew how to inject Diastat into my sister when she had a seizure. I’ve been on seven planes by myself before I was seven (to visit my sister and mom when they went to a hospital in California), I have seen a seizure at least once a week ever since I was three and since my mother and father were forced to always pay attention to Becky, I had to be my own mother and my own father. It screwed me up. I am not exaggerating. I have the maturity of a thirty-one year old, and in many cases I can seem even older then that. To tell you the truth it’s disgusting.
    You know how it is when you try talking two a one year old and you can barely understand each other, but other one year olds can understand each other perfectly? This is how it feels everyday for me in school. It feels like the other kids are speaking a different language then me. They care about different things and they’re naïve and unsure. It has always been hard for me in school. I haven’t made many friends because of the lack of the connection. People have teased me ever since kindergarten when I was held under the playground slide by a bunch of boys and called names by girls. I would come home in tears. Then when my mom would pick me up from school, people would see the handicap sticker and call me handicapped because they thought I was the one with the handicap rather then my sister.
    Then it got worse. I started cutting myself. It really struck me how something so bad for you can feel so good. I felt like nothing. Just a little insignificant invisible person that no one could understand. I wanted to feel something. I didn’t want to feel so painfully numb.  Fortunately I stopped.
    I understand this is what my life is. I understand that you should accept what you have. But that doesn't mean that you can't do anything about it. If you want to just take it then you might as well just press the button and watch your life turn into a mess that will only run down a disposal, because that is all that will happen. I ask of you to live life. To not only accept this life as your own, but to live it and bring out the best in it and make it better for yourself. Have any of you read "The Wizard of Oz"? If you have you remember those glasses and when you put them on you saw everything as green. I like to think that there are glasses that you can put on that give you the perspective of everything being negitive. If you keep just watching your life fall like it's a TV and you're not doing anything about it, you have no right to say that your life is terrible because you've done nothing whatsoever. You are just taking up space on God's globe if this is the case.
    So live...love...laugh...learn...but whatever you do take off those glasses.