Ian and Meghan: Matt’s perspective

I could probably write a book about Ian and Meghan, the stepsiblings who I grew up with from the age of six until eighteen and then lost when I was twenty.

I probably will someday.

Losing a brother and sister who you spent the majority of your childhood with is one of the greatest tragedies of my life.

Like Kelli, I remember meeting Ian and Meghan on Halloween, and I remember being somewhat confused as to why they were in our home. My mother and father were still married and together, but it was clear to me, even at my young age, that something strange was going on. 

Just a few weeks later, we stepped off the bus and found Ian and Meghan’s father, Neil, in our living room with our mom. Mom told us that she and Dad were getting a divorce. Neil presented himself as a social worker who was there to help us through our parents’ separation.

I knew better. I had seen him around the house too often to believe it.

A few weeks later he was living with us, and Ian and Meghan began staying with us every weekend. 

The integration of Neil into our home as a fulltime stepfather was not easy. In many ways, I never accepted him as my stepfather, which probably explained why I spent more and more time away from the home as I got older. By the time I was sixteen, I was managing a McDonald’s restaurant 45 minutes from our home and working 40-50 hours a week. I moved to an unheated basement bedroom in order to further extract myself from the family and began using the hatchway as my primary entrance and exit from the home. I avoided my parents as much as possible as I got older, because of my distaste for Neil and my understanding of how their relationship came to be.

But the integration of Ian and Meghan into my life was instantaneous and perfect. Almost overnight, they became my brother and sister. I became hard to imagine a time in our lives when they weren’t a part of the family. Ian was a tougher kid than Jeremy and challenged me more often, but it was good for me. Being the eldest, I was always in charge. Ian still deferred to my age most of the time, but if there was a voice of dissent, it came from Ian.

Meghan was the sweetest of the bunch. The most innocent. Kelli was tiny for her age but was tough as nails. If bitten by a dog, Kelli was the kind of kid who would bite back. She relied on her big brother’s protection from time to time, but most often, she took care of herself.

Meghan was four years younger than me, and I suddenly found myself with a tiny little sister in need to watching and protecting. I liked this. She was like the baby sister I never quite had because of the closeness in age between Kelli and me. I would take her on amusement rides for the first time, teach her to ride her bike and keep a wary eye on her when we hiked through the back forests.

Of course, being brothers and sisters, there was the occasional spat. One of the toughest things for me to deal with was the clear favoritism that Neil demonstrated for his children, and especially Ian. When given the choice between doing something with Ian or with me, Ian was always the chosen one.

In 1983 my Little League baseball team reached the championship game. On an adjacent field, Ian was playing a regular season game.  Despite the fact that my team was playing for a championship that we would ultimately win and I would be named an all star for the league, Neil remained on the adjacent field watching Ian play.

It was a moment that I never forgot.

Kelli’s description of the disillusion of our Mom and Neil’s marriage was sanitized to say the least. Perhaps she doesn’t know all the details.

I moved out of the house after graduation, moving in with friends and continuing to manage McDonald’s restaurants. The word “college” was never spoken to me throughout my entire childhood. Not by parents nor teachers, While my friends were spending their Saturdays taking SATs, I wasn’t even sure what an SAT was. 

Instead, I was given bath towels, a microwave oven, and a set of pots and pans for the birthdays and Christmases leading up to graduation. I was sent a clear message, through these gifts and the complete absence of talk about my future, that my time in the family home was coming to an end. I graduated in the top ten percent of my high school class, yet no one spoke about college to me, and I became to afraid and embarrassed to ask. In my mind, college had become something for people not like me.

A year after I left the home, Neil lost his job. I have been told that he lost his job for actions that were unethical and possibly illegal, but I have never been able to confirm these stories. He would eventually convince my disabled mother to accept a lump sum disability payment from the state in order to invest in a multi-level marketing company. Needless to say, the money would be gone a year later, along with Neil and our childhood home. He stopped paying the mortgage and didn’t tell my mother until foreclosure proceedings were eminent. Then he left for a canoe trip to Maine, leaving a note on the kitchen counter that informed my mother that he was leaving her and that the house would be gone in two months.

My mother showed me the note. It was despicable.

Just like that, Ian and Megan were ripped from my life.

With opposing parents, it became impossible to remain together.

My mom would descend into poverty with my sister, and I was suffer from a lifetime of guilt as I found myself equally impoverished and eventually homeless and unable to help her. Eventually I discovered that Neil was living in the same apartment complex as a friend, about two miles from my home. I made it a routine to drive over to his apartment about once a month or so and bash in his windshield with a baseball bat.

I have seen little of Ian and Meghan since our parents’ divorce. I attended Meghan’s wedding years ago and saw many of her family members who I once called Uncle and Aunt, but I avoided Neil entirely. The family had apparently heard that I planned on writing a memoir about my experiences as a child. A couple of the uncles seemed less than enamored about the idea, but one uncles offered to sit down and “dish me all the dirt” when I was ready.

I recently reconnected with Ian through Facebook. He’s married with children now. He only lives a couple hours away from me. Meghan is even closer.

It’s so strange. The boy who was my brother is not a father with children of his own. The girl who was my sister is a mother with children of her own.

All of their accomplishments and joys over the past twenty years, lost to me because of our parents’ divorce. I often wonder what it would have been like to have Ian and Meghan in my life for all these lost years. I try to imagine them at my own wedding, meeting my own children, sharing Christmas Eves and birthdays like we once did as children.  

Losing the brother and sister who I spent the majority of my childhood with remains one of the greatest tragedies of my life.