My name is Diana Meyers. I’m 28 years old, and 15 years ago, my own parents threw me out of the house when I was just 13. Last week, they showed up at my uncle Harold’s will reading—the man who raised me for the past 15 years—with confident smiles and a private attorney, absolutely certain they’d walk out with millions.
But when attorney Margaret Morrison opened that sealed envelope and began reading, those smiles vanished.
And when she reached clause seven, my mother—the woman who once declared I was no longer her daughter—shot to her feet, her face chalk white, her mouth hanging open in disbelief. To understand why my mother reacted that way, I need to take you back to the summer of 2010, when I was a 13-year-old girl who believed she was the root cause of every problem in her family.
Part 1: The Invisible Daughter
Growing up in a modest house in Southeast Portland, I learned early that love in our family wasn’t distributed equally. It was rationed, portioned out like precious resources during a famine, and I always seemed to be at the back of the line.
My father, Richard Meyers, worked as an auto mechanic at Morrison’s Auto Shop downtown.
He was a man of few words, and most of those words agreed with whatever my mother said. I don’t think I ever heard him voice an opinion that contradicted hers. He was a shadow, present but not really there, existing in the spaces between my mother’s decisions.
My mother, Sandra, worked the checkout line at Fred Meyer and ran our household with the precision of someone who always knew exactly who deserved what.
She had a ledger in her mind, invisible but absolute, and it tracked every resource, every dollar, every ounce of attention. The allocations were never equal.
My sister Tiffany was two years older than me. She had Mom’s golden blonde hair, Mom’s bright blue eyes, Mom’s easy laugh.
Everyone said so.
“Tiffany looks just like you did at her age, Sandra.” And Mom would beam, her whole face lighting up with pride and recognition, like she was looking at a mirror that reflected her own youth back at her. I looked like our late grandmother—Dad’s mother who had passed away when I was three. Brown hair that never held a curl, brown eyes that Mom called “muddy” when she thought I wasn’t listening, quiet disposition that made me easy to overlook.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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