Discover more from Breaking the Cycle by Marissa Hackett
(Taj and I, post swim meet, Los Angeles, 1986. We both took trophies home that day.)
My brother Taj was my everything growing up and remains among the few people I feel safest around.
Taj and I spent a lot of time together as kids in LA, and they were the best years of my life. We had a lot of freedom to play and use our imagination.
As the little sister, Taj made me feel welcome in his world 95% of the time. Our parents set the tone of prioritizing family as our best friends, and Taj and I embraced that expectation.
One of our favorite games to play as children was motorcycle cops in our backyard, inspired by the tv show CHIPS, one of our favorites to watch together. We also loved watching The Dukes of Hazzard and Knight Rider. We’d ride our bikes out to the garage in our backyard and conduct pretend drug busts with the bags of sugar we hid. We were the good guys. We talked about how when we grew up, we’d live next door to each other and be partners at the same police station. When I was 10, I announced in my speech in a beauty pageant (Little Miss Los Angeles) that my career plans were to be a police officer when I grew up ( I won 2nd runner-up in that contest- the only one I ever participated in).
Luckily, when our family separated and moved to Oregon, Taj and I had each other. It was helpful to have a brother who could relate to the difficult adjustment period of living miles away from everyone we grew up with. But I will NEVER know what it was like to be a Black teenage boy in Southern Oregon, a community with very few people of color in 1991. We were the new Black kids from LA, and many people didn’t know what to think of my hockey-playing, skateboard-loving big brother.
Taj and I remain close to this day, and I’m so grateful that he and my sister-in-law have made me an untie four times! ❤️
Here we are in 2019 in Galveston Texas (photo cred: Aaron)
Video: Guns and Roses, November Rain: one of our favorite songs in high school. ❤️
Thank you for being here.