It's my story and I'll cry if I want to...

I’ve decided to write down my history before I forget anymore of it. It is only going to get harder to remember. Don’t think that I blame anyone in these stories for the way my life has turned out. I don’t. Life is just a road I travel and all these little stories are like towns I’ve visited along the way.

The story of me begins with my mother. Mom grew up in rural northern Indiana. Grampa worked the railroad and was a gentleman farmer. She had one older brother and one younger that died in early childhood from brain cancer. She lost her Mother to cancer when she was ten or twelve. While I was sadden by this story growing up, it never occurred to me that these events shaped who she was as a parent and a person, maybe because she never talked about her past. I’ve heard snippets of her life from various people around her but rarely if ever from her.

Grampa never recovered from losing his wife and blamed God. I heard he never set foot in a church again all his days. He didn’t know what to do with his two kids after his wife died so he farmed them out to relatives each summer. Apparently mom had a weight problem (go figure) and was shipped off to a spinster Aunt that promptly put her on a diet of cottage cheese and lettuce. I’ve seen pictures of my mom from high school and she was a platinum blonde bombshell so the diet must have worked.

When Mom married my Dad, she was all ready carrying me and everyone knew it. I’ve heard rumors that she dated my dad’s older brother before she started going out with my dad. She conceived around Christmas of her senior year and I was born in the fall just four days after her 18th birthday. She has never talked of the stress and pain this must have caused the families involved. Surely her dad was pissed. Did he throw her out? I don’t know. She named me after her dead mother. Was it because she loved her mother so much she wanted to honor her or was she trying to appease her father’s anger so that he might welcome me into his family? Did my dad like the choice; did he have any input in picking my name?

Doomed from the beginning, the marriage fell apart by the time I was six months old. My dad related a tale that he came home early one day and caught mom in bed with a door-to-door salesman who had to jump out the bathroom window and ended up breaking his ankle. Neither of my parents has ever talked about their divorce to me. Was there yelling and tears and broken hearts or were they resigned to the fact that it could never work as they calmly split their property? Were they ever in love? I don’t know.

I’ve only seen one picture of my parents together. It’s a picture of them at a semi formal dance before they were married. I don’t know of any existing pictures of their wedding. There are very few pictures of me as a baby. If not for these few photos to document my early beginnings, we could pretend it never happened all the way back to when my grandmother died and her family shattered.

My mom picked up her life and quickly married again, a pattern that would repeat itself several times over the years. My dad was lost to me for the next 21 years until I had my first child. From what I can gather, he was drafted or enlisted on his own in the Army and was sent to Viet Nam where he served several tours of duty before coming home addicted to drugs and shell shocked for life (I believe the current term is post traumatic distress syndrome).

So ends my early years.