In Her Thoughts

I was born and, I’m living proof of it. I came into the world thanks to Dr. Power in San Francisco who delivered me from my mother’s screaming body at 2:40 p.m. August 2nd, 1964. To hear my mother’s tale of the day, it was the worst day of her life! I was the third child, the first girl and by far, the fattest baby she’d carried! They’re supposed to get easier, aren’t they?

Please keep in mind that the story I am about to tell you, or what I care to share of it at this time, is a consolidation of many stories that were collected right before the last of my relatives, my blood relatives that I came from, passed away.  Although my life’s experiences could very well sway my perspective, you would find after meeting me that I am actually very forgiving and removed enough to keep things in a more universal perspective rather than the “this is what happened to me!” whining and biased/selfish kind of way…I’m not into crutches or people who abuse them.  What happened to me made me who I am and my faith in God is strong enough that I know I am more powerful than anything this planet can throw at me.  I am a representative of what I perceive to be God and that is loving and strong.
Onward…

My family was your typical 1960’s dysfunctional family…reeling from the boring 50’s and zooming into the 70’s, the 60’s, I believe is what is wrong with this present generation in that they never got to experience them.

My mother got pregnant with me in order to save a dying marriage. I’m not sure what she expected as her indiscretions were bound to come out. I mean, we lived in a small row home in San Francisco with my aunt, uncle and their budding family! There’s not many secrets when you live that way.
Anyway…it worked for a while but soon after I was born my dad moved us to Florida to live with his mother and some more aunts and uncles, relatives of his, who could keep an eye on her.

At 6 months old it was reported that my father filled up as much as he could into our car and still have room for my 2 brothers and I…and our mother. I, so it has been told, spent most of the trip across the country in a dresser drawer in the back seat. Seat belts weren’t popular till much later.

I remember living with Granny in St. Petersburg Florida. She owned a small monkey that she let have free roam of the house so you can imagine… and we had our little dog Penny neither of which liked me much. Penny would snap at me and the monkey took me out of my high chair when I was little and dropped me to the floor and sat down and waited for whatever whomever was preparing to feed me. In a house like that there are many people moving about…you’re never sure who’s who especially when you’re little and there’s a monkey going around throwing you on the floor! You would think that what with all of the people roaming around, someone would’ve noticed a baby being thrown on the floor but whatever…

By the time I was born and probably before, my mother and fathers alcohol-fueled fights had gotten physical and of course with several families sharing an abode, someone’s bound to get their nose stuck in it and all I can say is “thank God that the show “Cops” wasn’t filmed back then cause we would have surely been on it!“  And of course the others couldn’t handle their liquor either and did stuff to start their own fights and it was just crazy! 

Next thing I know I’m living in a trailer in Seminole with my mom and the boys!  What the heck do I know…I was just playing!  My brothers did an awesome job of protecting me!  God!  I love them!!  So, I’m about 4 or 5 and my brothers were small steps ahead of me in age.  Nobody was happy and nobody spoke the truth.  Everywhere we went we got a bunch of side-stepping whiskey talk to the point that we stopped paying attention.  That was until my dad came in while my mom was out and drove away with my brothers not to be seen or heard from for another decade!  I later asked my dad why he didn’t take me and he said that he wouldn’t know what to do with a girl and after getting to know their lives better, I’m really glad he didn’t take me although my own path was no less rocky…just rocky in a different way.

My mother remarried to a man that she had cheated on my dad with.  This man was married too so there you go.  Two families destroyed by a couple of crotches!  It’s not unusual though, unfortunately!  This man didn’t really want the tag along kid and he let it be known.  Like, if I got up in the middle of the night and the scotch glasses were tinkling, I was forbidden from leaving my room.  Now, what do you think the first thing a little tomboy-ish girl who’s just had her whole life turned upside down and her brothers ripped from her arms and her dad having to do it in order to save them from my mother is gonna do?  Get on his every nerve!  That’s what!!  You can say he and I did our jobs very well of disliking eachother but loving my mother regardless.  I didn’t even know that they got married till they showed up after leaving me with some of the wackiest babysitters I’ve ever seen for a week!!  Jesus Christ!  Have these people no shame? 

I’m going to say this once and then go on.  I was abused sexually, mentally (mind games), physically (5 broken collar bones and 5 broken ribs before I was 4?) and told repeatedly that I was just a spoiled kid who was trying to get attention from her newly married mother.  I had a babysitter who whipped me and the boys with a horsewhip which, come to think of it, happened only a day or so after my dad stole them!  These are the kind of things that we saw dabbled in the midst of the muck…but I am not now nor have I ever been damaged!  Only educated.  The beneficiary has been my husband and my daughter because my past determined my future choices.

So, by the time I was 7 or 8, my mother’s new husband was moving us to New Jersey.  Now, typically a child is given time to say goodbye to the entire web of a family that she would be losing touch with…not by her choice but instead I was blind-sided by the move from all that I knew and loved.  I had enjoyed living a few blocks away from the beach back in the day before beaches became over-run with tourists and small towns were built up to encourage them!  With my extended and immediate family I had many days of scalloping and clamming and fishing and sitting around the picnic bench eating what we didn’t sell to restaurants and I remember sneaking beer mugs from the tables when my uncles weren’t looking with my brothers and my cousins.  Back in a time when your child could play it their neighborhood and show up when the street lights were on, or close to it.  That all was gone…taken like the rest of my childhood.  Quick, like a band-aid.  I remember “him” not letting me take my stuff from my bedroom after he had carefully chosen what we would take.  My whole room was left behind and sold or given away by the next owners!  What kind of crap is that?  No wonder I couldn’t stand him…although I now understand him.  All I have left is a picture of a stuffed lamb that I wasn’t allowed to take.  My dad had given it to me on my first birthday!

So…New Jersey.  Here’s a girl from Florida who barely wears shoes unless she’s forced to placed into a snooty neighborhood in Cherry Hill.  I stuck out like a sore thumb in my home-made green polka-dotted pantsuit which was “in” at the time…somewhere!!  I didn’t fit in and what made it even worse was the growing tirades between mom and the new guy.  He got MS soon after moving up here.  He was like the top guy in TRW Electronics and then nothing…dropped like a hot potato when he got sick.  I understand his anger but I don’t agree with who he took it out on!  Anyway…he degraded pretty quickly from the disease but the two of them ended their marriage when the state gave my mother a choice.  Move me out of the house away from him or lose me to the state.  We moved.  He passed away a year later but not before his mother, a devout Catholic, <I’m just sayin’> had their marriage annulled and any monies that she should have gotten from the divorce were tied up in courts and then later on discreetly spent by my mother while I was getting high in high school.  See what happens when you don’t pay attention?

Basically, from the time I was 12 I was raising myself.  As soon as they separated, she immediately went on the hunt.  Please remember that this was the late 70’s, early 80’s and if you were alive back then, you know what I’m talking about.  I didn’t do badly though.  I didn’t get in major trouble, I wasn’t a teenage mom, didn’t get addicted to harder drugs and definitely did not carry the alcoholic gene that both of my parents were cursed with.  I graduated from Maple Shade High School alive and in the top quarter of the class!  Back then the teachers could be as stoned as the kids.  Ah…good times!  I had a history teacher in my senior year who was seen sitting in his car with his silver flask, and we could see it clearly cause we were out there in the lot smoking pot, and he’d come into class so snookered that all we had to know in order to pass his class for the year was the 12 wars, their dates and names.  I don’t know them now but I got an A!  Anyway…imagine my amazement at how small the world really freaking is when my mother came home from a night of clubbing with him!  He didn’t stay long…

When I got out of high school I landed a dream job at RCA which later became General Electric then Martin Marietta then Lockheed Martin and I’m pretty sure that’s what it is today!  I retired in 2002 after my heart attack.  Those days were awesome but I won’t speak of them any further than to say thanks for the memories and the retirement package.

Now, I had said that I didn’t become a teenage mother but I did, BY CHOICE become a single mother when I was 25.  I had plenty of chances to do it the regular way but I had not found the right man at that time of my life and really didn’t need one in order to have my daughter comfortably.  I petitioned a friend of mine who I felt had good genes and would take on the surragacy the way I wanted him to…absently…so after one take, it took!  I continued living with my mother anda boyfriend of hers that I actually like and still speak to now and then.  I worked the night shift and they worked days so my daughter never had a babysitter till she was old enough to defend herself or at least report it.  My mom still drank a lot but I trusted her boyfriend and it all worked out well. 

In 1994 I decided that Prince Charming was not needed for me to have my home no more than he was needed to have my child so I bought a small house in the Jersey pines where life is simple and the cost of living’s cheaper.  I moved in on a New Years Eve and three…count ‘em…THREE days later I met the man that I will spend the rest of my life with happily and comfortably!  He had just rented a room from the single guy who owns the house acrossed the street.  He’s no longer single though…neither of them.  I met John 3 days after moving into my home and we’ve been a family ever since making it legal on the 4th of July, 1996.  Our daughter knows of the man who made her but she has no desire and plenty of chance to meet him but to her there is no man like her daddy.  It’s like a freakin’ fairy tale, you know?

My daughter is now 18 and is graduating this year with some college credits in her pocket toward her business degree which she will finish at a county college while she works at the McGuire military base in a office-like atmosphere.  Can’t say much…it’s secret!  She’s a good kid and knows that between me and her father there is nothing she can do behind our backs that we won’t know about.  We’ve seen it all.  But, although she is no angel, she’s not an idiot either so we’ve lucked out there too!!

My health sucks but we have to have balance in life.  I had a heart attack when I was 34 years old and it killed off 1/3 of my heart.  It’s been a mess since then but I’m really alright!  You wouldn’t know that I’m sick if you saw me.  And I certainly don’t go around flaunting it!!  But the balance is that I have found happiness.  I am secure.  There is nothing that myself and my family cannot handle and we still laugh together. 

The past is gone.

My father died of pancreatic cancer in 1990.  He lived his entire life never settling down and forever holding the devil’s grudge against my mother for messing up his life.  He was the epitome of loving someone to death.  He loved her so much that he let her make him bitter.  After the boys reached 16 and she could no longer do anything about him stealing the boys, and trust me, she made his life miserable in those years…hunting him down for as little as $60 with private detectives, we all reconnected.  I met my brothers and my dad again when I was 14 years old and have done everything to keep in touch as long as they were alive.

My mother passed away in 2004 after abusing her inhalers for COPD.  I would say it was accidental but the EMT’s found a dozen inhalers next to her body and her lungs were paralyzed which is indicative of the inhalant abuse.  That and the fact that there were carefully arranged photo albums and notes and other tell-tale signs that she knew what she was doing.  A lot of I’m sorry’s…she didn’t need us to forgive her though…she needed to forgive herself.  Her search for gold made her blind.

The day before I settled my mother’s estate, my brother Rick passed away at the age of 49 from a massive stroke.  He died while in the medi-vac helicopter to a better facilitated hospital and even all of these miles away I could hear him saying, “I always wanted to fly in one of them”. 

My other brother, the youngest of the two, was arrested a few months later and eventually convicted of a double murder.  He swears he’s innocent. 

And the aunts and uncles that I loved dearly as a child had long since lost touch with me except for one aunt, my Aunt Jenny who still lived in the small house in St. Pete that I had the last few years with my family in.  She passed away last summer.  She and I were so much alike…so much so that she and I had our heart attacks in the same year!  Her heart gave out and she joined my Uncle Paul who had long since been gone and that was the last string I have to the time when bigwheels were fast.  I’ve been told many times that I should write a book, and believe me, I could because what I told you is only a splinter of an old, huge tree but I doubt I ever will…I mean, who wants to hear about all of that? 

Just remember this…
The only way that life can destroy you is if you let it. 
If you choose, you can be not only triumphant but thrilled, and thrilling.  I’m living proof!

 

Gary and I

(R to L) Myself, brother Rick, cousin and one of the few kids around with a bike in one piece…but the day was young.