Truth Is Stranger and More Painful than Fiction I came to life in 1962 on January 25. I can almost see the snowflakes swirling around. It was a happy time for Grandma and Grandpa Gilles. I was the first girl to come along in the family in a long time. I was the first grandchild and, make no mistake, I was special. I have never been so special ever again in my life. Dad was a twenty five year old lapsed Catholic. I wonder if he would ever have gotten strong and described himself as a recovering Catholic. I kick myself for losing the few pieces of poetry he wrote. He dwelled on the nuns and his second wife in words. Dad was a photographer, a glassworker, an unhappy Catholic boy and my mother's husband but I found out when I was 28 that he also was a poet. Mom was eighteen when I was born. As far as Dad's family was concerned she came from the wrong side of the tracks. She was a lapsed Southern Baptist with a wish to be a big fish in a little pond. She dutifully kept the secret of her first child from my dad. I was not the first. I was the first she could admit to for a long time. But I was a baby, and blissfully ignorant. Growing up I lost my innocence as all children do and I came to understand that creepy things, unspoken things, were going to be thrust into my life and psyche. We all have our secrets and our hidden agendas. Sometimes we hide the truth from ourselves. Mom was larger than life and she didn't like working as hard as she had to. She wanted to be on a pedestal so long as she didn't gather dust there. My dad acted like he was beaten down and used silence as a weapon to fight back. I was just there, watching and observing from the old soul that was lurking inside that baby's body. Wasn't it a nightmare waiting to play out? I saw it all. And, I know in my Pagan heart, I chose this life. I don't feel sorry for myself. I remember the bits of love that came my way. But I am not an innocent anymore. I am all grown up and given, more days than not, to my dark side. My sister was born fourteen months later and then my mother went through pregnancy three more times.In that effort she confronted death and the imposed morality of others and somehow prevailed in giving life to my brother in 1967. My other brothers died just hours shy of viable births. I visited their graves this summer in West Virginia. One tombstone was there to remind but none had been placed for the other child. That grave is now marked as well. It was the right thing to do. I have not been able to set to rights finding my half-brother. My brother was the best loved of the children by my mom. No one really doted on my sister that I recall. That could be a reason why her life has played out as it has. But, as grownups, we are to shed the pain and hurt of the past. We are supposed to move on. And that is why I am writing. I want it out in the open forever. I want to be healed and move on. I want to tell the ghosts of my pass to move into the light and pluck plums from the trees in the Summerland. I will be there soon enough to join them. I am pretty angry sometimes. I am well versed in reframing things that have the potential to anger me. Someone cuts me off in traffic I picture a woman being rushed to the hospital to have a baby. Someone puts their needs above my own I scold them and talk to them silently about how much more important than me they are. I say I would rather keep scary drivers in front of me to keep an eye on them. But I am getting tired of being around people who make it all about themselves and their fun and schedules. My life has never been all about me. Have you ever considered how difficult it is to make friends when you move frequently? I don't have a single friend from grade or junior high school left in my world. I have recently reconnected with a friend from high school but its sparse communication at best. I went to thirteen schools by the time I entered high school and went to them in four different states. I'm not sure if we were skipping out on bills in the early years or if the legend of the family itchy foot is true. Funny, years later, my unit was dissolved at the hospital I worked at for fifteen years. Most of those folks have had to move on as well. There is no cohesion in my life at all. I am a vagabond and a gypsy who somehow managed to live in one place long enough to make sure my children never had to wander and try to fit in over and over. Yet, now that they are gone, I have moved again. I have changed addresses three times in less than a year and a half. Life before the aqe of eleven was pretty normal I suppose. I had friends and we played monopoly and hospital on the porch. We fought like gladiators in the alley using the trash can lids for defense and huge carpet tubes for cannons. We played in the creek and skirted the rubber plant which was rumoured to be full of rattlesnakes and copperheads. We jiggled the candy dispensing machines and occasionally got candy bars for our deviosity. We stole turnips from the neighbor's garden because we loved to eat them. I used to climb trees and eat little green apples. I watched my dog Valentine get hit by a car. I saw my kitten name Sunny laying in a box after being bitten nearly in half by a large dog. I recall my dad trying to do the manly thing in chasing and capturing a bat under the waterheater as we lay in bed screaming and carrying on. He was more scared than my siblings and I. I remember having more toys than a store locked up on the screen porch and being made to make my bed and work round the house on days I was sick and home from school. I almost remember crawling out on the roof of a house we had and scaring Mom so badly she beat the crap out of me and ending up in the hospital with hives from comforting myself with orange baby aspirin, nearly a whole bottle of it. I remember playing with my cousins who now hate the family guts and I will never know again though it gives me pause to think about it. I remember visiting my mom's parents and hearing the gospel and bluegrass music coming from the radio. Love that music memory to this day. I also remember my Grandma punishing me by beating me with the stick I had chosen. I had learnt from experience it was better to chose it myself than let her choose it. I was a good kid and things like these, though normal in that day and time, were done to beat the devil I do not believe in, out of me. Her God, Her Devil. She was good to me sometimes but she was more like my mom and was a punisher. I was the punished, the reviled, the heathen. I feel the bruises to this day. Can't really say I was the apple of this Grandma's eye but she was the mother of seven, one of whom died at three in a fire, and she didn't have the longing for a little girl in her life like the other one. I recall on gray days hanging upside down from a bar in the closet. I loved the monkey bars too. I got quite good at hanging upside down and climbing trees. I was a tomboy. Life changed one day. My mom pulled up in front of the apartment on Chestnut Street and told me, in the front seat, and my brother and sister in the back that things were changing. The word divorce fell out in her matter-of-fact telling and I can remember the silence that fell inside me as my sister started wailing in the back seat. I say, time and time over, that my sister changed that day and she has never fully recovered. My brother was five. I don't think he understood at all. That apartment was laid out in a crazy fashion. It had steep stairs that came up fast and scary. It used to be a sorority judging from the writing on the windows down the blocked off locked up hallway to the left. We weren't allowed to use this because I guess we could have escaped without being heard or seen. That made for crazy room arrangements. At the top of the stairs to the right was the forbidden hallway and to the right was the bathroom and further down was the kitchen. The kitchen was in a line with my mom's bedroom, the living room and one of the kid bedrooms. You had to go through the living room and her bedroom to get to the kitchen. Not long after the divorce announcement my father moved out and mom got a job as a bartender. She came to me one day and put me in charge. Every day I had to make dinner and round up my brother and sister, feed them and get them their baths. Some nights they were hard to find and I learned to yelll very loudly. I taught my frightened brother the "Now I lay me down to sleep..." prayer and we said it together every night. It was a scary time, being in charge. I grew up at the age of eleven. My mom had tried some babysitters but I was more responsible and she had more control over me so it became my job. Even her sister couldn't be trusted as she would hang out of the window and act weird and she held seances with us in the walk-in closet in our room. One day we were tiptoeing through her bedroom to get some breakfast and a man's head was sticking out from under the blanket on her bed. That's how we met my future stepfather. He was a good man and loved her til he died but it was not the best way to meet your future father substitute. I was shocked. It wasn't long after that my mom decided to follow him on his steeplejack job and my dad moved back in for a while to take care of us. It was about that time that I broke my leg chasing my sister down the stairs. I tripped and flipped and ended up with a long leg cast. My mom said it was nothing to worry about but after the xray had to deal with a kid in a cast. I don't recall how I got to school but remember going to my third floor classes carefully and doing the splits in my classrooms while holding onto the desks. Kids will do that sort of thing. I think that put an end to my piano classes for good. I had taken them for four years. Life was crazy then but it got weirder when my mom decided to come back for us and took us to Florida for the summer. I fell in love with some of the hottest guys on the jacking crew and boy did I fall hard when they ignored me. We lived in motels until we moved into a trailer that year and it was full of mice and roaches. We slept with the light on and the cat killed mice regularly and brought them to whoever was handy to show off their treasures. Once my brother woke up with one on his chest. He was a little boy and it was an awful thing. We had learnt to sleep with the lights on because we could hear the roaches marching when they were turned off but they didn't seem to like the light and would disappear when it was on. My mom worked in retail and my stepdad worked the jacking job for a while and they both stopped at the bars and she would sing and he would admire her. One day they stopped off the road and got married. I don't know how we found out but that's what happened. My mom decided that we should go live with our dad while they made a move to Indiana near her parents and, on the day I was supposed to get together on a little date with a boy named Galen, my dad magickally showed up and picked us up and took us to Ohio where he lived with his honey. I don't think they were married yet. It was one of the saddest days in my life. I wasn't even allowed to tell that boy goodbye. We moved into my dad's duplex and with his future second wife and her two kids. While we lived there my dad slept on the sofa. I don't know what all went on behind the scenes but eventually by Christmas my mom had established herself in Indiana and came back to see us at Christmas. It was a lousy Christms in comparison to the ones that had gone on before and to top it off she took my brother to Indiana that same day because he wouldn't quit crying. My stepbrother Michael was in the car and we thought he was a snoot and a snot wearing his blue and white polka dot hat and ratty jeans. So, I lost my brother at Christmas and the presents made us sad. I got my first D in a class because I had started school in Florida and transferred to a school in Ohio and the school schedules were out of sync. I went sliding down a snowy incline frequently on the seat of my pants with my friend Terry and got to jump on a trampoline in gym class but that winter I also tripped and fell in a hole along the Ohio River and broke my right ankle. I felt the bone snap and my dad had to carry me up some very steep steps to get me up the hill. I spent more time in a cast. Just before my sister's birthday my mom sent some family by to get me and my sister and had them bring us to Indiana. We were glad to leave because my step mother was just not into us and she doted on her own kids. We felt damaged and unhappy. We moved into our Grandparent's home in Indiana so we could go to a decent school because Mom had moved to Gary and didn't know if the schools were safe enough. So there we were in school number three for the year. We enrolled on my sister's birthday in late March. (to be continued) |