my early life

Here we go again. Tomorrow is my birthday. This is such a weird and exhilarating feeling knowing that I have been alive for 33 years now. I made my appearance on Sunday June 13, 1976 at 12:15pm to a young mother of 16. It was a turbulent and painful episode for my mother since my father made himself disappear, making it abundantly clear he did not want the responsibility of caring and raising a child. Now, the man she loved had left her and disowned the child she thought would bring them closer together. Unfortunately, being a teenager she had a very romantic idea of love and sex and children. My father being an asshole only wanted her for his sexual pleasure. As soon as he realized she was pregnant made it very clear he doubted the child was his or that he even wanted any part in the rearing even if it was.
This event scarred my mother for life. She doubted everything about love, marriage and life partners forever. My mother later married a man eight years her senior, whom she did not love and made him absolutely miserable with her coldness and lack of interest. Hindsight is 20/20 and now she wishes she had not forced herself to accept this poor man that did at one time love her and care for. Now their relationship is of hate, disdain, misunderstandings and miserable rapprochements. Understandably my stepfather feels jaded, used and never loved. The strange part is that my mother did eventually learn to love and care for him but like the saying goes, “it was too little too late.”
I’ve talked to my mother many times about this episode in her life and she admits to being naive, simple minded and unproductive in her decision. She not only harmed herself, but the lives of five other people in the process because my brothers and sister did not escape unscathed. We were all witness to the strangeness in the relationship between our parents. Dad was absent in mind and spirit and mom was aloof and distant. Neither of them tried to understand the other. Neither of them could ever forgive the other. And neither ever really found out the truth about the extent of the deceit of the other.
My father stayed with my mother because he had a responsibility to the children he had fathered with her and always felt he had to care for them no matter what. He also had to contest with the demons of his own childhood full of lack and loveless upbringing. A man whose own father had left the household because he did not feel the attachment to the family he had procreated, my father would not do the same to his own children.
I wish my parents would have realized early in life that they did not need to stay together for the children, releasing us from a very painful guilt that we still carry to this day. We are all well aware that our parents did not love each other, or at least that mom never loved dad as much as he loved her. It is quite unfortunate that two wonderful people did not find the person they were meant to be with because they were too busy conforming to society.
I've tried all sorts of things to get my mind right and back on track. I have done very productive work in forgiving and forgetting about those painful childhood memories of our family. I have tried and been successful at letting go of the bitterness that engulfed me when I thought of the things that made me angry towards my mother. And in all this self discovery and trying to find peace and some balming for my soul and my heart broken self I found out that many of the painful memories I held on to were just actions that took place and I misunderstood at the time. As a child I took very personally my mother's rejection. I felt as if my mother did not love me when she sent me away because she was busy or she was upset about something. Looking back at those memories I see a completely different picture. I no longer look at my mother with the sad and lonely child that I was at that time but as an adult. And with my adult eyes I look at her experience and wonder how this young woman ever kept her sanity raising four children with a distant husband in the midst of poverty and uncertainty looming over her head. It is no surprise to me that she fell into deep depressions from time to time. It is no surprise that she could hardly cope sometimes with the cruel reality that surrounded her and how she had to do everything she could to keep her children fed, sheltered and clothed.
My mother was not the perfect woman, but she was a perfect human in an imperfect world. Mom did things with very little money and we never had our electricity cut off, or our gas. We always had food and mom fed us very well, we always had dinner together. And there was not a day mom said we are not eating tonight because we don't have food. Mom knew how to budget, knew how to shop and knew how to save. When my parents moved from New Jersey to Oregon they walked out of there literally with thousands of dollars. How she did it? Only she knows. One thing I know, we did not lack. We did have to fall in line and sacrifice, but we did not lack.
I unfortunately have had to learn allot of these things on my own now that I am older. Mom was not a very good teacher, she has always been very impatient, therefore she never showed us how many things in the house worked. All the children now suffer some sort of maladjustment to the real world. So I guess in a sense we were very sheltered when it came to knowing what things were and were not available.
I am very grateful for the parents I chose. And for them agreeing to help me make my appearance. My biological father is somewhere and although I say I do not care where he is I actually do. But I don't think I will ever move a finger to go out and find him. My stepfather is a very nice man, not the brightest crayon in the box when it comes to child rearing but who is? I know I suck at parenting and its my own child. So be it. I will somehow somewhere come across the knowledge that I need to improve on myself every step of the way. All of these people in my life have in fact taught me something and for that I am grateful. And if they don't teach me anything, at least they help me enhance my patience and my need for answers.
In truth, this journey is exciting, exhilarating and of course inconclusive. I will never stop learning, loving and laughing and living. I will always look for answers and listen for answers anywhere I might be able to find them. In advance I thank you for being in my existence.
Live, Laugh, Love!!