What's your family 'loyalty' like? Growing up in my family, the loyalty demanded was to my step-mother. My own mom had died two weeks after my ninth birthday (I know, that's hella specific but that's what kept going through my head at the time, 'it's only two weeks after my ninth birthday! it's only two weeks after my ninth birthday!' and she had been my hero.
This is actually a fascinating story... funny how you sit down to write one thing and then another thing wants to be written, isn't it?
My dad, let's call him Buck, and my mother... she'll be Becky... went to high school together. They didn't date then (so I've been told) but were friends and in the marching band together.
Tangent; my mother had been a 'first chair violinist' meaning the best violinist at her school, but quit so she could play the triangle in the marching band and go to football games with her friends. Good choices, Ma!
Being as how I was conceived before abortions were legal, recent high school graduates and even high school seniors got married in order to have the sex. Immediately after graduation, my mom married this dude named Keith, who I guess treated her badly... all I ever knew about him was he was awful and his face was scratched out of every yearbook and wedding photo I ever saw. Which is creepy AF, btw.
My father had some kind issue with his high school grades and wasn't going to graduate, so he joined the Army. If I understand correctly, he served and then came back home to California and got reacquainted with my now-divorced mother. They got married and had a bouncing baby boy, my older brother who we'll call Jack.
We'll call my older brother Jack; as in Jack Ass. Jack was the kid who taught himself how to read by the time he was three with nothing more than the alphabet game he was given as a toy. He was a dick to me his whole life, you'll soon hear why, so fuck him.
Some time after Jack was born, my parents started having problems. Given that I've only gotten one-and-a-half versions of this story, I'm not sure how much to believe. According to them, my mother was crazy and violent. Now that I'm older and know more, I think she was badly treated by everyone in her life who was supposed to love her, including my father and my step-mother, a woman she thought was her friend.
This has taken a tole on me, I'm going to stop here for now. I'll write more tomorrow, promise.
xo, b.
