Loss of Innocence
I know, without a doubt that everyone will fuck you. Every One. I don't care who you are.
When you are young, you don't see people as different races, you don't see rich vs poor. People aren't born evil, racist, hateful, abusive, etc. They are taught that. Children learn from those they are surrounded by. Children trust their caregivers unconditionally.
They trust.
Unconditionally.
Devious little shit, wasn't I?
The definition of trust, according to Merriam-Webster is the belief that someone or something is reliable, good, honest, effective, etc.
I've always said I don't trust anyone, but really...if we go by the definition, I do trust some people - but never unconditionally. I never have. I've come close. I trust Gary in as much as I've ever trusted anyone, maybe even a little more. But I know, without a doubt that everyone will fuck you. Every One. I don't care who you are.
That's not to say that I am always waiting for it - because I am a hard believer in the power of positive thinking. Positive energy works miracles. No bullshit.
What you believe you can achieve.
Trust is a hard thing. I have faith and hope when it comes to people, not trust.
Christmas, obviously. My new doll is up on the couch. I loved her.
It's funny how certain things take you right back to a moment. I recall I had this doll, she was tall, one of those walk-with-me types. She wore the same size clothes as me basically. So, that would put me at about 4 yrs old maybe.
I had this shorts set on. It was white with these tiny little green flowers on it. My doll could wear it too, though it was a little big on her. It was my favorite.
I remember being called into my grandmother's bedroom, I remember sitting on the edge of the bed. I remember the sound of his zipper. The shadows on the wall in the late afternoon sun. I can still hear him tell me to be quiet. To touch it. To kiss it.
She watched from a safe distance.
My doll.
She never told.
Neither did I.
It was a "cousin". Everyone was somehow family but I never understood who came from where and how we were all connected. His name was Willie, or Bill.
Thankfully I didn't see him very often. Thankfully it never happened again. He was just the first.
One little fucked up footnote to this story. When i was about 12, Willie came to visit. He had married a Vietnamese woman and they were getting ready to have a baby. They named her Sharon. I swear to fucking God. I wished so badly that I would have spoken up. But, in the grand scheme of everything else at that point, it wouldn't have mattered.
It begins with a baby on a bus
Don't get me wrong, aside from the dark and dirty secrets, my grandparents were good to me, they provided well for me, and I loved them because they were all I had and I knew no different. They were FAR better than the alternative of growing up with the people who gave birth to me.
Georgeanne and Mirl, my real parents
I was born in Minot, ND on the Air Force Base. My real dad was stationed there, married to my real mother. He was 18 and she was 16 - super young and dumb.
The story goes that my father came home to find me alone in the apartment with nothing on but a dirty diaper and a high fever, I was 5 months old. Apparently my mother was next door in bed with his best friend...Many stories have circulated about what horrific acts transpired after that revelation, none of them were good.
Ultimately, he shipped me on a bus to live with his parents, giving up full legal rights to me. I arrived in Kansas City in the middle of the night with pneumonia and no provisions. My grandparents found themselves parents again. He left for Vietnam.
My Aunt Helen and Uncle Don and 2 of my cousins, my real dad and my (grandmother) mom. This would have been shortly before I was born.
Dude looks like Gomer Pile, lol. It's okay, you can laugh. He was/is a really tall, lanky guy and should be instructed to never, ever, stand like that.
I was known as the "black sheep" of the family. I was Georgeanne and Mirl's daughter. Two fuck ups that had another fuck up, that was now going to fuck up my grandparents life.
Don't get me wrong, aside from the dark and dirty secrets, my grandparents were good to me, they provided well for me, and I loved them because they were all I had and I knew no different. They were FAR better than the alternative of growing up with the people who gave birth to me.
My grandmother was a school teacher who later became the librarian at a Junior High - in a different school district, thank God! And my grandfather, he was retired from something that he got a pension from. He was always doing different things. He had inherited a farm when his mother passed away (I was like 6 maybe, but I remember she died on the toilet, lol.)
Anyway, people would pay to come fish at the farm. He stocked the ponds with catfish from Arkansas and would clean and prep fish for various restaurants around. I was the ultimate tomboy. I ran around in cutoff shorts with no shirt. I had super short hair and everyone swore I was a boy. I was a hellova fisherman too.
I'll save the dirty truth of the farm for another post....
My grandmother had 2 grown daughters that were well into their own lives and in their 30's. My Aunt Barbara (Florida) despised me but my Aunt Judy (Michigan) was always nice to me. I had an Aunt Helen and Uncle Don and their 3 kids, my cousins, Rhonda, Terri and Debbie. I loved them. They were the family I wanted...and needed, but they didn't know that till much later in life.
My cousins, Terri, Rhonda, Debbie and Me (2yr old) Notice the saddest, ugliest Christmas tree in the history of EVER! It looks like it has cobwebs all over it!
The REAL Parents
Like so many others, my real dad came back from Vietnam all fucked in the head. He moved to Leavenworth, KS and got a job at the penitentiary there. He married some woman who had 5 kids of her own, one who was the SPITTING image of my real dad....it was never admitted to me though, but come on! She was Latino, her kids were all Latino and then there's the young boy who was a scrawny built twig with eyes exactly like me and my real dad....but whatever.
On the back of the photo it reads:
1305 hrs, Thu 23 July '70
V.C. Prisoner Of War Camp, East of Pleiku A.F.B.
(my real dad is the one holding a gun)
On far right, a POW interpreter, on my left, AIC Tarloton, a guard for POWs. On his left, two V.C. who was captured up on Monkey Mountain which is not shown in this photo.
Mirl Hobbs
They'd all come over once a year on Christmas Eve for dinner and he'd play "Dad for a Day". He was a stranger, he wasn't my dad. But I'd wonder why he never took me with them. If he was my dad, why didn't he want me? Why did he want all those other kids and not me?
I'd hide in my closet (that was my safe zone) and cry about it every fucking year - on Christmas Eve....ugh. You know what else, I don't ever remember getting a present from him. Not once.
He's currently living in Florida, in some back wood, nothing town, I think, with a different wife who is legit psycho. We never speak. I'll have to do a separate post about that whole fucked up situation. Seriously, like graveyard curses and multiple personalities....it's quite a tale.
No idea who the woman was. But, he did come visit at some point when I was about 2.
My real mother...wow, this one's good. How much time do we have? I'll try to condense it as much as I can.
So Georgeanne, eventually went under the alias of Connie, was 16 when she had me. She divorced my real dad and married multiple times and ultimately had 6 kids by 5 different men.
The funny thing is that we all grew up within 20 miles of each other and never fucking knew it.
I remember I met her one time when I was about 7. She came to the door one night and when I opened it she said she was my mother. She had a baby with her, my sister, Michelle. I don't remember anything else about that night and didn't see her again.
At one point, when i was about 12 we drove out to some shit-ass no-tell motel she was staying at in Independence, MO for me to meet her and she was so fucked up she couldn't even answer the door.
I finally met her, for real, when i was 18. After a long string of shit, my parents decided I should go live with her - a total stranger, in New Hampshire...they flew me out there and I was left standing in an airport not having a clue who I was looking for or if anyone would actually show up.
She was an alcoholic and a drug addict. A professional liar and had no basic respect for anything or anyone. She had two of my sisters living there, the only two that hadn't been taken away or given up. They were about 7 and 8 at the time and had been raised to steal everything they could get their hands on and run the prescription scams for her. They'd never had rules or boundaries of any kind, they were out of control. It was heartbreaking.
We ended up in jail together one time - that was one for the books. Got arrested with my real mother, lol. Stealing, of course. Not that I'd never been to jail before, but this time I actually hadn't done anything.
This is one of the few pictures I have of her. This was in 1991, surprisingly she's really lucid in this pic and looks to be doing well. Well, aside from living in the basement of her husbands parents house - with her husband, the two girls, and her mentally deficient boyfriend - who was younger than me....omg. I'll get to that one eventually. The girls had so many issues. I tried to be there, I did, but at some point I had to cut ties to protect myself and, ultimately, my newborn son. (another story, of course)
I recall one night, would have been in '91, sitting at the dinner table with mom and dad (grandparents). The TV was always on in the living room and they'd listen to the news while we ate. Anyway, they did this story about prescription scammers and I shot out of my seat and yelled that that was what my real mom was doing and sure as shit! By the time I got in there they were flashing her and her husbands pics on the screen! You know what, I called the tv station and tried to turn the bitch in lol.
I don't even know if she's alive currently. I went to a grocery store she was working at once and went through her line just to see if she'd recognize me. Nope...not even a glimmer.
Anyway - after all is said and done, I suppose I am glad I had the life I did. Maybe in my next post I'll talk a bit more about the reality of life with my grandparents. Maybe I should wait...we'll see.
My mom(grandmother) and me. I'm guessing it was my first birthday. I believe in the back that is "Aunt" May. She lived to be 103. My mom passed away about 15 years ago.
and this one time, at Clown Camp....
I was so convinced that clowning was what I wanted to do, I made my parents take me to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College when we went to Florida for vacation. I was going to join the circus!
wait, what?
I figured since it's almost Halloween, I'd share this lovely nugget with you. When I was about 14, my goal in life was to be a clown in the circus. For realsies.
Obviously, I was one of the "cool" kids, right?
Btw, that was my autographed Shel Silverstein...I'd kill to have it back EDIT - my super amazing, I don’t deserve you, husband tracked down a signed copy and now I actually DO own it again <3
(Now, since we are new here and I haven't posted enough to tell you about my fucked up life, we will start slow and easy.)
I grew up with my Grandparents, I called them Mom and Dad (that whole story another time)...what I'm getting at is that they were old. Old as fuck. They were 55 when they got me as a baby, so to me they were fucking ancient! Course, the closer I get to that age the younger it seems, but seriously they were fucking old.
ya, it was like that
So old, that they had no desire to play (deal) with me. We had nothing in common, two generations between us and a cigarette smoked haze of "Go Away" permanently lingered in the air.
They loved nothing more than to get me involved in anything that would occupy me or get me out of the house. I did Brownies/Girl Scouts, baton twirling (sucked), guitar lessons (learned one song, badly), played the flute (was pretty good at that one, but never as good as Tasha Kovich - she was the bomb). I took horseback riding lessons, swimming lessons, went to Sunday School (but skipped a lot to go to 7-11 and get candy), even went to a "finishing school" kind of thing (the only thing I took away from that is that you look like a cow when you chew gum)...you get the idea.
Yes, my love of footed jammies is legendary. I'm actually wearing some right this very minute. Go ahead, it's ok to be jealous. It's also okay to be jealous of that lovely couch. Oh, and notice behind me, my Dad's homemade slippers that he crafted himself from the hide of a sheep or some shit. Ugliest fucking slippers ever, and I swear I think he wore those till he died.
Ok, so it was getting close to Halloween and I needed a costume for school. I got a pattern to make a clown costume and found a giant metal ring that I was trying to sew into the waist. Me, being the klutz that i am managed to sew through my freaking finger. LITERALLY!
I damned near passed out from the pain while trying to get the needle out!
Not my image - but the same damned thing - Geezus Fucking Christ!!!! I still get knots in my tummy looking at it.
After a few days, I did manage to finish my costume, albeit by hand sewing. (that trauma lasted for years!) I had a big, oversized red and wide ruffle collar, a red nose and big red floppy shoes. Topped off with a giant rainbow striped afro and a foam lizard on a stick as a pet. I was Silly The Clown. (not very creative, but it's what I had)
Shortly after, I found out that there was a clown camp happening through our church. Hell ya people! I already had a costume and everything! (apparently clowns must have been all the rage back then, I mean really...a clown camp? WTF?)
My first brush with fame
I learned everything I possibly could that week. I was now a professional! We went to a hospital and a mall, I made balloon animals and the whole nine yards!
I got a couple birthday party gigs and even got hired by the local Chamber of Commerce to work a trade show. Made $100 and thought I had officially hit the big time!
I spent tons of time learning magic tricks and even got a unicycle. Yes, I had a unicycle. No, I was not very good at it. Hell, I could barely ride a bicycle.
There is still some argument about whether this is me or my bestie LeeAnne. We were two peas in a pod back then so who knows, it's all the same. Although, i was better at riding it than her ;p
I was so convinced that clowning was what I wanted to do, I made my parents take me to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College when we went to Florida for vacation. I was going to join the circus!
FYI, it's actually a VERY difficult school to get in to.
Course, that never happened. Instead, I got into boys, Madonna and all the wrong things. But that's another story for another time.
Ok, well, some things never change ;)
Hello, World!
The plan was made, that night we would go out and ….