I’m not anything that I was supposed to be…
I’m not dead, I’m not unhappy, I’m not unloved, I’m not unsuccessful, I don’t live in poverty, and I’m not uneducated.
These are just a list of some of the things that were expected of me, based on how I entered this world, and the way that I was brought up.
I was born in the 1970’s to teen parents who were struggling with their own life and upbringing. When I came crashing into this world at 4:15 on that Saturday morning, no one knew what was to come.
Of course I don’t remember any of it, but I was told that I was blue, my insides were on the outside, and “they” didn’t think that I was going to live.
I was baptized right away, and my Grandma was my only Godparent. I spent a week at our city hospital, and was eventually flown to a larger city to get better medical treatment. I was told that when I finally came home, I was still the size of a newborn, and I was already closer to six months old.
But that’s not my first real memory…
My very first memory was standing in the kitchen of my “home”, guiding my baby brother behind me with my arm, so that he couldn’t see what was going on in front of me. The words, “I’m going to put your head through the fucken wall!”, are what we were hearing. I’m guessing that he was not quite one, and I was not quite three years old.
There was a bottle heating up in a pot of water on the stove, I remember it vividly. I can see the linoleum tile on the floor. I remember it to be white and blue. There were snippets of other things that I remember from before that day, but nothing so complete, in detail, or as vivid as that moment. It was the first, but certainly not the last of those days.
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