When I was 12 I read a quote by Lord Byron in an Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet book that would personify the way I lived my childhood and much of my adulthood. Lord Byron wrote that, “The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.”, and that is what I did, I existed in pain.
My childhood has been the subject of much controversy. It amazes me how people make these claims to know how someone’s life is when the only person that could possibly tell you an accurate account is the person in question. I suppose people believe what they want to believe, a matter of fact I can attest to it. I think my parents depend on their versions of my childhood to be able make everything seem okay now. I imagine that “I am or was a good parent” or “I did the best I could” are important lies parents tell themselves. I mean if you aren’t a good parent what kind of person does that make you, right? I’d say it makes you an average one in my experience. Not that I am saying my parents were average. In retrospect nothing about my childhood was that average other than in the beginning. I was born into mediocrity as I like to say. I was born in the plains state of Okahoma, you know, where the wind go sweeping down the plain? It happened on a spring afternoon to my mother Susan and father Roger at Midwest City Regional Hospital. My mother was a dependent, black out drunk by her own admissions. She also tried a plethora of the illicit drugs available in the 70’s and 80’s. Which I just assume was all of them. She was beautiful, wild, fun loving, and idealistic. She was like a tornado, a beautiful disaster, for most of my life really. It didn’t work and they were divorced before I was a year old. I never resented my mom for leaving my dad. She told me why when I was around eleven or so and had asked her why her and dad weren't together. Don’t you dare be saying aww in your head, it’s fine. Trust me, the reason is valid. It goes something like; her and my dad were arguing, as was the norm for the time she says, and she said the wrong thing I guess because he ran across the room and leapt on to her and tried to choke her, which was apparently a little to close to her upbringing for comfort. She left him soon after that incident. I asked her why she married him and she said that he personified a 70’s rockstar. He had an uncanny resemblance to Bon Jovi and he was “beautiful, charming, and dangerous”. I guess it’s good that they didn't raise me together, my dad didn't raise me at all, not really. I am sure they had their reasons, not that I am saying they are any good but they were reasons just the same. My mother’s mother Betty and stepfather Merle helped raised me. It’s been six years since their deaths and it still hurts just as much as the first day I found out. It doesn’t matter what they say, time doesn’t heal all wounds, it can’t heal your soul. No matter what I learn about my grandparents past, about who they were, or what they did they were the only two people in my life that never hurt me, never disappointed me, and that I always loved and that is no small feat. But before we get into the deep, dark, depths of my soul let’s talk about the happier times. As a child I lived with them on and off and went there every day before and after school and they were perfect. They colored with me, played games, helped with homework, listened when I talked, and it was like the world was my oyster when I was at home with them. Home is an interesting concept because to this day I have never counted anywhere else as home. I was always a lanky child and scrawny to boot. I had short boyish hair that was sun bleached most of the time and my skin was always gold and tan because I could not be kept inside, especially not on hot summer days. I liked to play Barbies, hula hooping, and climbing trees. I was quiet, shy, and a perfect target. I attempted to make friends but it never quite panned out. I am told I was a happy child and I can agree that I probably was, before Him. I only have a handful of true memories from my childhood, memories not altered by photos of smiling faces in various locations. Photos lie you know, all you can see in family photos are what the people in them want you to see. I can’t remember much before the day was the last day of my happy childhood.
My mom and I had moved into our own apartment one husband and four years of AA meetings after my mom had wrapped her car around a tree while driving drunk. It was the first time I can remember my mom and I living on our own. Shortly after we moved in she started dating someone she met in AA. They had been dating for some months the day I walked into my living room to sit in the recliner, to watch cartoons and eat my cereal like I did every morning waiting for my mom. Dennis was sitting in the recliner and watching the news. I sat on the floor next to him and after what seemed like an unbearable length of time I asked if I could watch cartoons. He looked over at me with cold grey-blue eyes and in a flat deep voice said “No”. That was the last day of my happy childhood and I am not being melodramatic. I am not saying that because I couldn’t watch cartoons that my life was over. I just recognize that as the day that Dennis had decided my family was his family now and when my mom asked me if she could marry Dennis a few months later I promptly and flatly said “No”. I was overruled. Directly or indirectly Dennis ended my happy childhood. His family is the reason that I was forced into therapy when all I really needed was a gun. A few family members short and maybe I wouldn’t have a childhood that belongs on some god damned Lifetime movie. The only good thing I can truly say Dennis did for me was to deemphasis television when I was in my tweens. Dennis, his son, and daughter all read extensively. In turn my mother began to read so much more, she had read many of the famous and great plays in high school theater in hopes of being an actress but now she read varied genres. I guess I thought if you can beat them, join them. I tried to find books I could get through but the reading bug never bit me until I read a poem by Edger Allen Poe, I know, typical. The poem was called Alone and even though Poe was a drunken mad man he sure did know how I felt. And so my love of poetry was born, I read it and attempted to write it, and once I had read all the Poe I could get my hands on I started to read everything. My family’s book shelves were quite sundry, from true crime, to sci-fi, to horror, and even a romance novel once. By the age of twelve I had read Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar and Romeo and Juliet and had also read one of my personal favorites, the Crucible, I just couldn’t get enough of dramatic plays and so I, like my mother, joined theater. I had also read The Great Gatsby, which I contend wasn’t that great. The book that made me want to start writing isn’t one of the classics and technically it is probably not a great book, it was called Blood Crazy by Simon Clark and it is still my favorite book of all time. I have read it twelve times and still find myself reading it start to finish in one sitting. What can I say, British horror writers know the way to my heart. I was really so lucky to love reading and writing, it saved me from my life, and occasionally even managed to save me from myself. The years from twelve to seventeen are a blur of epic amounts of pain, abuse, turmoil, betrayal, and really hatred for myself and everyone else. I was suspended and arrested more than a few times and ultimately I said the wrong thing to my dad and got myself kicked out at seventeen. I moved in with two older friends who were nineteen. I dropped out of high school because you really can’t physically work full time and go to high school. Then the party began, from seventeen to nineteen I did whatever the hell I wanted. I drank whenever I could, I did every drug I could find as often as I could find it, I smoked a pack a day, got piercings and tattoos just because I could find someone to do it, and I used and treated people like people had used and treated me. Essentially I was a terrible person. My mom started thinking I was a sociopath when I was ten and I can’t say that my behavior helped any. I don’t know when it had happened but I had shut myself off. It was easier that way. If you don’t care or have feelings no one can hurt you. When my grandparents died it stopped my world. I did have feelings. I physically collapsed when I saw my grandfather’s body. My heart was shattered and I know it will never be whole again, because two pieces are missing and there weren’t many pieces in the first place. I have been through a lot of physical and emotional pain in my life but nothing like what I felt then. I did many things I would never do again but the way I see it is that all roads that we take in life are just a means to an end. I am not ashamed of anything I did because it made me who I am today. I have this deep dark fear that maybe I am a monster and all I can do is keep fighting the part of me that still feels that I should just shut down all connections for the grief they cause me.
I sure am making myself sound important here and I assure you that is not the case. I am profoundly average. Just another of the mediocre masses attending UCO, in hopes of getting a job that at least pays me well to be a drone. Pays me well for my soul is what it feels like. Souls are apparently a precious commodity, or so says the Bible, not that I would generally rely on fiction for my information. Who knows what the future holds for us. All I can do is concentrate on the present and presently I am okay I guess. My mom and I get along famously now even though she is much more conservative and religious than I could even think of being. Conservative values and religion I can't subscribe to in good conscious. She’s tried so hard to make amends for everything and really what more can you ask for? She genuinely cares. What can I saw about my father? I love him sort of? He is still the same person, underneath the facade of having come from money and being agreeable he can still stop me with a single look, like a rabbit in a fox’s sights. He is a predator one must never forget. I don’t think he’ll ever change but I see him every major holiday out of some warped sense of obligation but I keep my head low and try and dip out early. I love the place I live but I hate the people in charge so I hope to flee the country at some point. I have a fiancé who is a photographer from Queens, New York who probably, in a line that is so very cliché, saved my life. He is the only person I have met who can go toe to toe with me on my bad days. He pulled me out of the shit life I had before and made me realize that I should want to be a good person for me, not for anyone else. And so I have decided that as long as I can in good conscious look at myself in the mirror in the morning and not regret my choices, fuck what anyone else has to say.
