“Post-Birth Aborted Child”
This first chapter is titled, “Post-Birth Aborted Child” very specifically because, not long after I was born, perhaps when I could walk without assistance or communicate clearly enough to speak for myself, my parents abandoned their roles as “mommy” and “daddy” in my life.
My father didn't like babies, and whenever my mother was pregnant, his reaction was that of anger or disgust. His grandmother was of this same mind, wouldn't let my mother join them in public while pregnant, and supposedly very derogatory towards her all the time.
My grandmother on my mother's side hated my father, and made it very clear that we were the spawn of satan and that Hitler was our relative. At any chance she could get, she called us Nazis and German bastards, and horrible, degrading names like that. I never really cared for my grandmother.
My grandfather died when my mother was only 12 or 13 years old. He died of a massive heart attack, and my grandmother blamed my mother for years, constantly putting her down, very critical of her looks, her actions, and basically abandoned my mother from that point on until her elderly years when she was dying from cancer and diabetes and needed the care of my mother during that time.
My mother was passed around from family members to family members, and sadly she was molested by an uncle and a cousin at the same time, and then told that she was a filthy liar when she tried to tell her mother. At the age of 15 or 16, she ran away and went to live with Jim and Jean Hood, my God-Parents.
Needless-to-say, when my parents met, my dad was in the Navy and my mom wanted out of her miserable life and so they got married when she was 19 and he was 22.
My dad tells me that their marriage was evidently a serious mistake and he wanted out within three months, but my mom was pregnant with my oldest brother, Mike right away, and then again (less than a month later) pregnant with my sister, Angie. My dad felt trapped, so he escaped with the Navy, volunteering for long West Pac tours of duty. There is a four year difference between Angie and my brother, TJ, and then I came along the following year.
I have always been told that I was a beautiful baby, perfect in every way. My dad would say that I was very pretty with my dark hair and dark eyes, and my mom would say how happy she was that I did not have a cone head when I was born. Sadly, though, I don't know anything else about myself as an infant. I often wonder when I first crawled, or walked, when I first talked, what was my first word? And why is it that I have no memories what-so-ever of either one of my parents investing a minute of time in raising me so that I could grow into a secure, responsible, citizen, rather than the mixed up, confused, and very lost woman that I find myself today.
During the first five years of my life, my memories involve a great deal of time spent alone or with a woman who lived several blocks down the road, but never in my mother's arms, never cuddled, never kissed or told "I love you." It's as if once I was born, my mother figured she did what she had to do to bring me into this world, but that was all she was willing to do. I don't know if it's because of how ugly her own mother was to her, if her father's death and the incest by her uncle stunted her mental growth and ability to function as an adult, let alone a parent, but for years to come, I was basically abandoned by my mother to fend for myself or to rely on my brother, Mike, to raise me. Not a good choice, considering he was only 6 years older than me.
The memories I have which involve my parents are few and vague, as they made every effort to remain out of my life for one reason or another. My father was in the Navy and was always out to sea, but even had he not been in the Navy, he and my mother divorced when I was around two or three years old.
The earliest memories I have of my parents involve a flash memory of sitting in the back seat of a really old car and waiting for what seemed like forever for my mother to return from wherever she had disappeared to. When she returned, my father was with her, a brace around his neck, and that was it. The next memory I have involves sitting on these wooden benches at a court house in Virginia, I believe, and again, waiting for what seemed like hours for my mother to come out of the session she was in. When we were in the car, I somehow knew that this court hearing meant that they would no longer be married, and I remember asking my mother if she still loved my dad, and she wouldn't respond.
My parents' marriage was not a match made in heaven. From what my mother says, my father was abusive, both physically as well as verbally and emotionally. He would go out to sea, screw around with a chic in every port and come home to try weird sex with her. In the mean time she was screwing around on him with his best friend, Butch, but when my father would return from overseas, it would be a battle between her weight, his drinking, her messy house keeping habits, her finding his medical records showing infection of ghonorrhea while overseas. All of this, of course, was told to me by the time I was seven or eight years old. I put very little into the stories my mother has told, but I don't know that they are not true, either. I never really knew my father until I was older, but by then his image was already destroyed by her vicious attacks, so to this day we do not have a strong relationship.
Apparently, when my parents divorced, he got away with only paying $200 a month for all four of us kids, and from what I gather, she resented the fact of having to raise all of us on her own, having to get a job, pay the bills, and manage life on her own, with the limited mental stability that she had at the time. I don't blame her for being so resentful, but I think that was also during a time when my dad didn't have a good job either. So who knows?