Category: relationships

Engagement, And family.

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I will never Marry…but I came really close once. He was a handsome lad, who truly acted like I was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He had dark hair and pretty blue eyes. We had dated for a while when I was in high school. I had gone to a special camp for occupational therapy. He was there and we hit it off. He was so cute, with a little bit of a problem with authority…yeah I know I have a type where men are concerned. Almost all of the men I have actually been attracted to have had that same issue with authority. I left him and the facility. Then a year or so later he and I met again. We hooked up. He asked me to marry him. You know what…at the time I had an awful amount of stars in my eyes where love was concerned. I wanted that damn white picket fence with six children. I wanted happily ever after like the poets speak of. (Says the poet) He made me think I was worth that love.

I was nearly twenty-one. I was an old lady to my mind. Thirty was an impossible dream. I had one child already. My best friend was engaged to a charismatic stoner. We were a group. At the time I thought that the traditional monogamy route was the only way life was. I also was quite deep in the metaphoric closet. I had girlfriends, but I was hiding them and our relationships because I was convinced that being myself was a bad idea. So, I was convinced that I would marry him. We would be together and there would never be a reason why we would not.

Then I walked in on him and my best friend on my couch. Yeah. He apparently had different dreams than I did. I had a one night stand with her fiance as revenge. That was an incredible memorable night. We are still friends, that one night stand and I. The best friend and the husband to be…well I haven’t seen either of them in 26 years now. I left the area and joined Job Corps. I met my boyfriend. He was unlike any guy I had ever dated. Yesterday is the anniversary of the day we met.

He is my best friend. He makes me laugh. He and I will never marry. We don’t want to. He and I had an open relationship from the first. It worked because we were able to be honest with each other. He closed it off when I found someone I could actually have considered getting close to. He realized that he wasn’t able to find anyone else who was even remotely like what he had in me. I still am able to find a girlfriend because there is things that a girl can provide that he cannot. But I have the only man I will ever have. And I am okay with that. (If he was gay the situation would be open there, but he is not.) I had in my youth figured that I needed to marry. I needed to have the house with the three-car garage and white picket fence to be normal. I was so foolish. At forty-seven I have learned a lot. I have carried to term 3 children. I had to give one up for adoption. I miscarried 2. I have found my home. It was not in a building. It was at the side of a man that loves me. It was being Mom to a neurodivergent Girl who thinks I am some kind of hero…and I still am trying to convince her she is mine. It was allowing myself to be me.

I have some definite opinions about Roe vs Wade. This story has a lot of family intonations in it. If I had grown up without the option for an abortion, it would not have mattered to me. I would have not aborted any of the three. However, I miscarried. Twice. Both were emotion killing moments. I wanted both babies. I barely survived having my beautiful neurodivergent girl. The doctors told me if I got pregnant again I would die. I can never carry another child to term. Roe vs Wade means I have the choice. I hate the idea of getting one. I still want that choice. I was raped after my son was born. If I had ended up pregnant I would have wanted that choice. I didn’t report it. I was terrified of the idea. I had told about the sexual abuse I endured as a child. I was told I had lied. Why would anyone believe me if I said that this had happened?

Ending RvW will not stop abortions. It will stop safe abortions. There was abortions before RvW. There were no safe abortions. Women have been choosing to slip pregnacies since the dawn of time. We are supposed to be an advanced society…so why are we discussing this again? It was solved in 1973…

nature at its best

sitting on my porch, watching the chicken that my daughter has…(she’s cleaning up it’s cage) and it is letting her opinion of my porch be known…well if it wasn’t pouring rain we would be walking around the yard…

The trouble with Spring

So aside from the terrible allergies that I suffer every year…the trouble with Spring is the weather is actually nice enough to get the yard cleaned up. That is for me in the form of hiring people who are able to do the work I cannot.

well I have to supervise and direct. So I am staying busy today. Add in the first of the month errands and I am likely to be super busy all week. I will try to post some interesting stuff as permitted by my schedule.

today I am posting from my phone while I am waiting for my kid to come back out of the gas station.

Each life is a book

This week I have been sharing some of the stories of my book. A lifetime of stories lived. Some of the stories I have lived will never be shared – for various reasons…some because they are not my story to tell(I am a mother after all) Some because the trauma prevents. So many lives are books stuck on dusty shelves. Never shared for various reasons. I need to share my stories. As a survivor of childhood sex abuse I felt like my voice was taken from me. For me, telling my stories is empowering. For others it is not. I would never try to force the telling of a life.

However, I also want to be clear. I am always willing to hear the story of the lives you have lived. I devour books like the dragon I am…and if you choose to present me with more to read I will revel in it.

Thank you for allowing me to share the stories this week. For me, it is the best form of immortality. I when I am gone will remain due to the book written by my words.

No story today

My Daughter, My Mother, and Me

Today is my Mama’s birthday. She is an amazing quilter, a creative soul, a hard working woman.

so I am not going to do any stories today. I am just going to be thankful that I have my mommy.

Radios, rednecks, and the results

My dad was a plumber. The majority of his friends were blue collar – construction workers, bikers, and truckers. We had cb radios in the house and in every vehicle. My mom met her second husband on the cb. It was a central part of our lives.

That radio has been featured in a couple of stories over the years. Once when I was 10 or 11 Daddy had a bunch of friends over. I was bored and trying to find trouble as all kids do. I snuck into one of the cars and got on the cb. My handle – the name you use on the cb – was/is Sasssy Suzy.

One of the guys who was visiting heard me on the cb flirting with anyone who would talk to me. He proceeded to get on and inform the audience of my age. The radio went silent.

The first time I met my Pop – mom’s second husband – he was talking to me on the cb. He called me honey and I was sure that he was thinking that I was Mama. He chuckled and said that he knew who he was talking to cause he was outside and mama was with him. Man…I miss him.

Remember my handle? The first year I was dating Joe, we were messing around on the cb. Joe has been a trucker for most of our lives together. I started flirting as I was prone to do on the cb. I still remember the response. Some dude I didn’t know came back announcing that he knew Sassy Suzy and she had an ass the size of a 747. I don’t think my backside is or was ever quite so large. It did offend me enough to stop the flirting and caused Joe fits of laughter.

That cb was a feature of so many other stories. Too many for a single blog post. I may tell a few more tomorrow.

Story of humor and headache

A quarter of a century ago I lived in the garage behind my current home. The house belonged to the grandmother of my boyfriend. We have been dating since we were 21. I moved into the garage with him after only knowing him for a week. It never occurred to me that I was being impulsive.

That door covers a smaller door into the small space that was our home. His grandmother put a bathroom on the back porch of the house – where the laundry room is now. We had a fridge and a gas stove. We slept on a couch against the back wall of the garage.

We would play D&d and hang out and live our lives in that garage. One night the boys got me laughing. I threw my head back in laughter. The garage is made of porcelain brick. I cracked one with my head when I threw my head back laughing. (nice little concussion)

Now that garage is behind my home. sometimes the little changes are huge.

More childhood mishaps…I mean stories

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I have a huge family. My parents were each from families of five children. So there were lots of cousins. My grandmother wanted my brother and me to know our cousins. So every summer for a few years – I believe it was like five but the memories are so infused into my childhood that I am not sure, she would drive us out to my aunt’s farm to visit. Mom has three sisters and a brother.

Her brother was into cosplay before cosplay was cool. He did his costumes without a pattern. I used to have pictures of him in his spiderman costume with Stan Lee. He was one of my childhood heroes. Mostly because of how creative he was. I had a lot of childhood heroes that I could look up to. Still, he lived close so he was not involved in our trips.

One of the sisters was Navy. She lived in Florida and still does. She did not choose to have children till later in life. My cousins on that front are amazing, but closer in age to my son. So they were not around when we were doing these trips.

The trips, and the cousins, were based in Michigan. A gorgeous small community near the Canadian border…Boyne City. My one aunt had a farm and though I don’t know what the other aunt did, she lived nearby. The farmer had two boys, one close to me in age and one closer to my little brother. The other aunt had a boy and a girl. The boy is elder than I, I am not sure by how much, and her daughter was my age. We stayed at the farm when we went. I remember drinking milk straight from the cow and riding ponies. I remember my cousin telling me dirty jokes in the barn. I remember all of us kids playing in the coal shute – it looked like a black sandbox. Then we were all thrown in the bath together because we were covered in coal dust. The summers there were amazing.

Now this story is about one of those trips. We lived somewhere between Virginia and Maryland. Grandma lived in Alexandria. She lived in basically the same place my whole childhood. That is why I often claimed her place was home. She had a station wagon…much like the one pictured on the top of the post. The trip between home and my aunt’s farm was a long one. We would drive up and back. On that particular trip, we were somewhere in Ohio on the way to the farm. Grandma was having trouble with the car, and she never did…but it was not acting right.

I remember her deciding to get off at an exit that was coming up. She took the exit ramp, and it was one of those that turned around and went in a circle. She was going slow, because it was an exit ramp, and thank goodness she was. I remember her cursing…mind you when I say she rarely did. The next thing I saw looking out the window was the passenger side rear axle and wheel rolling away ahead of us down the exit.

She somehow managed to get us pulled off of the ramp into the grass. This was way before cell phones…and she had two little children with her. My brother was a toddler. I am seven years older than he, and we stopped those trips around the time I turned eleven or twelve. I am not sure but I believe that this was on the last one. If it was I really can’t blame grandma. We walked to the nearest place where grandma could call for help.

She was good at handling emergencies. Obviously, we survived, but I remember it being a huge thing. I remember the fear when we saw the axle and the wheel rolling away. Yes, It was worse because it wasn’t just the wheel. Somehow just the wheel would have been comedic. This felt like we were in real danger because it was more than the wheel.

So many of my memories from childhood are based around trauma, mostly because that is what cemented the memories into my brain. This one is both different and not. Though the fear was there… I knew I was safe. This one has all of the wonderful memories of the trips attached. The cousins that I got to visit and know because of them. Two of those cousins are gone now. The little farm boy who told me dirty jokes lost his life on a snowmobile. The daughter of my aunt passed away as well – due to more natural causes. So all I have left of those cousins are the memories of summers spent in childhood. If you can, let your cousins know you love them. I am lucky enough to still have the cousins on my dad’s side.

Well, this was not supposed to be a dark story. I was trying to tell it for the fun oh my goodness type tale it used to be. Now I am melancholy at the loss of the cousins. So I will leave the blog well enough alone, maybe tomorrow I will go back to posting the normal stuff. It depends on how I feel in the morning.

Stories from childhood

Photo by Katherine Mihailova on Pexels.com

To start this story I need to explain something. I lived in a two-bedroom trailer with often ten or more people. We did not have running water. We lived a mile back in the woods. There were always animals…dogs, birds, cats…But this story focuses on one cat. The cat that left a lifetime mark on me. B.c. which was short for bad cat. He wasn’t bad. He was amazing. I did not have a bedroom. Mom and Pop had one, and my two stepbrothers had the other. My little brother and I slept on couches in the living room. There was another couch that whoever was staying over slept on. And we had a weird guy in a tent outside for most of my preteen years. Sometimes somebody in a camper outside as well. The people who slept on that couch had a few things in common. Usually, they were male. Often they were seen as trustworthy. They were not always.

We moved in there when I was eleven. I however have had an adult-shaped body since I was 8-9. Many of the men would try to make sure I knew that they wanted more from me than I was willing to give. Well BC was my defender. Those that crossed lines with me would often find that they woke to cat poop on their chests. He did not do it with everyone…and I did not control him. But it felt like He was always taking care of me.

Now anyone who has a cat will tell you that they bring you presents. BC was no exception. I often received dead mice. bird or lizard carcasses. I got very used to just using a paper towel and throwing them away.

I started ninth grade late…it was October when I started school that year because I had my son on the first of September. I was fourteen. So I had a lot of kids who picked on me. I was just as weird in high school as I am now, if not more so. And I had a kid. It was no secret. So one of the freshmen during my sophomore year thought that he could make a name for himself by pranking me. He just choose a poor prank considering my life. He saw a dead mouse laying outside the cafeteria. I had a bad habit of leaving my stuff at the table when I went through the line for breakfast. It wasn’t like I owned anything worth stealing. My purse at the time would have had my nail polish, an electric blue or black color, my wallet which was always empty, my hairbrush, a pen and notepad, and maybe some chapstick. On the rare occasion I would have my prized possession, a mini-cassette recorder my grandmother had bought me. So I would dump that and my backpack on the table and go get in line for my free breakfast.

The boy chose to put the mouse corpse in my purse. I discovered it in first-period Biology class when I went looking for my pen. I just calmly did what I always did with such things, believing it to be a gift from BC. I used a paper towel and disposed of it. The boy had expected a scream. I didn’t. So he approached, apologized, and became a friend. It was decided that I would be called Mouse due to the incident, and it stuck…I am still mouse at 47, the nickname was assigned when I was 15.

Bc left that winter. He never came back. I am aware that cats will go find someplace to die. But we never found him or his body…and I believe in the fae. So I can tell myself that the fae stole him because he was too smart for the human world. And I can enjoy the memories of the cat that got into so much mischief that it became his name.

I am not sure if I will do the proper posts tomorrow or another of my stories from childhood…I will have to decide then. Thank you for your patience with my whims.

One last week of Chaos

Last week I gave you excuses and the slow dripping of art and poetry for the week. This week I scheduled at the same time…mostly because I don’t believe I am going to have the wherewithal to do better this week. I will try to do better in April. I do want to point out that the poetry I shared was from stuff I have yet to put on pretty graphics. I did want you to see new stuff, but the energy levels I have been keeping as the stress levels have been this high have been abysmal. I have been writing…and I will have some new graphics in April to share. (Those were in previous volumes and ones I had decided not to share originally.) This week I will be sharing some of the book covers I have designed that are still waiting for someone to want them. I will also share more art and poetry. Next week will, for good or ill, see this stress done. I will go back to my normal routine. Thank you again for your patience with me.