The following is abridged text from a letter I wrote per request of the therapist mentioned previously. It illuminates some of the major events in my life, but certainly not all and reveals a little of what formed who I am today.
I had a pretty good childhood. They were working class people just making there way in the world. I don't remember ever being spanked. My father was a journalist and my mother was a registered nurse who was always home when we got home from school. My older sister and I got along okay.
In 1972, my mother and I were in a very serious car accident. We were hit by a drunken gravel truck driver. We both nearly died. I went through the windshield. My mother's abdomen was sliced open by the seatbelt. In those days, the buckle was over your stomach instead of on the side.
My mother suffered from illnesses, post-partum depression after my older sister was born, a breakdown when her mother died, small strokes through the years.
For the most part,I was happy-go-lucky and allowed to run around barefoot and to play at whatever suited my fancy. I was a good kid.
I realized in elementary school that I liked girls more than boys. I wanted to be strong and handsome and have the girls love me.
When I got into middle school, things changed. I was picked on and harrassed. I always felt different, but I was secure in my family's love. I had scars from the accident on my chin (I still do) which made them uncomfortable, but I think the kids sensed that I was different, too.
In my freshman year of high school, we moved out of Miramar (yes, I was at the same school that Johnny Depp attended, at the same time) and home, to this town, where my grandfather arrived in 1924 in a Model A Ford.
Coming "home" was one of the best things that ever happened to us. New identity. New life. Brava!
Pretty much that was it. The day after college graduation we went to Kissimee to see a college Admission's Director. That fall I left for college in Maine.
In the spring, my mother had a stroke that left her paralyzed on one side. During the summer, I came home and stayed with my grandfather and worked at the receration department. My father travelled every night to visit my mother at Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale. This was before I-95 was completed! When she came home, I helped to take care of her.
When I returned to college in the fall, I was became close to the small handful of lesbian students at the school. Once again, I had family love and acceptance... this time it was a "family of choice."
I was overcoming much shyness and fear. I was becoming an open-eyed, competent individual. K, our "peer group leader" taught me to look at things differently, to see that it was okay if I couldn't do things by myself, to find joy in small things, to see tasks as challenges that were rewarding and more. I owe so much to her. Then there was R. R has a soul that could swallow you. She is the first person I ever fell in love with. She's stubborn and difficult. The best rrelationships are often the most difficult sometimes.
I was writing more poetry then I had before, and one day when I got up from my desk in the professor's office where I did work-study as secretary, I left my notebook open. When I returned, the professor was standing over the book and he was impressed. He told me it was very good. (Okay, he was not a professor of Literature.) That, along with urging from my friends and family helped lead me to continue writing.
I tend to think of my relationships as being unending because that is what I grew up with. My mother's friends remained her friends, even coming to see her as she was dying.
This is where I have chosen to end the letter for this journal . I have provided these bits for the sake of exposition....
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