It's my first post for Blogtember. Today's challenge is to describe where or what you came
from. The people, the places, and/or the factors that make up who you are.
Wow this could be a pretty big blog post. Recently, I have started reflecting more on what
has shaped who I am today. Obviously this blog is part of that as I titled it
“Finding Myself in My Forties”. This
will only be some of the pieces of what and where and who has made me who I am.
From as long as I can remember we went to church. Not only on Sunday’s but on Sunday morning,
Sunday night and Wednesday night. Going
to church and participating in church activities was the biggest consistency in
my life. (I have elaborated more on this
in my ‘religious background' post here.)
I grew up in a small town in Colorado. My best friend was my neighbor. We moved a lot as I was growing up, and it was
kind of a joke that we lived on every street in town. We lived in several different houses, actually a lot of them were duplexes. The funny thing is, my best friend and her
family seemed to move right along with us.
We either lived side by side in the same duplex or she moved into a
house after we moved out of it. In
hindsight it seems kind of weird but that’s just the way it was.
 |
| Several of the duplexes that I lived in growing up. |
From a very young age I remember walking all over town, a
child alone (or with other kids), to and from school, to the store, anywhere,
but never with an adult. I have a memory of trying to walk to school, I had to
have only been in kindergarten, and the wind was blowing so hard I couldn’t
keep going. So I sat down on the curb
until someone I knew saw me and picked me up.
We only lived about 3 blocks from school at that time, but I couldn’t
even image letting a kindergartner walk to school by them self today.
Sixth grade was a monumental year for me. It was when I really started to notice that
there were ‘popular’ kids and I desperately wanted to be their friend. For Valentine’s Day, of course the tradition
was to give all the kids in the class the little paper character
valentines. But I thought I would buy my
friendship with a couple of the girls and give them a candy bar with their
valentine. This was big for me as we didn’t
have a lot of money and for me to come up with two candy bars at one time was
going to be hard. I somehow managed it
though, but the morning I needed to take them to school I couldn’t find
them. I was heartbroken. I knew my
chance to be best friends with the popular girls had been destroyed and I
didn’t know how I would go to school that day.
I did and when I came home I found them where I had left them. I was so caught up in trying to be
a cool kid by bringing such a great treat that I had anxiously overlooked them.
And the more I looked and couldn’t find them, the more distressed I got. I must
have looked over them a dozen times without seeing them. But it taught me a lesson, believe it or
not. Buying a friendship was never going
to be true. It wasn’t right and I knew it.
One of my worst (yes I said worst) memories is from the sixth grade. I don’t remember the circumstances that prompted me to say to the class and the teacher that I was moving across the street from another classmate. But the teacher and the whole class busted out laughing at me because all they heard was that I was moving across the street. I was mortified and hated that teacher. And I have never forgotten how bad I felt that I wasn’t allowed to be heard.
My sister and I dressed alike.
My mom was single from my earliest memories, although she
was married when I was born. He wasn’t ever a part of our lives. My sister is about a year and half younger
than me. My mom always dressed us as twins even though we really didn’t look
alike. (It might sound funny to say ‘my’ mom but my sister and I still both
refer to her as ‘my mom’ not ‘our mom’ or just ‘mom’. We have mentioned it as
adults and think it’s funny but it is just what we say) Anyway, she was single
for quite some time. About the time I was eleven years old she met and married my
step-dad. I had never known what having a dad was like and he was/is a great
example of an amazing dad. He taught me
so much and made me realize what my potential really could be. Actually the sixth grade move was into our
first house as a complete family.
(Wish I had a good picture of my step dad at that time, but I don't)
Our first family house.
I loved that house.
It was two stories and it was finally a whole house that was all
ours. No connected neighbor in the other
side of the duplex. We each had our own
room and we felt like we had climbed the ladder from poverty to middle class. Nothing was better than the dollar bill that
was left each morning for us to take to the public pool to swim every day during
the summer. We thought we were rich or
something. And then we got an Atari. We
really thought we were something then.
The Christmas we got our Atari.
In junior high, I still wanted to be a part of the popular
group. Although, I think overall, I
fared quite well in junior high. I was a different person at home and at church
than I was at school. I had a lot of confidence
in my little church group and was often the center of attention. I was always congratulated about how good I
had done performing in plays and dancing and gymnastics. Often after church I would ‘practice’ the
cheers I had seen the high school cheerleaders doing at the football games. Church was just a different, more comfortable
place for me.
Me and a friend at some church pageant or play.
By the time I started high school; I really tried to find
myself and joined different clubs and sports. I discovered that I liked to be
involved in whatever I could be. I had
never cared before if I missed a day of school, but when I thought I might miss
something, some announcement, or some chance to join something, I just couldn’t
take that chance. I desperately wanted to be on student council, but never won
an election. When I joined drama club, I
found out that each club got to have a representative on student council. I couldn’t wait and promptly got myself
picked to be the drama club rep for the following year. That only lasted for a couple weeks, once I
discovered that I wouldn’t be able to be in drama club because I needed some
other class that was at the same time as drama.
Like a lot of girls, I wanted to be a cheerleader and the homecoming
queen (or at least one of the attendants).
But I never had enough confidence in myself to even try those things. I
never even went to prom because I couldn’t get over myself. I wouldn’t go without a date and I wouldn’t
go with just anyone, so I ended up not going.
We had moved a couple more times since the ‘house across the
street’ that I loved so much. By the
time I graduated high school we had moved to a bigger neighboring town. My sister and I still continued to go to our
old school and we both graduated from there.
When I was sixteen years old, my mom gave birth to my baby
sister. What a weird thing that was for
me. I was so involved in everything at
school that I really didn’t have time to be distracted at home. I loved her (and still do), but I feel like I
never really bonded with her. And then
two years later, I went off to college.
I ended up only staying ‘away’ at college for a semester but when I came
back home, I drove to another college every day, I worked, and hung out with
friends. So I really didn’t spend much
time with her then either. I regret it
now, but was too self-consumed in my youth to think of anyone but myself.
For some odd reason when I was applying to the new college,
one of the questions on the application was asking for the date when your
biological parents were married. (Can you imagine?) Anyway, I had to ask my mom, and she had told
me that they were married in May 1971. Ok, I was born in September 1971, so
they weren’t married when I was conceived.
That was probably less common in 1971 but not unheard of. Then I started to talk to my sister about it and
we started to remember a guy that she had talked about quite a bit when we were
little (before our step-dad). So one day
as she was heading out the door, I decided to ask if he was my dad. I wasn’t prepared for the answer. And I
definitely should have waited until she had time to stop and talk about
it. I won’t get into the details, but I
was devastated. The guy who I had thought was my dad all those years wasn’t
actually. He wasn’t around anyway, but
my sister and I had always been told we had the same mom and dad. That question came up a lot because we didn’t
look that much like each other and we were built completely different. It was a
joke to us…yep, same mother, same father.
Now we knew.
Over the next couple of months I got to have a conversation
with the man that I had thought was my biological father. He explained that he had married my mom
knowing she was pregnant but that the child deserved a family. ME, he did that for me. Obviously the marriage didn’t work out, but
it changed what I had thought about him for so many years. He had told me that he always wanted and
tried to stay in touch but my mom would never allow it.
Me, my mom, and him.
Years later, I did get to meet my biological father. It took
me a long time to get up the nerve to search for him. In the process of our first communications I
found out that he knew she had gotten married, but didn’t have any idea that
they had divorced. He thought that we
were living as a happy family all those years and never wanted to interfere.
The day I met my biological father.
I got married and started my own family within the next
couple of years. And of course that has changed who I am, but up to that point,
the things above are some of the major things that have made me who I am. And I think it is a good place to end this
post.
Thanks for visiting!
