Haven't given it much thought untiil lately, but having gotten off to what some might consider a rough start as a wee person, I have managed just fine in the grand scheme of things. Here's the story. I swear it is true.
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Mother used to tell me that, although most women carried babies in their womb for nine months, she carried me in her heart for nine years after she lost a baby girl to crib death. My birth mom had left me with her brother and his large family where Mother spotted me, three months old in an arm chair for a crib.
Turns out I was one hell of a lucky duck because Mother and her husband at the time, Benjamin, were able to adopt me and bring me home to adore. But, hoping I would be forgotten, my thirteen year old step brother set fire to the barn, which spread to the house where I lay sleeping. Everything was destroyed, but me. Best laid plans and all.
Mother blamed my strong will, along with my temper, on my French Irish Catholic temperament. And it does seem I had some pretty strong genes. Just a toddler, I fell out the back seat of our car and was hit by another. Mother was a Christian Scientist, so she prayed and, along with some help from my “temperament,” I made it.
After the farm burned down Benjamin left, my step brother went to live with his father, and Mother and I moved to Providence to be closer to my Nana. Mother found work cleaning for a widower thirty years older than she and ended up marrying him when I was five.
Bernard had three “old maid” sisters-- Edna, the first female stock broker in RI, Tante Paula, an art teacher (and my first creative mentor) and Gertrude, who traveled the world as a nanny for children of the wealthy. We visited them quite frequently in their upscale old maid’s pad.
Then there was my Uncle Bob, who was gay and lived with my Nana. He rioted at Stone Wall, served in WWII and was a prisoner of war. The thing I loved best about him was learning to waltz and fox trot by standing on his feet.
I attended a private elementary school. After spending a chunk of that summer studying and then tested, I skipped 5th grade. Starting in junior high I went to public schools, where for the first time, I mingled with kids of other ethnic backgrounds, which I loved. Until then, the only black kid I had known was our cleaning lady’s granddaughter.
Mother was horrified at the size of the Jewish population in my high school, but got over it when I brought friends home and they didn’t implode or anything. She had the same fear when I became best friends with a Catholic girl and would have died to know I waited on the steps of St. Whatever’s while my pal went to Confession.
Most likely around twelve, I contracted polio, but survived, thanks to Mother’s prayers and no doubt, my strong French Irish Catholic temperament.
At thirteen, after a beer in the back seat of a ’47 Chevy Coupe, I lost my virginity to a guy who never believed I was a virgin because there was no blood. Although I had a full scholarship to Middlebury College, at seventeen I opted for marriage to him, followed by rapes, regular beatings and five pregnancies, only to be abandoned along with the babies, at age twenty six.
In conversation with a therapist at nineteen, I was told that I had already lived more than most people did in a life time. Now on my way to seventy- five, it would seem to be a good thing I got an early start.
At the moment I am rereading my Henry Miller collection and wish I could find a man who loves animals and likes to dance to R & B. Wait! That would be my latest ex and good buddy, Sky.