Not Pretty Pictures

It's kind of hard to know where to begin when telling someone about yourself so it seems best to start at the beginning and work your way to the present. At all times remember this one thing. "That which does not kill us makes us strong." You are not allowed to feel pity or sympathy from anything you read. Compassion and understanding is welcome. My momma knew my name before I was born. Angela Carol for a girl, Michael Laverne for a boy. Thank God I was not a boy. Laverne is an awful name for a boy. I was born August 20, 1966, about 50 miles from where I lived in Georgia in a little place called Aiken, South Carolina, home of the triple crown and southern home to those who have an affinity for horse racing. My parents married young. My mom I know could not have possibly married for love. I believe she married to get away from her parents. Not unusual, but not the best reason either. I really don't know the truth why she married him. My mother is not one to discuss the past, she often denies many things exist. She has a selective memory about some topics and I have learned to just let it go and not bother seeking answers to things that will only cause her hurt to remember. My father was in the Army. He had been in Vietnam and chose to go a second time. Somewhere along the way he went AWOL, took up drinking and beating his wife. She toughed it out a while but finally made her choice and left him when I was 3 and she was pregnant with my sister. We lived with my grandparents. She was right back where she started. What should be good memories are often marred. My grandparents were working class blue color, provided for their family by working in the cotton mills. My grandfather, former navy, WWII, was very controlling of my grandmother and when he wasn't around my grandmother flexed her muscles and tried to control everyone else. My mother is 1 of 6 children. the oldest girl, second in line in birth order. The oldest, my uncle, was married and gone and started his family the same time my mom did. I am the first born of my mother, the first grandchild, born on my grandmother's birthday. What should have been a special bond was for a long time but it grew away then back again. My childhood was typical from the outside, big family all living together in a big white house. I am 3 ½ years younger than my mother's baby brother, 9 years younger than her baby sister. We grew up like siblings, slightly skewed generations. The other two sisters were older, closer to my mothers' age but yet we had strong ties and they were like a momma to me too. It was a common southern upbringing, extended family all working together for the betterment of the whole. We were in church every time the doors where open. Summers meant gardening and lots of canning and jelly and pickle making. Everything was cooked from scratched not from boxes. I learned at a very early age to cook at the knee of my grandmother. The roles of girls and boys where clearly defined, as where those of men and women. There were many arguments between my grandmother and mother if my mom did not give into to pressure and do everything for her baby brother as if he were her child. After my sister was born, my mother worked in a cotton mill, 3rd shift, and we were left in the care of my grandparents. When times got hard, my grandmother worked and when things got better she didn't. My grandfather was an only son and the baby. His mother, also called grandma, was were I spent a lot of my summer in early childhood. I love going to grandma's and staying with her. She did not ever change. She looked the same to me from then until she died when I was 20. Grandma's house was my safe place. When I was with her no one could bother me. I remember crying and begging to stay with her for weeks and weeks on end till I was forced to go home. Grandma's house was little more than an old shack by any means. Painted white with green trim. Her kitchen had a hand pump for water and there was no indoor bathroom. She ran a little store for many years before I came along. The building stood empty by her house and was used for storage. In that store is where she kept and unlimited supply of 6oz bottles of coke. She let me and one of my cousins once a day get a coke from in the darkness of the store. We spent our days playing, listening to grandma tell stories, shelling peas or butter beans and getting turns to help cook. I was 5 maybe 6 and she let us cook or do whatever we wanted as long as we cleaned up our mess. It was freedom. The most incredible freedom to be in her tiny house. Back at home, it was controlling and restricted. Children were to be seen not heard. Sent outside and told not to bother grown-ups. From before age 3 I have very clear memories of my father. I never saw him again till he died in 1980 and I stood at his casket. I never knew him to miss him, but I knew who he was and that he had problems children do not understand and grownups do not explain. By age 4 or 5 my memories are of my grandfather. Everyone called him daddy, including me. It is all I ever heard him called and he was the only man in my life. My mother worked in one mill on the night shift, 11-7. When she had to my grandmother worked in another mill on the 4-12 shift. All of us children where in bed and sleeping when my mother left and we were in the care of my grandfather till my grandmother got home usually around 1 or 2 am. Those were very dark times. I can still hear his footsteps and the creak of the old wooden door. He was a huge man, 6'4", 240lbs easy. Back then I was a tiny girl. The things men do to children are things they should be made to die for. When I finally got the courage to tell I was punished in true southern fashion with a leather strap to the backside and a scolding about the evils of children going to hell for lying. I soon learned it was easier to take the abuse and not tell than to tell and get a beating for lying when I was telling the truth. From age 4 to 9 I have black spots in my memory. I learned to go away inside my head and live someplace else while it was all happening. There are times I distinctly remember having no recollection of weeks passing. It's all black. Lost time. Salvation came, I thought, in the form of the man who married my mom when I was 9. But I went from one form of abuse to another very quickly. They married quickly, moved us away to Georgia. The very nice man who was going to be our dad gave us his true colors in less than a week. He was a mean drunk and didn't give a damn about anyone but himself. At age nine I went from living in a town with city blocks and sidewalks and the school across the street to living on a farm in the middle of nowhere and riding the bus to school. I was an extremely nervous child. My mom provided little emotional support, although she did take good care of us in all other ways. I knew she loved me but my mom was and still is at times the kind that thinks money will buy you peace. She said I love you all the time and we knew she was the one who loved us, but other than that, she did all she could to survive and that left little for us. He was the meanest drunk you can ever imagine. Beat her any time he got upset about the least little thing and on more than one occasion tried his best to kill us all. We were put to work in a way we had never known, feeding and breeding cows. Working in hay fields, cornfields and any other kind of field he planted. If you complained, you got whipped with his belt. If you didn't work fast enough you got whipped with his belt. If you did anything a child does, you got whipped with his belt. His temper was ferocious. He didn't know when to stop when he started and usually stopped only when his arm gave out. My sister was the tiniest thing you can imagine. If he had hit her he would have killed her I am very sure. The sight of seeing her hurt that way was something I could not take and often I put myself between him and her and took her whippings. I found out I was made of stronger stuff than he. I refused to let my knees buckle and I never let him see me cry. By the time I was 13 or 14 he gave up. He couldn't break me. The next few years passed in a whirl. I went to school, got a job, and he had strokes that left him in bad shape. You get what you give, no pity or mercy. I graduated high school, turned 17, worked fulltime and woke up one morning to hear him having a fight with my sister. My mother was in the hospital having just had back surgery, he decided to be a bully and things ended that day with me packing up everything she and I owned, and leaving without looking back. We had no place to go and ended up at my grandparents. A couple months of that place and I had an apartment in town, worked double shifts and my sister decided she wanted to be with my mom and went back to hell. I never looked back. There was no love lost there and I stayed away. My mom would come to visit when she could and I could tell though she never said the stress was killing her. After a couple years I did go back, but not to their house. I moved back out in the country in my own place, less than a mile from her and she was happy. There was a silent agreement to disagree and get alone and by the time I was 19 my stepfather had mellowed, stopped drinking and was trying to repair his health and had learned to treat my mother as something better than a doormat. She did leave him once, and that shook up his world badly. I think he feared living alone more than anything. My father died of some strange cancer and I will never believe they were not from exposure to things in Vietnam. My grandfather too died of a very uncommon form of cancer which is believed to be chemically induced exposure in his job of 30 odd years. My stepfather, he suffered many years of heart problems and died one day out in the woods while hunting, so far away from a town or city no one could have saved him. Everything comes full circle sooner or later. The piper always has to be paid. No matter how painful, I have dealt with them all, gotten past it for the most part. I have my head on straight and my heart in the right place. I survived. It made me strong. I try not to carry anger and blame. Those who are cruel to children have their own hell I think. All 3 of those men suffered agonizing deaths at the hand of their Creator. Revenge was His and he took it. But I got to watch. Cruel, yes, but it put closure to a lot of things in my past. To this day my mother doesn't believe things happened. And that is okay. It is how she manages to get along every day. One of my aunts and I have talked. She believes me. She has faced her demons and knows the same truth I know. We are far better for it. Living in denial breeds problems. Ghosts linger to follow you everywhere you go. Shining a light in those dark corners banishes them and they can never hurt you again. The major result of my past on my present is how overly protective I have been of my girls. I watch everyone with an eagle eye. Hurt them and you answer to me. I have tried very hard to give them a great childhood full of memories that can never be painted black. They will never know anything but a childhood filled with laughter and loving. The way it should be. You might say I took the bad parts out of my past and gave to them everything good and kind. The childhood I wanted is the childhood I gave to them. Each person in my life has helped to make me the person I am now. I am strong. I am confident (most of the time). I am in control. Often I am thinking one step ahead of most given situations. It may sound as if I am a control freak and weary of everyone I meet but that is not what I mean. It is like waiting in the wings and being readied to intercede should something go wrong. Everything and everyone has helped to make me the woman I am and to those people, the good and the bad, I say thank you. The past prepared me to be the very best mother for my children. It has also made me a damn good wife. My whole life I think was working to get me to here. Here and now with a husband who loves me unconditionally. Who supports me in every dream I dream. Who promised me before he married me that I would always be free, cherished and loved. Free to do anything I wanted, to never be controlled or forced to do things against my better judgement and will. Cherished in the way Jesus loved the church, unselfishly and without jealousy. Loved -oh I am. I don't take one minute of this life for granted.