On chilly winter days and nights, when the sky is dark and snow falls I love nothing more than sitting by my window watching the snow as it drifts from the sky onto the ground. My favorite time is late night when I can watch it falling under the street light. It is moments like that which makes me wonder why I am so different and why I never totally feel like I belong here or actually anywhere. Sometimes, I believe there is something within me or something of me and that I am not of what I am supposed to be.
Is this just the overactive imagination of a crazy, forty eight year old woman? After all, I am the one that goes out and predicts tornadoes (its a fact, I have witnesses), believes that I can calm the winds, has conversations with animals and inanimate objects and the list is too long to go on.
Will I ever be normal and if I was normal would it make me happy? Unlike others, I think happiness is a choice. It’s not about comfort, health, finanaccial security, or anything like that its about deciding to be happy regardless of the situation and look for the positive in the most negative of situations.
As a young child of about four, I was molested by my grandfather. He wore those stiff, starched white long sleeved shirts regardless of the weather and on the sultriest of hot, summer days he rolled up the sleeves and always wore black slacks except when working in the mines and the men all wore coveralls so I have no idea what they wore under them. He always wore white socks and black dress shoes, too. He wasn’t my blood grandfather as my dad was illegitimate but I didn’t know that for many years and in the eyes of everyone he was legitimate so nobody discussed it.
My grandfather smoked those filterless Lucky Strikes or rolled Prince Albert but I remember the Lucky Strike pack through those white pockets. I throw up thinking about them yellowed, nictotine stained fingers and nails touching my panties and slipping into them. That dirty old bastard was a no good hound and he touched me and my sister inw ays he shouldn’t and I don’t think I can ever forgive him. So many people say why didn’t you tell somebody. I wonder what planet they were from. Back in those days, children got knocked down a rat hole for saying anything negative about an adult and there was never a chance for anyone to listen because a child never had the chance to say more than a few words. People may think it was cruel but the truth is children learned respect and its something I seldom see in children today. The cruel part was that an adult would do such a thing to a child in the first place, the cruelest part is that a child still remembers it after all these years.
It seemed that was the beginning of a cycle of things to come. My mother was cut out to be a stepford wife. She tried smoking those long ciigarettes and watched the stories (they call them soaps now) and played that big wooden console stereo record player with those love songs and cheating songs sang by country men and women.
My dad was a coal miner and mom was an uneducated stay at home wife and mother and dad become injured and times were hard on and off and she had a few flings during my growing years. A few to the point, I was nicknamed the daughter of the town tramp.
Dad had been in the korean war and started drinking and became an alcoholic. He even had to be put in the Veterans Hospital Psych ward a few times.
Mom was particularly angry with us children especially if we didn’t want to go to bed and she wanted to have a man over while dad was working. The ebatings became worse as I got older. I looked just like my dad and my sister was fair and blonde like my mom. Everyone always called her the pretty one. Guess that made me the ugly duckling of the bunch.
I ended up hiding behind the sofa during some of the knockdown dragouts and blowups between my parents or shutting myself in a room. I never wanted to go in the closet though , becuase she had shut me in there so many times before and wouldn’t let me out I used to think I would die in there someday and it made me very clasutrophobic.
When the song The Little Girl came out by John Michael Montgomery came out, I cried everytime I heard it because I used to remember how many times fear it could have been me. I am thankful it wasn’t.
I also remember a song by an older country singer(he was young at the time) called Upstairs In The Bedroom. It had a real three chord twang to it and the lyrics were:
Upstairs in the bedroom, shes painting her eyes
painting her lips and planning her lies
Downstairs in the backroom, I’m holding my head
walking the floor and wishing shes dead
Its just about time for the phone to ring twice
she’ll slip down that stairway smelling like spice
off to the drugstore, she’ll say I bet
but the drugstore don’t sell what shes out to get
She’ll cross this room on the way to the car
but if this gun shoots straight, then she won’t go far
Shes told me tha last lie she’ll ever tell me
shes seen the last boyfriend that she ever will see
shes breathed the last breath that she ever will breathe
Now tell me, is that not a helluva song for a ten year old to memorize. It didn’t really get any better. That Christmas dad worked the double holiday and I got up for a drink in the mobile home we lived in (pure white trash that I was) and saw my das best friend humping on my mom in the living room. Man, I thought I would die that night. as if the cussing me wans’t enough, when it wa sover she came into my room and got me by the hair of the head, grabbed me out of bed and beat me senseless…guess thats why I am crazy.
I told dad, he almost killed her and she amde feel guilty for the rest of my life.
I was fifteen and the school football star acosted me late night going through the park from a ballgame. Within minutes, I was gagged and my wrists were tied around a tree. During the assault, I passed out and when I awoke I was still bound and my jeans were at my ankles, my top around my neck and had lost my virginity forever, as well as feeling like the county pariah. Who is going to believe some mobile home park garbage over a football star?
The beatings continued and at sizteen, my mom put a checkbook in my hand and said I had to pay my way. That was all she said and I knew only what she told me and relied upon me to do. Before I knew it, there was over a thousnda dollars in bad checks in my name and the cops came looking for me and took me off to a magistrate. Within hours, I was took to a foster home and a few days later the state police came and took me to a jail in another county. The jail was in an old American Legion building and there was one large cell for women with metal bunks and a toiler that sat on a wodd platform where the guards could see you. A one stall concrete shower with no curtain and no sink at all. The men were right across the hall and the guards read PLAYBOY and PENTHOUSE and tried to hit on evryone there. I had one reach through the bars and grab me by the hair and pull me up and kiss me and after that I prayed I would never be in the cell alone. I wasn’t. However, one night a rich lesbian and her lover maid were lcoked up for DUI and the lesbian tried to molest me but the maid squealed so the guards maced her, but got all of us in the process. That crap really stings, burns and itches and if you rub it, it gets worse.
I spent thirty three days and nights there with no communication from family and thats when I started writing alot. I prayed a lot , too. When I finally got out, I was forced to get a job to pay off all the checks plus enormous court costs so my mother arranged without my knowledge for me to sell my soul to the devil for awhile.
This man named Emmitt owned a club called The Cove and he wanted Go Go Girls. He had me write one check to cover all my checks plus all the ones my mom had wrote so the total was over four thousand dollars and he would take my pay until the total was covered and then return the check to me…or so he said. I became his slave and his plan was to own me forever. I had to be there daily and he would screw me several times a day and I cried tears until there were no more tears. I laid there in horror thinking my life was over each and every time he mounted me. One day, he told me if I would try to enjoy it and move a little it would be over a lot faster. I learned a few tricks that day and what used to be thirty minute sessions of hell never lasted more than five minutes per session after that, thank God.
Here I was missing a normal teenage life, being her savior by being his slave and she still treated me like shit. I was in hell and there was no end in sight. This routine lasted for almost two years.
Well folks, its been a horrid ride so I am stopping here…at least for now.
September 22, 2007 
