My Life – Part 1: The Early Years

My life begins, not surprisingly, with my parents. My mother’s premarital history comes to me primarily by way of anecdote and hearsay but I think we can safely piece together at least a vague sense of what was going on at the time. (Hopefully someone will yell at me and correct what I get totally wrong or accidentally fabricate.)

My mother was the eldest of three children, the only girl and it seems pretty clear that her father had little use for a daughter and knew with absolute certainty where she belonged and where she should go in life. She was a painfully shy child and little wonder this was the case given that her father was an abusive alcoholic. Family lore tells that he would often be drunk behind the wheel and drive down country roads at 90 miles an hour in such a state of recklessness that even the youngest and most adventurous of his children were terrified. Since he worked with the fire department, however, he never managed to actually run into any serious difficulty with the law.

My mother made her way through her childhood years living in the little burg of Frankfort, Indiana and going to school there until just before her Senior year of high school when her parents decided to move to the country. My mother had the unenviable experience of changing schools just before her final year of high school so she graduated from (if I’m not mistaken) Clinton Prairie, a tiny country school district that boasted a graduating class of less than 30. I’m sure that it was no easy task for the shy city girl to inculcate herself into the inner circle of those people in a single year of acquaintance.

From this rather scattered childhood, my mother came of age and headed to college. Her passion for her entire life had been to work with animals. Even today, she despises humans and prefers the company of animals to any person you can name. Her intent was to go to Purdue to study veterinary medicine but her wise father decided that instead she should pursue a more stereotypical female role and become a teacher. So as you may easily predict, this shy child when pushed into the role of outgoing teacher failed miserably in her studies. She swiftly headed home never to return to Purdue or her shattered dreams.

Not long after she met my father. The circumstances of this meeting are lost to me for the most part but again, family lore steps in with enough random tidbits to give one the idea. My father was a free-thinking hippie and that did NOT set well with my mother’s redneck father. Despite the intervention of firearms and other abundant protestations from grandpa my parents were married on December 31^st, 1971. From the beginning, the marriage was one under a great strain. It has even been admitted that the marriage took place for only two somewhat shabby reasons: 1. pissing off my grandfather; 2. my father’s misguided attempt to help a damsel in distress.

Just as the shiny newness was wearing off of this misguided matrimony, a surprise arrived in the male. My father (at least according to mother) had always claimed sterility because of a reproductive incident in his adolescence. Apparently this theoretical sterility was the only birth control in use in my parent's household because a mere 10 months and 9 days later a new baby arrived in the house. My mother had barely even had a chance to adjust to her life as a married person away from her parents before she was suddenly adjusting to the idea of having a child to care for. This must have come as an incredible shock to her especially considering I was a colicky baby and many times my mother was (she claims) on the brink of throwing me out the window to shut me up.

Even with all the newness of having an unexpected child, I think everything would have been alright except for one little problem. Grandpa suddenly had another boy in the family. As much as he had destroyed the psyche of his daughter, his boys fared, I suspect far worse. The expectations heaped upon them must have been unbearable. It’s clear from grandpa’s actions towards his boys later in life that he was in no way satisfied with how his boys had turned out. So here now in this tiny grandchild my grandfather saw his second chance for success. If he could only get this child under his care and direction he could accomplish what he’d never been able to with his own children.

From the moment of my birth, my parents and my grandfather were involved in a terrible tug of war. Grandpa wanted my hair short; dad wanted it long. Grandpa wanted me to play football and shoot guns; dad wanted me to be involved in the arts. Grandpa did everything he could, short of killing my father, to get control of his grandson while my mother was trapped in the middle. It’s no wonder that later her primary advice to me was “Whatever you do, don’t have kids. Kids ruin everything.”