i'll say this first: i still have my 12 string guitar...

and so i will back up a little now.

my 12 string guitar was bought by my grandfather from the px on miramar naval airbase, shortly before and specifically for my 15th birthday. my grandparents had been sending money to my parents for years for birthday presents. and my father, instead of spending the whole 200 bucks they sent him for my christmas, skimmed 150 off the top and bought me a cheap red thing with the remaining 50. and took all the credit. it was one of the few things i brought from ohio with me and my sister when we flew out west to live with them.

and my grandparents, in an effort to keep me constructively busy, made sure i had guitar lessons.

and when i got grounded that summer for being caught kissing one of my adult boyfriends, i played guitar for 8 hours a day. screw chores.

i improved rather quickly. and so the question of a better one came up. they asked me what i wanted. i wanted an electric guitar and a small amp. but i didn't ask for that because i was a burden, and so the things i should ask for should always be acceptable to them. and an electric guitar i KNEW was not ever going to be acceptable. so i asked for a 12 string guitar.

and i played it like it was a six, teaching myself how to manage to fingerpick 12 strings. and i bent strings a little.

i used music to make a little headway in the popularity wars in california.
in corpus christi i didn't so much. mostly because i no longer cared. but i did discover i could easily play with other musicians.

skip forward many years.

when the eighth child was born, medicaid paid for my tubal ligation. i decided it was time to do what i always believed i was born to do: make music with and for other people.

so when the youngest was weaned i set out. i answered ads. but the people were not found acceptable by him. and he told me i just wasn't good enough to be wanted by anyone anyway.
after all, as he often told me, he hated musicians. and i was no musician.

so we arrived in texas. and once again i set out, only i was much more courageous than i'd ever been before. and in the course of buying my strings i met and made friends with many male musicians. and they wanted to hear me sing. so i discovered the real purpose of the karaoke bars. and in the course of trading this instrument for that i discovered i was good at playing bass. and from there i got into doing blues jams. and i did it alone. all of it.

a local pawn shop has a memorial day blow out every year with live bands. and they asked me to play a set. and i mean They Asked Me. so i did. i did a set of acoustic country by myself. and on the ride home i heard everything i'd done wrong. wrong songs, wrong clothes, wrong song order, wrong wrong wrong. and the next week i went back to the shop for strings. it was hard to look them in the eye, thinking i was so horrible. but they were glad to see me, and gushed over how well i'd done. two years ago i just out and told one of the fellows what he said about that set i'd done. the fellow got real angry and swore to me that i'd done a great job.

so.
i'd hit a blues jam on a sunday night, get home at 1 am and be up at 5 am to fix his goddamned lunch.

and this is where i don't have peace yet.

i got into a mediocre blues band as a bass player. i was good.
he was not happy. before this band, he let me trade a non working 67 ford pickup for a great bass amp. then after the deal was done he swore up and down he didn't say i could. didn't matter, he'd been too lazy to register the truck so i had, in my name alone.
he'd been too lazy to fix the caburetor on the truck anyways. the guys who made the trade said he'd left out one spring when he rebuilt it. that's why it didn't work right. i loved that truck.

but i loved the bass amp more. and he dropped it. deliberately. it never worked right after that.

so in my confusion about dealing with the mediocre blues band i answered an ad for a rock band.

the drummer talked with me on the phone. asked me if i was any good. i said yes, i am good. later he said that right there was what capped it for him. i had confidence in my own abilities. i impressed the guitar player enough but they found a former bass genius was back on the scene.so i didn't get the job. but the drummer said he'd getthe bass genius to listen to me sing and play keyboard and we'd do studio stuff.

now, the drummer was an egotistical, charismatic man. and so i was immediately accused of cheating, again. never mind that we always invited him along to practices and blues jams to scope out guitar players. i wanted him to come with me.

now, he had always had health issues. he'd get very sick very quickly and end up with pneumonia or bronchitis. he ended up on anti-depressants by this time too. it didn't help.
he let a sinus infection get away from him. the infection spread into the skin on his face. i'd taken him to the er one evening and they gave him some painkillers and told him to see our family doctor. when we got to the doctors office the very next day, they were in a tizzy. seems the blood work showed the infection was in his blood and he needed to be taken to the hospital again asap. another hour and he would have died...

the drummer visited him with me while he was in the hospital. he treated my friend like shit. over 16 years of patience were at an end for me. six weeks after he got out of the hospital, we sat down on the front porch for his daily bitchfest. but this time i talked.

i told him i wasn't happy and that i didn't know why. i told him that we were going to save up our money and get serious marriage counseling in the spring. and that for a couple of weeks of this intensive counseling i wanted us to live in separate places. he asked me where i was going to live.
i told him that i wasn't going anywhere. then i got up and went and did the grocery shopping. when i got back, he had packed his things. he left without saying goodbye to anyone. it was december 4th, 1999.

that was the beginning of my year of hell. the year he told me he had never loved me, but only felt sorry for me, and then stayed to fulfil his paternal responsibilities...

i think i'll end the narrative here.


and the question you have in your mind, "what does this have to do with why it was so devastating losing that other person?"

well, i had no idea what love could be like until september of 2005 when that person started telling me he loved me. and acted like he loved me. how can i describe the feelings of joy i had? they surpassed by miles the feelings of joy i felt with the love from each of my kids. surpassing the feelings of joy radiating in waves from my baby sister's face pressed against the sliding glass window.

i felt loved for the first time in my life. really and truly valued. and then it was ripped from me.

i'm 41 years old. and once again i am alone. because it is far better to have never known love, than to know it, and have it removed from your life in an instant, forever. to have your still beating heart ripped from your chest and stomped on. to spend months dealing with panic attacks, and the feeling of someone sitting on your chest, and wishing...


well, there's a gaping hole where my heart used to be.


going to tell me to get over it already?

go fuck yourself. or better yet, go home and fuck your lover, and pray for mercy from all that is holy, that no one does to you what has been done to me.


take this however you want, but i just don't care anymore.

first i'd like to say that i appreciate your hugs and your care and your love. but don't worry, i can talk about the things from my childhood without pain or regret or fear. it took a long time, but i've been at this place of peace with it for a long time as well. it takes time, not so much to heal the wounds, but to accept that sometimes we just have to endure the difficulties caused by others. there is no asking why because really, there are no reasons. it just is. and was.
the reason i rarely mention these things is because, well, they aren't my Now. plus i know that some people reject others for these kinds of harsh realities. that hurts, but i, myself, no longer feel pain over my childhood. i can go days without it even crossing my mind. and other people just feel uncomfortable about it. so i don't feel the need to talk about it, and since it isn't in my Now, i just don't.

onward to part 2. my young adulthood.

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i spent a couple of years in california after my parents divorce living with my grandparents and my mother. i had never been into religion, but my only friend was a christian, and due to her influence i converted.
then about the time i started to get a little less unpopular in high school, my grandparents decided to relocate to corpus christi taking all of us with them.
but along with the notable increase in popularity at school in california, came a notable increase in popularity among the males. i had a total of four boyfriends while in california. only one of them was my age. the other three were adults. but it wasn't heart rending leaving because of the male attention i was receiving. i was lost in corpus christi without my church.
in one summer i had become very involved with bible studies and teenager functions. then shortly after my 11th grade year started i was ripped away from the people and church i knew. it was hard.

i never did make the adjustment to life in corpus christi. i did well in school. but it was just a day job. after school i'd pick up my sister and go home and play my 12 string guitar for hours. but i never made anymore effort to fit in. so when i graduated, i did so without a single friend. i went straight into college too, having won a partial scholarship for voice at the last possible minute. the judges told me afterwards that i should have auditioned earlier because i would have won a full scholarship. i hadn't wanted to audition at all because to me it seemed like a waste of time. you see, my grandparents were going to pay for my college, but there was a condition: i could not major in music, it had to be something that was useful. we argued a little, they wanted me to go the math and science route, which i couldn't really do since i had flat out refused to do anything but the barest minimum of either in school. music was everything to me. so i made a final offer of music education. they grudgingly accepted the concession.

so there i was, 17, and in college during the first summer session. one of the churches i had attended a bit and i had made friends with one fellow and his wife. they became youth leaders at another church, but they informed me that while i was the right age for the high school group they had begun teaching, because i was in college i wasn't allowed to attend, that i had to attend the college bible study. so i did.

there was a beach party planned and i thought it would be fun to go. so i bought a bathing suit and matching shorts and went. that is where i met the guy i married.

he gave me alot of attention. he stuck by me like glue. and he made a date with me for the next evening to see a movie. then the next night after that he drove out to see me. and the night after that, and the night after that.
six weeks later i found out my grandparents were planning to relocate back to california. so in order to stay in school right where i was and keep my scholarship i moved in with him.

he had told me we would have a wedding and he would pay for it. he also told me he would have no problem paying for me to go to college. but after i had moved in, i found out he had no money and couldn't afford even part time classes. by moving in i had alienated my family. i couldn't go home.

they left me there. and i stayed with the man. he treated me well, but i wasn't much of the wifey type he wanted, so he set out to make me into what he wanted. and because i loved him, i complied. but i was never good enough.

i was inept at cleaning the house to his specifications. there was always something wrong with the food i cooked. i was either too fat(during my eight pregnancies) or too skinny. and i wasn't blond.
but sometimes he would tell me he loved me. and he would tell me the only reason he stayed was to fulfil the obligations to the kids.

and everytime we had a birthcontrol failure, he would threaten to kick me out of his house. in 17 years of a common-law marriage we moved 6 times. i can't count how many churches we tried to go to but were not right for him and therefore me. i don't know how many times he would quit his job only to get another better one but with slightly lower wages.

then he decided to buy a house near his parents and almost a whole country away from my family. and i homeschooled the kids.
because we never had money for christmas i ended up making toys by hand for them. because we barely had money for food, i cooked everything including our bread from scratch and i sewed all the kids clothes. i didn't have time to sew for myself. yet he smoked and would spend an hour afterwork everyday complaining to me about how aweful his life was.

after the seventh child, and fifth birthcontrol failure, i tried to schedule a tubal ligation. he refused to talk to the finance department of the hospital, so they cancelled it. a month later i was expecting the eighth.

two years later i decided that i needed to see my family who had moved to north texas. after the short visit to a place where i could breathe through my nose for the first time in 9 years, i took advantage of his disatisfaction with yet another great job and suggested we relocate.
so we did.



and now i have to go pick up some stuff for dinner. the last chapter will be much shorter.

"get over it already", "has anyone ever told you that you hang on to things too long?"

these are some of the comments i've received in the past year about what has been one of the most devastating things that ever happened to me. but for you to completely understand why losing that man was so devastating, you need to know alot more about me than you do now. i've been open here for the most part. but i realize that my openness here has been about the here and now. and that is the kind of person i am, open, and living here and now.

but today i will open up the past.

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i was a wanted child. they wanted me to be a boy, that is. my mother was a manic depressive homemaker with a writing hobby. and her hobby was much more important than the housework and me. i have absolutely no recollection of playing any games with my mother at all. none. no conversations about anything. none. i remember once she took some time to play with and braid my long blond hair, but it was too much of an imposition so she never did it again.
my father was more interested in the television. i had(and still have) issues with the noise a television makes so i rarely watched it. i played alone in my room with the vast array of toys they bought me to keep me out of their way. and i played outside when it was sunny and climbed the big tree or played with my dog.

then there was school. my parents really wanted me out of the house as soon as possible, so they conned the school into putting me into kindergarten when i was four. i would have done far better if they had waited a year, not because i had difficulty with the work. but because i was already smaller than my age peers, putting me in with kids who were all one year older made me the smallest person in my class for years. coupled with the ability to read circles around everyone put a nice red target on me for bullying.
and i got that in spades.
and when i told my mom, she brushed it off. for years.

i knew i was a burden. i am not guessing that they wanted a boy, i was TOLD that they wanted a boy. my grandmother loved me in her fashion, but when i was 11 my little sister came along. and i heard from that day forward that SHE was the most beautiful child that was ever seen by anyone.

yeah. but you know something, i liked the person i was, for the most part(i really could have lived without the zits though). and i never ever understood why no one could see in me what i saw in me. i attempted suicide three times in my early teens, not because i hated myself, but as the only way to escape the hell i was caught in. funny thing about my suicide attempts: i used tylenol because there was never any aspirin in the house. so basically my attempts went completely unnoticed except as me sleeping in till noon and missing the school i hated so much and yet staying home with the manic depressive mother who would throw things when life wasn't going her way. which was alot.

my parents decided they'd had enough of each other when i was 14. my father had been abusing me for 2 years by then so i was somewhat happy about the divorce. by the way, the first time my father touched me i told my mom, but she just laughed at me...

so the one thing that made me unhappy about the divorce was the fact that my baby sister might end up with my father, and i was dead set on going wherever she went.

you see, she loved me. she would stand at the sliding glass door and wait for me to come home from school. my mom worked nights at that time, so i took care of my sister from the time i got home from school until my father got home from his drunken binges with his friends at the bar.

my mother wanted to talk to me one day. she said that she was sorry but she could only afford to have one of us go with her, and my sister still needed her. i would have to go with my father.
then my father wanted to talk to me. he said he could only afford to take one of us, and he wanted my sister. i'd have to go with my mother.

i told both of them in no uncertain terms that where my sister went i was going.
so they sent me and my sister to live in california with my grandparents, the parents of my mother.
then a few months later my mother followed and the divorce was done from there.

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and now i have to get ready to take my two little girls to see the eye doctor. part two will be written and posted later. and i am thinking about posting childhood pictures of me also.

i guess i should elucidate on a few things.

i have eight kids. yes 8. two are out on their own so i am down to six.
they all have the same dad. he left us 4.5 years ago.
i went to college immediately after divorcing him.
lots of terrible stuff happened that year.
lots of terrible stuff happened the next year.
now i have graduated and have the best job.

i have a red 2002 mustang.
i have a black 97 suzuki savage.

i guess that's all for now.