Sick, Insane, Amazing, Incredible!

On July 3rd I completed Body Revolution, a 90 day intense Jillian Michaels workout program. When I was in high school and college I worked as a lifeguard and swim instructor and would have to swim and sometimes I would get into kicks where I would actually try to swim on a regular basis. Other then that I have never worked out on a regular basis. In January of this year I started on Nutrisystem, the first month I was doing great and was super motivated and by February I decided to step it up. I stumbled across a group of woman that had just begun The 30 Day Shred by Jillian Michaels. I searched it online and started doing the workout off of youtube, I was checking in everyday with the women and we were sharing our experiences. As we neared the end we decided the next move would be to do the Body Revolution. The family and I went away to Florida in the middle of April, a couple weeks after starting BR, so I didn't get to workout everyday as I had wanted but as soon as I got back I busted my butt to get caught back up with the ladies. I struggled with getting back on Nutrisystem 100% when I returned but I stuck with the workouts. I still haven't been the greatest with Nutrisystem but with the support and the accountability those ladies give me I get my workouts done. When I started Nutrisystem in January I weighed 252 pounds, as I am approaching my 6 month anniversary with Nutrisystem I have lost 39 pounds, I wish it was more but I am the only one to blame for that. Next weekend we are having a big family party (I'll explain in another post) and I plan that as soon as that is over I will go back on plan with the same motivation as I had in January. My plan is that next year this time I will be at my goal weight of 135.

College

College was a struggle for me. Between the lack of time management, lack of study skills and my life always being a little stressful, it wasn't easy to get through. My first year I tried to enjoy myself, I was finally able to let loose and act my age for once in my life and I did. I didn't focus much time on studying and reading. My second year I started dating Mr. Money and I was struggling to work, have time with friends, have my relationship, take care of Mr. Money, and be in school full time. My third year working a lot more to pay for living on my own, taking care of Mr. Money, Mr. Money developing the pain killer addiction, and again being in school full time. My fourth year giving up on Mr. Money, breaking up with him, and working plus school full time. By the time the second semester began I decided that I wouldn't take a full class load and I would stay an extra semester. I felt like I had missed out on so much those years I was with Mr. Money and my school and grades were suffering. I decided taking my time and getting my grades up would be best. 
For some reason in my mother's head she had planned that I would go away to college, graduate, move home and she would give me the house after I got married and had kids of my own. The phase "keep the house in the family name" had been thrown around a lot. I never had a desire to move back home let alone stay in the house forever and raise a family in it. The house was filled with bad memories, it wasn't a place I would look forward to coming home to or want my children to come running home to after school. The house has no yard and it isn't anything like I picture my dream house. In the past women wore their mother's wedding gowns as a tradition, a mother passed the dress onto their daughter. Now women want their own dress, want their own style, want what is in fashion. To me I wouldn't want the memories. Both my mother's marriages failed miserably why would I walk down an aisle in that same dress. Same goes for the house. 
When I went to orientation for college my intention was to be a double major, criminal justice and psychology. My advisor told me I had no chance in being able to double major let alone major in criminal justice. Instead of doing my usual trying to prove people wrong, I backed down and listened to her. I changed to just a psychology major and criminal justice minor. The psychology classes were all very large and the exams were multiple choice. The criminal justice classes were small and usually wanted short or long answers or essays for exams, and required more papers. My grades in psychology were always poor, I struggled with multiple choice, not being able to explain my answer and I had a hard time with the theories. I constantly battled to keep my grades good enough to stay in the major. My criminal justice grades were always great. I didn't struggle in those classes. 
Two weeks before I finished up my last semester in college my father passed away. I didn't do great on my one final and wound up failing the class, which I did not find out until a couple weeks after I walked for graduation. The professor was a jerk and didn't care, so I was 3 credits short of getting my degree. I was able to take an online class to make up the credits I missed with failing that class and getting my diploma. 

Mother's Day

Yesterday was Mother's Day. It is such a tricky day for me. I don't have warm and fuzzy feelings for my mother. I try to avoid hugging her. I feel forced to say I love you when she says it to me, so it usually comes out luv ya.
I can't not get something for my mother but I don't agree with all the mother's day gifts. Picking out a card is so hard. I don't want to get something all mushy and lovey dovey because I don't and haven't felt that way about her. So I have to find a card that just basically says Happy Mother's Day, no hearts or anything saying you are a wonderful mother. Then the gift can't be mushy either. This year I found a card that was for Grandma, from my kids and just signed mine and my husbands names. The gift we got her a panoramic picture of her favorite baseball team's stadium. We also took her out to dinner, but my husband had that planned for me anyway. Nothing saying you are a great mom. 
Part of me feels bad I don't have those warm fuzzy feelings but all of me knows that I can't and won't ever have them. She made really shitty decisions throughout my childhood, she was not very kind to me growing up, and she continued to make shitty decisions as I got older.
I am going to sound horrible and as a parent myself I hope my children never feel this way about me. I would be perfectly happy if I never had to speak/see her again. I have heard so many people say don't worry your relationship will get better as I get older and have kids of my own. That I should cherish my relationship because not everyone has a mother. I can't. It will never happen.

As a side note I had a wonderful day with my kids yesterday. We spent the day out and enjoying funny time.

High School - Senior Year

Most high school seniors are concerned most about filling out college applications, writing college essays, getting accepted, deciding where to go, deciding what to study once in college, getting time with their friends before leaving, graduating, packing, and starting college. Not me.
My junior year I had toured Ivy League schools in the New England area. I had decided I wanted to go to school for law, wanted to be a criminal defense attorney. I really wanted to go to California to go to school but I knew my mother would never let that happen. By the end of my junior year things changed so drastically between 9/11 and things with my father that my dreams changed. I developed a passion for criminal justice and psychology. By senior year I had decided I wanted to go to school, get my 60 credits and then go into the NYC police academy, finish up college and work towards becoming a profiler with the FBI. I knew that the Ivy League schools were out of the question, not that my father had much money but now my mother would have to put me through school all on her own. I decided very quickly which two schools I was interested in, of course I applied to a couple in case I didn't get in. The one school was in upstate NY, it was a big campus with large classes and a lot of cement but far away from my dream of going into theNYPD. The other school was in NYC, had the exact program I wanted and worked with the NYPD in furthering education, HOWEVER there was no dorms. I would be forced to live at home until I could afford to have an apartment, which would take a long time. Both schools were high ranking in the fields of study that I was interested in.
By this time my friends and I had grown apart. They were more concerned with partying, which is something that I wanted to distance myself from. They would leave me out and not invite me to things so they could be a little more free in what they did. I started to become close with an old friend and a new friend of hers. These two new close friends had an understanding and appreciation for screwed up parents. We always wanted to be out of our houses but we weren't typical teenagers looking for a party or trying to get wasted. The three of us came across a park and ride which apparently turned into a gay meet up place. They left us alone, we were two girls a and a guy (who happened to be gay but had no interest in finding love that way). We were able to hang out, not run into people we didn't really want to see, laugh and observe some interesting situations. One day I will write a post all about the park and ride. We wound up spending a majority of our hang out time at this parking lot and even made some friends. We would blast the music from our cars and dance our butts off.
When it came to school, I had started off the school year with a normal course load plus one AP class. After about two weeks in the AP class I decided to drop it, it was the last period of my day. The prior period was a study hall/gym (I had been excused from because of a knee injury) rotation and I had lunch right before that. I was able to work it so that I was able to leave school at my lunch period. My usual routine would be stop at Burger King get a number one, go home and eat then head to work until my pool closed. This was one of the reasons my weight started to creep up. I was able to hide my eating from my mother because she wasn't home and I was eating crap.
I was able to graduate in the national honor society and in the top 25% of my class, despite my grades slipping at the end of my junior year. I was accepted into all the colleges I applied to and chose to go to the one upstate. I knew I needed to get away and be on my own. I spent the summer packing for college and working all the time.
My relationship with my mother just got worse and worse. She never had any restrictions before but started to implement some even though I wasn't in anyway out of control. The rule was I needed to go home when my friends went home. I held a job and didn't miss school but yet she thought I needed to come home earlier. I think she just knew she was going to be losing the control she had over me.
My love life, non existent. Hanging around a gay meet up place doesn't really help that. I was fine with it, I knew I was going away to school and didn't want to start anything back home. I didn't want to have a reason to have to go back home more than I needed to.

High School- Junior Year

Junior year was completely different from the previous school year. Two weeks into the year, I was in my third period criminal justice class. We had a guest speaker, a NYC police officer. He was telling us stories from working in the police department and telling us about it as a career. He resembled Robert from Everyone Loves Raymond, except he was a lot more outgoing and vibrant. The principle came on the loud speaker, immediately the officer (who is very familiar with our school and how much our principle loves to talk on the loud speaker) rolls his eyes spins a chair around in front of him and sits down with a sigh. The principle then informs us that two planes had flown into the twin towers in NYC only 30 miles from where we were. He asked that anyone with family working in the towers report to the guidance office to attempt to contact those family members. He also said that we would remain in the class that we were in until future notice. The officer stands with tears flowing from his eyes, knowing this wasn't good but trying to not panic us, he asks one of the boys in the class to walk with him to the main office so he could call his station to find out where he needed to go. My teacher was in and out of the classroom trying to find out what was going on. The difference between now and then was the speed at which we get information, back then we relied on TV news, radio, and internet, now we would have been all on our smart phones getting second by second updates. The next announcement was that both towers had collapsed and that anyone with family working in the city should report to guidance. Shortly after my teacher walked in the room to report that the pentagon was hit. That was the point I decided to leave. My uncle (Mr. Perfect*) was NYFD and an uncle on my father's side worked in the pentagon, I knew I needed to get in contact with my mother to find out what was going on. My cousin, Mr. Perfect's son and I went to school together. I walked out of my classroom and out of the school, it took me a half hour of trying to call my mother from my cell phone to get a hold of her. Once I finally got a hold of my mother she informed me that Mr. Perfect was at home when it all happened. He had actually switched to have that day off, my aunt was in Florida starting her vacation a few days before his and he was supposed to fly out that afternoon with both of my cousins to meet her. Had he not been off that day he would have been in the tower when it collapsed as was all of his station that was working that day. My mother didn't have any information on my other uncle since he was my father's brother. I began searching the school for my friends and cousin. We all gathered up and walked off campus. My happened to live not far from the school, so we spent the rest of the day at her house watching the news. Over and over agin watching the footage of the planes going into the towers and then the towers collapsing. It was all so overwhelming and there was a huge fear of more things happening. We each sat there and waited, some of us getting calls from family members checking on each other, some of us hoping our phones would ring. I felt so helpless, I wanted to do something but there was nothing I could do. Over the next couple weeks my uncle worked crazy hours going into the city trying to put out fires and searching for any remains. It is something he never talks about anymore and I know it changed him in many ways. You would hear stories of the near misses, my uncle having the day off. My friend's father was in one of the towers earlier that morning but was there too early and was asked to come back later that day. Then there were the stories of the missing, the fireman with two young children who lived down the street from me. A teacher in my school getting a call from her husband who was trapped above where the planes hit before the towers collapsed just to tell her he loved her. Seeing all this loss and senseless trauma I took a conservative stand, which was very different from many of my close friends and actually started our growing apart. In school we would sit and talk, our teachers were very supportive and even as adults lost with their emotions. I think we really all helped each other get on with life.
Life got back to "normal" slowly, it would never be the same, it truly took away a sense of security I always had being an American and stole the innocence of so many children. I started working at an indoor pool, would work almost 7 days a week just to be out of my house. When I wasn't working or at school I was out with friends or in my room at home. I kept good grades in school and my bosses loved me at work.
Sometime after Christmas my mother decided to try and set me up with the son (Heart Breaker, HB) of a guy she worked with. The guy she worked with was someone she knew for many years and he had even worked with my father who had worked there before moving away. HB and I started talking on the phone and then went out on a date. He was gorgeous; average height, dark hair (crewcut), blue eyes, tan, manly, and respectful. I was so confused as to why he would be interested in me. I was overweight, ugly and clearly unlikeable. He was very shy, a year older than me and I was his first girlfriend. We started spending time together every weekend, he lived about an hour away and didn't have a car yet (was saving for college) so I always had to drive to him after work or school. He had a very close family, two older brothers and his parents were still together. They always had big family dinners and there were always people in his house. I loved it, completely opposite of what I grew up with and I loved it. I think I fell in love with his family more than anything, I ignored all the things I didn't like about him. He truly wasn't that smart, he had very different priorities then me, he really didn't have an interest in a long term committed relationship, he had very different goals for his life, and he pictured his future very different from mine. I looked past all that and was blinded by my physical attraction to him and my desire for normalcy in my family life. Once everything happened with my dad (check out early posts) he started to back away from me. We went to my prom together and after that he made a lot of excuses to not see me. A couple weeks later was a family get together for my little brother's birthday, he had agreed to come over for it, I would go get him and bring him home after. The morning of I called him to make sure we were still on and he backed out. He told me that he was going away to school at the end of the summer and didn't want to go away with a girlfriend back home. He said that he wouldn't be able to spend as much time with me that summer because he wanted the time with his friends and to relax and get things ready for school. I was crushed, in anger I said well then I would rather it be over then to know we were wasting a summer together. I got off the phone with him cried my eyes out, put myself back together and went to my brother's birthday party like nothing was wrong. At that point I was so used to being told to hide things and not let anyone know that I was completely broken/destroyed on the inside that it was second nature to me. The next day I had some finals at school and then I called him and told him that I was wrong and that I wanted to spend any time together that we could. I never talked to him again, I would call and he would always be busy and never call me back. I waited to hear from him everyday. I lost my stepmom, my dad and a boyfriend all within a couple months. A couple years later my mother told me that she heard around work that his father pushed him to end things with me because of what was going on with my father.
People around me, of course that knew about what was going on, were on egg shells, on suicide watch. But I kept going. That summer I worked a lot and stayed away from my house even more than I had in the past. I gained 60 pounds in a year, and that was really the beginning of my major weight gain. I was never skinny but I was a steady weight. Between not eating normal healthy meals at home (my mother never really cooked normal meals), hiding my eating since my mother was pushing fad diets on me, and a horrible case of depression my weight started to spiral out of control.

*I call my uncle Mr. Perfect not in a sarcastic way but in the sense that that is always how I viewed him. I looked up to him, he was a hero, started out as a cop and became a fireman. He treated his wife like a queen and would never hurt anyone. In fifth grade I started liking the football team I like because it was his favorite. I wanted to become a police officer to be like him. He was truly a good guy and I was not surrounded by many growing up.

Summer Before Junior Year

The summer before my junior year was the first year I started working for the town. I worked as a swim instructor at a beach during the day and then at the town pool in the evening. It was tons of fun working there, I was one of the younger ones most of the rest were in college. We would hang out in the parking lot and talk for hours after the pool closed, we would toss each other in the pool if we noticed someone looking a little dry, we would go out to dinner and take up half the restaurant, and we would have our kids race against each other or make the older kids sing funny songs. I was also able to drive to and from work, that is how I got into my very first accident. Nothing major, no injuries but a bunch of damage to my car. And the driver in the other car was the father of a girl I had been on and off friends with throughout school. We both had stop signs but he didn't stop at his, luckily we were in a residential neighborhood so neither of us were going that fast, but fast enough to deploy my airbags. The guy got out of his car screaming at me, saying I did everything wrong, what the hell was I thinking blah blah blah. I told him I was going from one job to the next, which was true but he convinced me that I was still the one going to get in trouble. I wasn't even thinking of the police, wasn't as afraid of them as I was of my mother, I knew she was gonna scream at me. So we didn't call the police and I was so nervous that every time I beeped my mother I put in the wrong number. I wound up driving home, which wasn't very far, and went right past a cop who didn't do anything. My windshield was completely cracked and both airbags deployed and my front end was damaged. I got home and told my mother, she screamed at me and of course it somehow turned into me not appreciating her. Since the police weren't called and the way the cars hit corner to corner they said it was 50% both of our faults. During all the paperwork my mother found out the guy had been fired from the school district, he was a bus driver, because he was caught drinking on the job. The light bulb went off, he wreaked of beer when he was yelling at me and that would explain why he was so adamant on not calling the police. I was so intimidated by him and terrified of my mother's reaction I wasn't putting it together. My mother took her usual stance to everyone else I did nothing wrong, he was this trashy drunk that caused the accident. But when she was yelling at me for about anything else for the next year, I was the one that did wrong he probably wasn't drunk and I definitely must have been doing something wrong and I don't appreciate her. By the way, I wasn't texting, it wasn't a big thing and I don't even think I could do that on the phone I had at that time, all I could play was snake.
A couple weeks after the accident I went as a student ambassador to Australia, I spent two and a half weeks traveling around with a group of students. We were recommended for the program by a teacher and then we had to interview and get picked to go, after we were picked we spent almost a year meeting up once a month to learn about what we would be doing, how we needed to act, about the culture there, and getting to know each other. I also spent a good part of the year raising the money to go, it wasn't cheap. It was an absolutely wonderful experience. We started in Sydney, then went to the outback, walked around Ayers Rock, sleep in the outback in a swag, rode camels and horses, went in a hot air balloon, went to the rainforest, went to brisbane, stayed with a family for two nights in Townsville, went to Cairns, went to Long Island, swam in the Great Barrier Reef, learned about Aboriginals, and then back to Sydney. I took 35 rolls of film (digital wasn't as big back then) and would still love to go back.
After getting back from my trip I returned to working at the pool but as a lifeguard for the remainder of the summer.

High School- Freshman and Sophomore Years

High school was a completely different ballgame from middle school. I had two close girl friends and the other kids didn't harass me anymore. It was almost like magic, everyone seemed to grow up (for the most part). In 10th grade one of my 6th grade tormentors was my biology lab partner and we actually got along great. 
In the beginning of 9th grade I got my first real boyfriend (I had other boyfriends in middle school but I don't really count them). He was almost a foot taller than me, had a bowl haircut, bright blue eyes, really skinny (which always made me feel super insecure) and was really shy. We met through friends, my best friend started dating his, my two close girl friends and his guy friends started hanging out and one night as we walked back to his house after a carnival I grabbed his hand. That night we kissed and we were boyfriend and girlfriend from that point till the end of the school year. He was most of my firsts; first real boyfriend, first long relationship, first person I started exploring my sexuality with. At a very young age I knew what sex was and thought about it in a casual way, didn't help that my mother was very clearly having sex with many different men throughout my childhood. Right around us dating for 6 months I lost my virginity to him (actually it was the night before my mother married my stepdad), I was 15. It was awkward and not very romantic at all. I don't regret it, I wish I was older so it could have been more special but at least he was a good guy. We had a little pregnancy scare, yes we used protection, I didn't know that after the first time your period can be thrown off a little. So I wasn't but because of the scare and that we were so young and opportunities to engage in sex didn't happen often, we only had sex one more time after that. The summer was coming up, I was getting "bored" and he was getting on my nerves; my little brother had a birthday party at a bowling alley and the employee hosting it wound up asking me for my number. I gave it to him and that night broke up with my first. I cried for 2 weeks, who goes and breaks up with someone and then cries about it??? Me. The bowling alley guy never called me and in fact at some point over the summer I ran into him on a date with another girl. Then about a year later a new friend of mine introduced me to her boyfriend... yup it was bowling alley guy. I was never really that into him but we would always kid around that he owed me a date. Sure enough the summer after my freshman year of college I get a call from him asking me out, HUGE mistake, there was a reason it didn't happen the first time. He was extremely immature, tried to kiss me at the end but I gave him the cheek. He actually married my friend from high school and they recently got divorced. Ok, back to the summer after 9th grade, I didn't see my ex much and we didn't hang out in our group much either. The couple times we saw each other we would wind up hooking up, until one night when he was all over another girl and I decided to get back at him by hooking up with a guy I didn't really know. 
At this point I was starting to rebel a little bit. In 10th grade I started drinking on weekends and even experimented with drugs. I smoked pot a couple times and ate mushrooms a few times. Nothing hardcore but completely out of character. Nothing really big happened in 10th grade. No boyfriends and no drama in my life (except normal teenage things). I did start working as a hostess at a restaurant. That year was the calm before the storm... 

Middle School

In our school district 6th grade starts middle school, however our class was so big they had to reopen an elementary school they closed down once all the baby boomers left the school. So they threw all of us 6th graders into a building all our own, because our district is big there was two different elementary schools coming together. Once again I was feeling like an outsider, kids knew each other from preschool or playing outside of school sports together or parents that are friends. This town tends to be a black hole, if you have gone through the school district most likely your children will too. Not only did I know no one, I only played sports for a couple years when my dad would take me and I was shy so I didn't make many friends there, but this is when RGG started to come around more and I would sleep on the couch every night. I slowly pushed away from the girl that had first befriended me when I came into the school, and started becoming friends with these two other girls. They were really catty, they were constantly fighting and talking about each other. By the end of that year I had probably gone back and forth between the two girls over ten times, I finally just ended our friendship. 
The next year when we moved into the main building I became close with these two new girls. They were both on my bus but one was a year older than us. They were both really trashy and the one was into witch craft. Nothing against her interests but one day she decided to tell the friend of a boy I was "dating" that we did spells, which was not true and the boy broke up with me. They then went and told the entire school, I was called a satanist and witch on a daily basis. One time I was in gym and we were playing volleyball, this one girl kept screaming witch every time I went to hit the ball. Somehow I was able to resist all the temptation to punch her in the face, then rip a strand of hair out and say this will be enough. I wish I had gone to school nowadays, with all the work people are putting into ridding the school of bullies would have made my life much more peaceful.
8th grade I again switched friends, I started hanging around a new girl (Dizzy), a shy girl she (Skittles- she had rainbow colored hair when we first started hanging), and Chameleon (explain later). Chameleon, in 6th grade we had classes together and were school friends, and Skittles were long time friends and dressed "unique" or "goth". Basically big baggy jeans, dark clothes, black lipstick, colored hair. No witch craft. We were good friends, all got along great and did everything together. The kids in school still weren't very nice to us but we couldn't care less because we had each other.
Overall I was a good student. I had above average grades but I wasn't the smartest. I struggled in English, had a hard time writing, but still pulled off good grades. I made it onto the junior national honor society. The odd part about my school was that the jocks and popular kids were actually the smart kids too, they were overall high achievers. So it was hard to stick out, it was always the same people getting recognized for the different awards. They were good in school, sports and everyone wanted to be them.

Elementary School

Not long before I began elementary school we moved to a different town, with Girly Voice. At that time I was very outgoing and not at all shy. I had tons of friends in school and my neighborhood was filled with kids. We were all around the same age and as long as it was nice out we were outside playing. The John Bender (Breakfast Club) of the neighborhood had a huge crush on me and would stand across the street from my house until I came out, he wasn't allowed to cross the street alone. I was on a bowling teamed named 3 men and a lady.  

In second grade the school began testing me for advanced placement. Halfway through second grade my mother moved us back to the town I was born in and she grew up in, Little/Big Town. Due to my mother buying a house and not having Girly Voice helping with bills we didn't have a lot of extra money. I wound up wearing a lot of hand me downs, things that weren't in style, and sneakers with holes in them. I never complained, I knew if I had asked for something more my mother would have worked more or missed lunch or dinner to get it for me. In my new school, material things were important and even though it was only second grade it was very cliquey. On my first day only one girl came up to befriend me, she offered to show me around. Most of the other girls in the class were not very nice to her, they made fun of the lisp she had, clothes she wore, and her unclean hair. One day a group of girls actually approached me and told me they wouldn't be friends with me if I was friends with her. I chose her. 

Third grade I started in a non-graded program. It was three classes one of each grade level, 3rd, 4th, and 5th. We changed classrooms for each subject just like in middle and high school. We were placed in classes based on our abilities and not grade level, so you could be in third grade but be in the 5th grade math class. Some point that year the school started testing me for learning disabilities. The school I had started in was more ahead in math than language and they had a different way of teaching children how to read. I learned to read based on memorization. They did not teach us how to sound out words, still to this day that is not how I read. In order to learn how to spell a new word I need to see it and write it. The new school took this as a learning disability and put me in resource room and speech. I honestly never understood what resource room did, I would only do homework there and never asked for any help. I pretty much stopped going to resource when I was in 7th grade but they didn't officially pull me out until 8th grade. Speech, was pointless as well, I had no problem talking, problem was how I learned to read and in neither resource or speech did they try to teach me the right way. They took me out of speech in 6th grade. 

I remained in the non-graded program in fourth grade, most of the same kids from the previous year continued in the program. That was the last year for the program. I went into fifth grade in a regular class. Even though I had been in the school since second grade I really didn't know many of the kids or much about the school. I had the half of year in the regular class and then the next two years in the non-graded program, where I was in the same 3 classrooms, with the same kids, and not even eating lunch with the other kids in my grade. I felt like I was the new kid again, I still was very shy and only had a couple close friends. Just one or two that I would see outside of school. It didn't help that I was pulled out of class a couple times a week for resource and speech. That was just an over all tough year, a couple weeks before it started was when POS beat up Ditzy and my mother, my mother changed relationships a couple times on top of all the other reasons I didn't fit in at school.

Mother 2

I'm not exactly sure when this happened or if it was always this way but my mother has a horrible temper. She went from happy to ridiculously angry in the blink of an eye over nothing. I remember one time, I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, she came into my room and wasn't happy with how clean it was, started screaming at me and slammed a fist into the wall. Her hand didn't go through the wall but she hit it so hard all of the ceramic art I had hanging on the wall came crashing down. Which was also my fault. My natural response every time she started screaming was to start crying, even as an adult if someone were to raise their voice to me I break down. The usual course would be to scream at me for extended periods of time, in which I would cry and think when will this end over and over again, then she would cry and force me to hug her and apologize to me for yelling at me. She never hit me or hurt me in a physical sense, mentally is an entire different ballgame. As I got older I always felt like I was walking on eggshells, make sure everything was done perfectly how she wanted it, to avoid getting screamed at. That was my goal, everyday and to this day I am still worried about getting in trouble, need to have everything in place the way she wants it. She would start yelling at me about my room being a mess, my homework not being done, or water not being put in a dirty cup in the sink and it would turn into I don't appreciate her and the things she's done for me and I treat her like crap or the scum maid. I learned to say thank you and I love you for everything. It got to the point that it pains me to say i love you to her now, I avoid it as much as I can and when I have to say it I say luv ya.
My mother had my little brother at the end of my 4th grade year. The day she brought him home from the hospital we sat and watched the news coverage of O.J. Simpson in the white Bronco. After that POS was obsessed with the entire trial. He took notes and recorded all of TV coverage. Back then he had to record it on VHS so there was no changing the channel, so the TV was either on that or OTB. He had started spending a lot of time and money on betting on the ponies as he would say. There were times he would take me and my cousin and sometimes my little brother to OTB. But we wouldn't be allowed to go in so we had to sit in the car, we would sit there for hours. Had that happened now-a-days he would have been arrested for child abuse. To this day I cannot turn on the OTB channel without getting a chill. The OTB was also next to this run down hotel that tended to have sex offenders living there, no nothing ever happened but he clearly did not care if something did. POS turned into the stay at home father once my mother went back to work.
The summer before I went into 5th grade my mom was hanging out with a guy that lived around the block a lot. I don't know exactly how they met but he had the crappy run down house in the neighborhood. One night we went to a BBQ at one of his friend's houses. POS stayed home with my little brother because he was sick or something, being a mother now I couldn't imagine going to some guy's friend's BBQ while my boyfriend was home with my sick one year old. At the end of the BBQ my mother decided that she should drive the guy home since he had a little too much/more than her to drink. When we got to his house they insisted on going in so they could have another drink. I just wanted to go home, be in my own bed and his house was very cluttered and disgusting I did not want to be there. But they set me up on his couch and gave me the remote and told me they were just gonna go out on the back porch to have a drink. I couldn't find anything on and badly wanted to go home, so I called for my mother a couple times and no response.
I had learned very quickly in life how to get around without making much noise and even to this day (at my overweight size) I can still maneuver very easily unheard, my mother stomps everywhere and it's a huge pet peeve of mine. At the bottom of the stairs to our basement there were doors on either side one went into a room set up for my mother, POS and a nursery for my brother and the other side went to the laundry/fish room. When Ditzy would be doing laundry I would sneak down the stairs and just stand there waiting for her to go from room to room and scare the crap out of her. Her reactions to being scared were the best and she was so easy to get, I couldn't resist.
So I went quietly to the sliding glass doors to the porch to get my mother and go. There was my mother with her pants on the ground and the creepy guy on his knees in front of her. Obviously my sudden appearance alarmed them and they jumped up, I stated I wanted to go home and went back to the couch. Sadly at the very young age of 10 I knew exactly what I had just interrupted and had no idea what to do with this. We walked back to the house and nothing was ever said about what I saw.
Towards the end of that summer my mother and POS organized a family trip. We were to spend two weeks driving the East coast. However my mother couldn't get the entire time off work and POS wanted to spend time camping at this lake upstate he would go to as a child. The trip started out with myself, POS and my little brother taking a train into NYC carrying all of our things, including a play yard, car seat, a "tent", and everything else we all needed from Penn Station to Port Authority. We then took a bus several hours to this town in which we had to take a cab the rest of the way to the camp ground. Neither POS nor my mother thought to open the "tent" before leaving so when we got to the camp ground and he opened it we discovered it was only a tarp. So we set up the tarp over the picnic table, put our sleeping bags under it and my little brother's play yard. POS didn't bring a lot of money with him so we were limited in what we could buy for food and there was no way we could spend extra money on getting a cab to transport us to the local general store. We had to walk, it was probably 2-3 miles from the camp, I think he had it in his head that we would fish and that's what we would eat, despite knowing that I was completely disgusted by fish. So for the couple days we were there I eat nothing but cold cut sandwiches. Shortly after getting there is started raining and didn't stop raining until the day we left. Not only that but my little brother cried almost the entire time as well. I was put in my usual position of caring for him. The crying got so bad that a trooper came by because people from nearby were concerned, no shit a baby and a small child under a tarp for days while it wont stop raining and the baby wont stop crying. I am so glad my brother was too little to remember this because no one should have this vacation as a memory. He had rented a small row boat and we went out on it the one day so he could fish, I was holding my brother who was crying and out of no where he ripped him out of my arms started shaking him and screaming at him to stop crying. He took my back to shore and left us while he went out fishing on his own, I remember standing there shaking from what had just happened. One of the nights myself and POS were sitting in front of the fire talking and I opened up to him about what happened after the BBQ. I was so young and confused, I knew what she did was wrong but she made it clear that she wasn't going to talk to me about it. POS had told me he had a feeling things like that were going on so he hired a private investigator to follow my mother around while we were gone and if they stayed together he wouldn't bother looking at what the investigator found but if they broke up he would. On what I think was the 3rd or 4th day there my mother joined us, she rented an astrovan and drove up, thank god we had a place to sleep that night. The rest of the trip was filled with ups and downs, they fought constantly but then were happy the next moment. We drove up to Canada then down to the Carolinas.
Two weeks before my fifth grade year started... It was early morning, I was sleeping in my room. I heard POS come home from an overnight shift or a late night out, then I heard some yelling. Fighting wasn't unusual to hear but there was something different about this. I heard POS stomp down the stairs to their basement room and a couple minutes later Ditzy went down with my little brother, I guess to get him something to change into or a diaper. Then I heard Ditzy screaming, I flew out of bed and down the stairs, he was on top of her on the bed wailing on her. She was still holding my little brother, I started screaming to get off her, my little brother crying. My mother came down the stairs and into her room, jumped on his back, and he pulled her off and threw her across the room into a wall. My mother slammed the door closed on her room so I couldn't see what was going on, I began pounding on the door and screaming. It felt like forever but I'm sure it was only a couple minutes, Ditzy came out of the room and we ran up to her room and locked the door, shortly after my mother came up and locked herself in the bathroom. He started pounding on the door and begging for me to let him in, saying that it was gonna be ok and he was better. I remember standing in the middle of the room looking from Ditzy who was passed out on the bed holding my screaming brother to the door having no idea what to do. We called 911 while in her room. He then gave up and went to our driveway which on the side of our house had the bedroom and bathroom windows looking onto it and the other side is the back of my neighbors house. He stood in the driveway for about 5 minutes screaming and cursing and calling my mother various names. I saw my neighbor close her bedroom window. After the 5 or so minutes he left, it took the police 2 hours to show up after that. We live less than 1 mile from the police station, apparently screaming babies and children aren't a priority. I later found out that the people across the street called the cops, my mother called the low-life when Ditzy first went downstairs and then the cops when she started screaming. We were told that because we didn't call the police station directly, that we called 911, it took them longer. I also found out that the entire argument started because when my little brother woke up my mother just brought him into the bed and didn't change his diaper first.
The rest of the day Ditzy, my little brother and I sat in her car a block away from our house, we waited for Ditzy's boyfriend to come and stay with us while my mother was at the hospital.
A couple days later POS turned himself in to the cops, he was able to come with a police officer to the house to get some of his belongings and I thought that would be the last I saw of him. A few weeks later I came home from my dad's house and everyone was in our backyard, my father and I walked up the driveway and into the backyard, only to see POS sitting there. I had an overwhelming feeling to run but I knew I couldn't just leave my brother, he was too little and I needed to protect him from them. I would think of it daily, I would pack him up in his wagon with my cat in her carrier and we would walk the couple miles to my dad's house. Only problem was my dad would just return us and I wouldn't want my mother to yell at me, so I just stuck it out. POS only showed his face a couple times after that. I think Ditzy basically told my mother that if he came back she was leaving and my mother knew she couldn't work her hours and afford everything on her own without Ditzy helping care for us. I think my mother would have dropped the criminal charges against him if it wasn't for her. At some point my mother allowed POS to take my brother for an overnight visit and he was out driving around and got pulled over and was arrested for a warrant, after that he never saw my brother again.
Over the years POS has only contacted my mother to try and get the child support lowered, never to see my brother. I actually found a letter he must have written my mother a couple years later apologizing and begging for her to take him back, saying that she overlooked all his wrong doings when they first got together (drug, criminal, drinking... problems, what a great guy to bring around your young daughter and have a child with) and that no one has ever done that before. Back in the spring of 2008 he brought my mother back to court to get the child support lowered, so my mother and myself looked up where he was living, found the closest OTB and camped out in front of it. Sure enough after the first race ended he came out for a smoke break, we got some pictures of his living off the government self spending our tax money very wisely. He didn't show for court which was typical so nothing happened with child support. I think over the years my mother has been brought to court about 12 times for this issue. This past Christmas a letter came in the mail addressed to myself and my brother, it had a money order in it for a decent amount from Secret Santa. We figured out it was from POS because he sent the same thing to his two daughters. I am grateful for the money, but I wasn't nor would I ever want to be his kid. Plus where has he been? My brother, as much of a pain in the ass as he came be, is a smart and decent almost 19 year old and POS missed out on almost all of his life. My thoughts were that he wanted something from us all. Found out a couple weeks ago, his one daughter spoke with him because he was calling their mother, he wanted to settle the back child support he owes because he cannot get his drivers license back until he no longer owes child support. I told my mother she would be an idiot to settle it.

Not long after she really ended things with POS she started dating another man she worked with. They only dated a short period of time and I found out that they broke up because he wouldn't stop drinking and and doing drugs. What I knew of him and saw I liked, he was always very nice to my brother and I. A couple afters later, after he almost lost his job he cleaned up his life, got engaged and got a dog. While at work he was up on a utility pole and his partner accidentally re-energized the wire and he was electrocuted to death.
Right after they broke up my mother started dating a Really Good Guy (RGG), also someone she worked with. He was in the process of getting divorced from a woman he had three kids with (two boys and a girl all about 10 years older than me). He was a recovered alcoholic and had been for a number of years. At first he lived in an apartment about an hour away from our house. We would go there on weekends and just about any other time my mother could get out there. This is the point in my life that I felt like my brother and I were second in life that the boyfriend and sex became her first priority. Even though she would always tell people that we came first. Even though, later I could see RGG as a good addition to the family, in the beginning I resented him. He took the time I had with my mother away, I had to spend time at his place away from my friends and father, and I was getting tired of bouncing from guy to guy. I think the point I stopped resenting him was the point I started pulling away from my mother, I realized he was a better parent and would gravitate more to him. Around the time I started 6th grade he started living with us and their bedroom was still in the basement directly under mine. At night if I didn't manage to get to sleep before them I would be kept up from their "noises". There were times I would ask them to keep it down, yes a preteen was having to ask her mother to stop being so loud when she was having sex, but my mother's response was to tell me to stop listening to the floor. I eventually gave up and would sleep in the living room every night and most nights I would cry myself to sleep. How my mother didn't see something was wrong is beyond me. This is also the first time in my life I had started thinking about taking my own life. My fear was that my brother would find me and that kept me from ever acting on it.
Towards the end of 6th grade they decided they were gonna sell the house and move out to were RGG's children lived and our house was way too small for us to live in. I put up a pretty big protest about leaving my friends and school and eventually they decided to instead of move add a second floor to the house. The up stairs would have two decent size bedrooms (one for me and one for my brother) a bathroom and then one large room that would be a makeshift apartment for Ditzy. That next school year, everything got finished and sometime during winter I had gotten a pretty bad cold and was out of school for a week. During this week my mother and RGG fought almost everyday, then one night my mother and him sat me down to tell me he was moving out. His ex-wife had up and left his kids in his old house, his youngest was in his senior year of high school so they needed a parent around. He had purchased his house back from his ex-wife and was moving back and didn't tell my mother till the deal was final. I understood, these were his kids and he had to be there for him, he should have told my mother the right way and it wasn't like he was ending their relationship, but I think regardless my mother would have reacted the same way. Sometime during my 8th grade year RGG proposed to my mother and he moved back. They got married in April of my freshman year of high school. It was almost like the day they got married they lost their passion for each other and their relationship went down hill. They fought a lot, didn't talk a lot, and by the time I was getting ready to go away for college they would see who could stay awake the longest to claim a spot on the couch that night.
Once I was older RGG and I would talk a lot and mostly about our issues with my mother. He was a rational person and I could confide in him. He told me one time after things with my father happened that he wasn't a believer in kids going away to school that they should stay home and go to community college first but that I needed to get away or he was afraid I would take my life. He admitted that my mother mentally and emotionally abused us.
A month after I started college RGG was forced into an early retirement. He didn't get a great payout but he had a small side business he was trying to get going. There was more and more stress between them and they never talked. When I would come home from school for breaks it was miserable. They were hardly in the same room as each other, when they did talk there was always a sigh or grunt under their breaths. Halfway through my sophomore year she told me that he wanted a divorce and he told her in a letter, I don't blame him one bit for that one.
He told her that he wanted to stay apart of mine and my brother's lives since he had been in them for so long. He had been going to dinner every wednesday night with my brother for sometime and wanted to continue that, it was a night my mother normally worked. For some reason, "my brother" didn't care to continue the relationship and every quickly lost contact with him. Myself on the other hand would talk to him occasionally, I was living in my own apartment up by school and didn't come home often. But he started to back off because she would check my call history and then yell at him and myself for keeping in contact with each other, like we were betraying her.
Over the years my mother did a lot of hurtful things but one of the things that stands out the most was one time I was home from school on break and I was on the phone with my boyfriend in my room and she came in and started yelling at me for something. It turned into her telling me I didn't appreciate her and then that I changed after everything happened with my father. She said that I started hating her and that wasn't fair because she didn't do anything wrong. Then she said "Don't you ever think about me? How I felt? When he did what he did. Don't you ever think about that it could have been me??". I just sat there staring at her.

I am sure I will update this at some point. I covered a long period of time in this one blog but I wanted to get past my mother's story and on to more important things. I know I have missed a lot but I will add things as they come back to me.

Mother 1

I've been putting off writing the past couple days for a couple reasons. I'm not really sure how to attack this ^ topic, my kids have been sick so I don't get a chance to write, and I've been lazy about it. Again I'm going to stick with not using real names of people or places.

My mother grew up in Little/Big town (has the characteristics of a little, closed minded, stuck in their ways town but is one of the biggest in the area with several different school districts and tons of big businesses). She has two brothers one older (Ogre) and one younger (Mr. Perfect). Ogre was not very nice to my mother, he would beat her up, treat her as if she were scum and disowned friends that attempted to be friends with her. He married a woman and had two daughters with her, one exactly 6 months older than me (Bitch) and the other a couple years younger (Lush). When Bitch was in her teens Ogre and his wife divorced because he was cheating on her with Sweet Willow. He then moved into the house he grew up in with Sweet Willow, Mr. Perfect owns it but their mother still lives in the upstairs. To this day Ogre still lives there with Sweet Willow and their mother upstairs. Mr. Perfect went into civil service first working as a police officer then transferring to the fire department, now he's retired from the fire department and got his nursing degree. He married this one woman who cheated on him and then married again when I was in elementary school, he married Disney. Disney had two boys from a previous marriage one my age and one two years older, Mr. Perfect wound up adopting them from their biological father a year after they got married. Disney is also a nurse and with both kids out of the house they spend a lot of time traveling (to Disney World at least once a year plus many other places).

My mother's relationship with her father wasn't the greatest. He was very old school and believed women belonged in the kitchen, he also had a drinking and temper problem. He died when my mother was in her twenties before I was born. My mother and her mother weren't close until the past couple years. My grandmother always favored the boys, they could do nothing wrong. And I guess the years of my mother throwing herself at my grandmother's feet finally worked. The family as a whole isn't very warm and welcoming. I've heard from numerous people coming in from the outside that they felt very excluded and uncomfortable. They aren't the type to run into your arms and hug you and swing side to side saying how much they missed you into your ear before giving you a huge wet kiss on the cheek. They are the type that tries to touch the least amount when giving a hug or kiss and for the shortest amount of time. At this point in time the siblings all live within 5 minutes of each other and only get together on holidays or events. My mother does see my grandmother at least once a week for lunch and/or breakfast at this luncheonette they have been going to since they were children. Sometimes Ogre goes there with Sweet Willow and he will barely say hi and never sit with them.

When my mother graduated high school she was given a full ride to a very good art school but since her parents were very old school hey didn't believe in girls going to college let alone for art. She started working for a big company in the utilities field doing blue collar work. This is where she met my father, you all know what happens there. I have mixed info about when they divorced and why but basically I was a toddler and he was drinking a lot and cheating on her. The story she told me was that one day she left for her morning shift (8am-4pm) and when she returned he was passed out with an empty six pack next to him and I had been in my crib crying, hadn't been touched all day, no diaper change and no food and that was her breaking point.

Almost immediately after divorcing my father she started dating Girly Voice. He had three children from his first marriage, all older than me, two boys and a girl. Not long after they started dating we moved into his parent's house, in Money Town, it was right before I started elementary school. Money Town was higher economic status than we were, none of the women worked and looked down on us because my mother did. Not long after we moved in his parents moved to Florida full time, his daughter then moved in with us, his sons stayed with their mother. When I was about halfway through second grade my mother caught him cheating with his ex-sister-in-law (kinda Jerry Springer, a lot of my mother's crap is very trashy), there was a message left on our answering machine that told her. So she quickly moved us back to Little/Big Town, at first we stayed with her best friend (Ditzy) who I always referred to as my aunt and her kids as my cousins, just until she finished closing on a house and we could move in, December 1992. Ditzy and her daughter moved in with us. Years later my father asked me if Girly Voice ever touched me, said that people around work (Girly Voice and my father still worked with my mother), talked and said he touched his boys. As far as I can remember he never touched me, I wouldn't have let him either (I just want to clarify this, at a very young age I knew what was ok and what wasn't, I knew what sex was and I was very independent). Kinda of funny that my father waited several years to ask about it and not make a bigger deal about me living with him.

At the time we moved in my mother had a new boyfriend, he was a guy that hung out at the bar she went to with her coworkers. He was a low-life that lived in his friend's basement and didn't work for a living.

Then one morning, spring/summer time, I was sitting in the kitchen and a man came walking out of my mother's bedroom in just a pair of boxers. I shall call him Piece of Shit (POS), sometime that afternoon my mother asked me if I liked him and I told her straight out no. She then asked me why and I said I didn't know, keep in mind I'm only 8, I just had a weird feeling about him. Her response was to tell me that I needed to have a reason, well it was more of a yell at me. She then explained to me that they did a bad thing and they would have to talk to the other low-life, POS was his best friend. Low-life and POS basically hung out in bars all the time with each other and somehow my mother wound up bringing POS home and sleeping with him. POS moved in with us almost right away and I had to start calling him dad. POS didn't work, he would spend a week or two at a job and then quit (later my mother found out that he was just avoiding child support). He had two daughters from a marriage, who we didn't meet until I was in college. POS liked to spend my mother's money, remodeling the kitchen and deciding to breed fancy tail guppies and sell them. He bought more guppies and tanks than he ever came close to selling. I still to this day have a fear of fish because of this. There were about 1,200 fish in our basement and I would have to go down there and feed them or help him out. The smell was horrible and the fish would jump out of the tanks and I would step on them all the time. That fall my mother made the announcement that she was pregnant...

Dad - Emotions

I've taken a couple days off from writing to just recoup a little and I haven't really had time to sit and think/write. I tried to keep as much emotion out of the first couple blogs about my father just so I could actually get through them without giving up again. So in this I'm gonna kinda go back through and talk about what exactly I went through. I have mentioned before that my mother forced me to keep everything kinda of hush hush, and I really think that forced me to suppress my feelings about it and thats why over a decade later I am still having a hard time. I don't expect that there will be a time I will ever be able to say that I don't get sad or angry about it but I want it to not turn into a dark place for me. I don't want to have April 11th be my dark day for the rest of my life, I'd much rather it be the day I remember my son crawling for the first time or the day my daughter says I love you (clearly). 
Most of those letters I haven't read in almost 10 years, so it was really hard rereading them and reliving it all. Reading the explanation of how it happened was just as horrifying, maybe more because I am older, as the first time I read it. So I definitely needed a break. 
Back to the beginning, I never wished my parents never got divorced. My mother didn't keep much from me and I knew about a lot of adult things going on so I was kinda forced to grow up early. So I understood that my parents were better off apart, my father got sober and might a nice woman and they were able to get past their issues and become friends. When my father would pick me up he would actually come inside and talk to my mother, he would even play with my little brother a little. The other thing is other then a couple pictures of their wedding I do not have any memory of them being a couple. Yeah sure I would have loved to have a normal life and definitely envied families of other kids I knew but I never pictured that normal life with my parents together. 
For a long time I have felt a lot of regret. One mainly being all the time I had missed out on with them before things went bad. I let the distance, my teenager-ness, work and my life come between us. He was my father and I only spoke to him on holidays, towards the end I wouldn't call him. I would wait around for him to call, to see if he remembered. He would never call on my birthday it would always be a couple days later, he would say that he didn't want to call me on my birthday in case I was doing something but I know he just forgot. I have a lot of regret about not being nicer to my stepmom, I wasn't movie mean to her, but I didn't give her a break sometimes. I just wish she knew how I felt, and that it wasn't her that I didn't like but that I was upset with my father for not being around enough. I regret not spending enough time with her when she came to visit and I regret not speaking up when I thought something was off with her during that visit. Maybe if I said something, my dad would have been more inclined to push her to get help. Maybe if I was around more in their lives I could have seen things going wrong. There was talk of me going to visit right around when all of it happened and I always wondered if I had that trip planned would it all never have happened because my dad knew I was coming. Or had I been down there around the time it happened could my presence changed the course of those days? I regret talking so long to start communicating with my dad after he went to jail, it would have given me a couple more months with him. I wish that I had written him more consistently once I did start writing, had he had the constant communication maybe he wouldn't have withdrawn, maybe I would have gotten a chance to see him or talk to him, maybe he wouldn't have died of a heart attack, maybe he would have been a little more at peace when he did die. I regret not pushing to go see him. I know all these regrets are irrational, I know I was a child, I know that I couldn't have possibly changed or prevented fate but I still can't help but think them. 
I have a ton of anger. Anger with my father, stepmom, mother, druggy burnout loser, myself (above) and god. My dad, first how could he let my stepmom get so bad without getting her help, how could he let things go that far that night, how come he couldn't control his temper, how come he didn't handle things differently after (call 911), how could he stop writing me, how could he leave me? My mom, that's for another post. My stepmom, it was her "fault", she attacked him first. Druggy burnout loser, I know he was the cause of a lot of their problems and fights. I have a lot of mixed emotions about religion, not very religious, but how could god let something like this happen. I was a good kid, treated people well, responsible, hardworking but I got crap after crap thrown at me over and over again and now this.    
Sadness is obviously a major emotion I experienced. Sad for the loss of my stepmom, and how she went. I often think a lot about all the things both of them missed out on. High school graduation, college graduation, my husband and our wedding, my children... I'm sad my kids will miss out on knowing the good side of their grandpa. 
Like I said in my last post I never went down the wrong path. I didn't turn to drugs or negative people. I didn't always make the greatest choices when it came to other things in my life, again another post, but I think those things had more to do with control of my life than anything else. I did deal with a lot of depression, I was always sick and in pain. My activity level decreased and I ate more. I gained 60 pounds from the time I found out until when I went for my physical before going to college. After that I continued to gain, not as quickly but 11 years later I'm over 100 pounds more than I was then. 
One of things I've changed about myself in the past year is to not hold things in. So a over a month ago I decided to send my stepmom's brother a message on facebook, I recently found him on there. This is what I sent him:

Hi, 
Throughout the years I have searched for your family and it wasn't until this past summer that I came across your daughter's profile but I didn't think it would be appropriate to contact her. Just a few days ago I came across your profile and since them have been trying to decide whether or not to write you. Then it was trying to figure out how to say what I wanted to say for so many years. So this may be choppy but if you decide you would like to answer me back I can go into more detail. I understand if you don't want to communicate with me but at least I know that you will "hear" what's been on my mind for so many years. 
I need to let you know I cared a lot for my stepmom. She was in my life a long time and treated me as if I was her own. Your family also made me feel very included. The day my mom told me everything, I lost two parents. 
I really wanted to be at the memorial for her. I was told I shouldn't attend, which to an extent I understand but I was grieving as well and didn't feel like I got to say goodbye. 
I had a very hard time with all this. I have not turned down any wrong roads in my life. I've done my best with what's been handed to me. I don't think I will ever be able to wrap my head around it or get over it. 
I have never been on my dad's side with this. I know I was told not to go to the memorial and I don't know exactly where that came from but I always feared your family thought I was taking sides because I did not come. Or I was on his side because he was my father. 
I am not my father and I didn't do what he did. However over the decade plus I have been ostracized from my father's family (my aunt hasn't completely ostracized me) and my siblings. And I have felt that is because I am his daughter. 
I am sorry if this has brought back pain to you. I just wanted you to know these things (I'm sure I've left a ton out) and to know that I've always thought about your family and wished them well. Like I said before I understand if you have nothing to say and don't respond. 

He never responded. Which like I said I understood and at least I have been able to say what I needed to but it's unfair to be shut out by everyone just because he was my father. 
For my 21st birthday my mother's present to me was tickets to a John Edwards reading. First off, yay you turned 21 now I'm gonna take you to try and communicate with your murdered stepmom. Secondly, I would have never agreed to go with my mother had I known where she was taking me. Of course I was read, the woman in front of us was nice enough to write down what he said, so I'm going to list what was said and explain each thing. 

• Called me out by saying Monkey Girl. When I was in elementary school I had a monkey for a short period of time and had brought the monkey into school a couple times. I was in this program where we were placed in classes based on our abilities instead of our age and we switched classrooms during the day like in middle and high school, so I had known a lot of older kids. Instead of them learning my name they called me monkey girl. And it actually stuck for a very long time, just with those certain older kids, when I was in my freshman year of college I ran into one of them and they remembered me by it. 
• Had to give up monkey. Shortly after my little brother was born we had to give up the monkey because my mother was afraid my brother would accidentally hurt the monkey and then the monkey would bite him. So we gave him to a natural compound in Oregon. 
• Grandmother passed. Both my father's mother and my stepdad's mother had passed. At first we thought it was one of them that came through but later started thinking it was my stepmom.
• Contemplate suicide, work through it, stay here, you escape nothing, work through them. Yes there were times throughout my teen years that I thought about suicide however I would have never acted on it, it was more of a it would be so much easier if...
• A lot to be appreciative of, stop being negative, this is who you are. I had a negative attitude, who wouldn't. 
• Engaged twice? Committed twice? At the time I was seeing someone and we were very serious but then later that year we broke up and I met my husband. 
• Paternity issue, uncertain about who dad is, stepdad. I think this was talking about my closeness with my stepdad and him being more of a father to me than my own dad.
• Miscarriage- son. No idea what this means. 
• 11th of the month. The number 11 has a lot of importance to me, April 11th, it's my father's birthday...
• Stepmother, help raise you, were you mean to her, did not cut her any slack, Sound of Music. I think I've already explained this one.
• Education component. I thought about becoming a teacher decided not to but most of the jobs I've had a major responsibility was teaching something.

I'm sure I have more to add to this particular post but right now I need to get dinner on the table, I will update this as I think of things. 

Update:

After I was told about what my father did I started having really bad sleeping problems. I just couldn't fall asleep, I couldn't stop thinking. Thinking about what happened, how things could have been different, about what is going to happen in the future, what I am going to say to my father when I got to see him... When I started therapy this was obviously something we discussed. She diagnosed me with obsessive preoccupation disorder, basically I can't stop thinking about things that are bothering me and it was causing me to lose a lot of sleep. Nothing other then time and sleeping pills helped this. I know I didn't stay in therapy long enough to make a difference when it came to it but I didn't have a choice since I was going off to school. Now it's not nearly as big of a problem except in a situation when something bothers me. So while writing those last couple posts, I had a very hard time falling asleep, no matter what I do I can't shut it off. If I get into a fight with someone or someone does me wrong in some kind of way, it triggers it. I haven't taken a sleeping pill since I got pregnant with my son and before that I tried to limit them as much as possible. I never wanted to rely on them to get to sleep and the sleep you get when you take a sleeping pill isn't as refreshing as without. 

Dad - Letters 2

I was originally going to go through all the rest of the letters again but the kids aren't going to let me plus I realize that would probably get boring and there's a lot more I need to write about than just what's in those letters. The letters continued somewhat regularly for the next couple months. We discussed graduating high school, going to college, work, his living arrangements, just kept it light. I was able to find out when it happened, the 11 year anniversary is coming up this month. I also found out that my stepmom had some kind of psychological disorder (lawyer told us bipolar) but that her family wouldn't talk about what it was even to my father. Something I started to notice was that his letters were very repetitive and his spelling ability started to decline. We talked about me coming to visit sometime and he talked a lot about things we would do when he got out; like he would look through all of my pictures from big events and we would discuss what happened in more detail. He had also mentioned the biggest mistake of his life was leaving my mother and I, that he should have never done that. Then around the end of my first semester of my freshman year the letters stopped coming. At that point I stopped copying the letters I sent him so I have no idea what I said or how often I wrote. When I would get bored in class I would start writing something and then never finish it or would think the letter was too harsh. I also figured out I could go to the criminal justice website for his state and look him up, it just said where he was, how long his sentence was, his charge and how long he had left. Eventually my mother sent him a letter, kinda of kicking him in the butt to start writing again. I got a letter from him on March 25th 2004, he was very depressed and withdrawn. He hadn't written anyone in a while and promised me he would be better about it. The next letter I received was March 7th 2005, I had written him a letter saying that if I didn't hear from him it would be my last letter. I had so much going on in my life, I couldn't be worried about his condition all the time if he couldn't bother letting me know he was ok. I also couldn't take the feeling of disappointment every time I went to check my mailbox and there wasn't anything from him. He apologized for not writing and promised he would write every other week. He was still very depressed and withdrawn, he stated several times that he was never going to be able to forgive himself in many of the letters I received.

I stopped hearing from him again. At some point after his last letter we had gotten word that the druggy burnout loser had refiled a wrongful death lawsuit against my dad, he had filed one right after it happened but he left didn't pay the lawyer and it disappeared for a while. Instead of fighting it my dad just signed over everything to him. So I wrote him a letter chewing him apart because my mother was left to pay for my college on her own and all druggy burnout loser was going to do was waste all the money on drugs. I sent letters begging him to write back just so I knew he was ok and nothing. I tried not to let it consume my life so there were times I "forgot" about it, but a lot of times I would start writing and stop or forget to send it. I have saved all my college notebooks and I could probably find at least 20 letters I never sent if not more.

One day I was at work, Sunday November 25th 2007 and I had this overwhelming feeling. One of my coworkers was an ex-cop, so I gave him a brief run down of the situation and asked him if I could call the prison to find out what was going on with him. I went home that day and put it out of my mind, I was finishing up my last semester of college and I only had two weeks left of classes. One day during the week I decided to look up him up on that website and for some reason it wasn't working, it displayed nothing when I searched his name, but the site was also having problems loading correctly. The following Friday I decided to call the prison an hour before heading to class, my husband (at the time only my boyfriend) was at work an hour away. The woman I spoke with explained that he had passed away that Sunday before. I immediately broke down, I tried calling my husband and no luck so I sent him numerous text messages and called my mother. She was at the mall with my grandmother (who only thought my father and I had a falling out and that was why he never came to graduation and she never heard me talking about him, my mother's excuse was that my grandmother could not handle something like that), hysterically I tell her what happened, she had really bad service and I had to scream "dad is dead" about 10 times before she figured out what I was saying. Once she got it she said she couldn't talk and would call me back later, who says that to their daughter that just found out their father died?!?!? Oh yeah my mother. As soon as I was able to get a hold of my husband he left work and came home. Once my mother finally called me back she told me she would call my uncle, she was able to get a hold of him rather quickly which is very unusual so part of me thinks she already knew and was just not telling me. Something I learned she did a lot.
Apparently he had gotten up Sunday morning and wasn't feeling well so he laid back down and never woke up. He died of a heart attack which only took over 6 months to find out, it took a very long time to get the death certificate.
My uncle had him cremated and held onto his ashes. He said that when he got time he would try to get his siblings together and me and we would have a like service and spread his ashes. Then he would tell me that he was just gonna spread them the next time he went on one of his jobs, he does something with shipping over water. I had several times asked him for the ashes or at least some of them. I didn't have an opportunity to put either of them to rest the right way or even say goodbye, so if everyone getting together wasn't going to happen then I wanted to do something on my own. I know he didn't make great choices but how his siblings couldn't make time to say goodbye is beyond me. One day in the fall of 2011 I got a message from my aunt asking what my address was, I gave it to her thinking she was gonna send something for my daughter. A few days pass and when I got home from work there was a package waiting. I opened it up and there was this crappy plastic box which was open and a bag of ashes hanging out of it.
The ashes are currently siting in that same box on my windowsill covered up by other things. Part of me wants to go and spread them somewhere (that's not as easy as they make it in the movies, need to get permission and it's not allowed at a lot of places). Then part of me isn't ready, we had so much left unsaid, so much time lost, and letting them go is gonna make it real.

My Stepmom

She was a little kooky at times. I remember getting a Muppet Babies cassette tape from her when I was a preteen. When she walked her dog she always carried something with her, afraid another dog might attack her, whether it was a stick or an empty gallon milk container she had to have something. When I went to visit them after they moved and I was 15, she wouldn't let me sit in the locked car while she ran into the store to grab milk, afraid something might happen to me. I couldn't sit near the window and look out to watch a far off thunderstorm. She always gave me socks. She had these notebooks all over with little notes scribbled in them and she would continually trace over some of the words. My dad had a sailboat and when we would go out on it, I would fall asleep on the deck and wake up covered in towels, she didn't want me to get sunburned not realizing she could have given me a heat stroke. After all that I knew she meant well. She was good to me, and clearly cared about me. When they lived by me we would cook special meals together, like lasagna and cookies and cakes.
Sometimes I wasn't always the nicest to her, I felt like she would get in the way of my time with my dad. I was resentful of her moving across the country with him and getting him all to herself.
The last time she came up to visit, the February before she died, she seemed off. Aside from her usual kookiness, there was something not right. She kept over and over again asking me if I was afraid to live in NY after 9-11. She was very focused on it.

Druggy Burnout Loser 

I swear I have many reasons to be as hard on him as I have been throughout my blog. Again trying to stay as anonymous as I can I won't use names and I have such a confusing family as it is (I have two other stepbrothers) that just calling him stepbrother wouldn't work. When my dad and stepmom first got married DBL was away at boarding school. He was a trouble maker and kept getting kicked out of schools. Even managed to get kicked out of the boarding school. So he was back and forth living with them and living with his father and was absolutely out of control. My dad was from a strict background so he didn't tolerate it but my stepmom just let DBL run all over her. He would only come around if he needed money and would steal from their home. He was usually nice to me, however I ran into him shortly after our parents moved and he didn't even recognize me.
Part of the reason I decided to make the changes in my life was because of him. We moved back to my hometown a little over a year ago and just shy of a year ago I was reading the newspaper one night and came across this article. It was about a body being found in the woods and that the boyfriend confessed to dumping the body, which was his girlfriend, after she ODed on drugs he gave her... Yup you got it DBL killed his girlfriend then dumped her body. I almost stopped breathing when I read his name in the paper. I was so angry with him, one because my fear of him using my father's money on drugs was right, two because he sued my father for doing almost the same thing and three because he wasn't even getting charged with more than a littering charge.
So I started going back to therapy and realized I never dealt with everything else. Being that my insurance sucks I had to stop therapy, but I decided I needed to do something still. I wasted too much time of my life in and out of depression; gaining weight, not doing things, being in physical and emotional pain, feeling sick all the time... Not all of that comes from what my father did, I went through bouts of depression long before that, and I will continue to write about those things.
I may not have always made the right choices and I did go through a very short party period in college but despite everything I went through I did the right thing, I went down the right path in life. I never did anything to harm myself (except my eating habits) or anyone else. Someone had commented on a news article online about DBL, that he had a rough time in life, kinda went into a little more detail than I was comfortable with, and thats why he's so messed up. Everyone has gone through shit in their lives but that doesn't make you who you are, you have a choice to either learn and grow from those experiences or allow those experiences to run your life. I choose to grow.

*I am going to try to add some pictures to the other posts so check them out in a little.