Well, this year starts out where we left off. My parents were getting a divorce. My father had moved out and my mother became a raving lunatic of rage and anger. Anything bad that happened was immediately blamed on my dad. Any time one of us kids did something bad, it was because we took after our father. My mother has no filter to the things she would say about my father. She shared all of her suspicions and confirmations with me. These are things I should have never known about my father. Things kids should never hear about their parents.
My mother wanted her children to be her allies in this war she was creating, yet she resented the fact that she was the one now with all of the responsibility for three children on a daily basis. She started to go out more frequently. I got to see my mother drunk for the first time. She started to date and occasionally she would not even come home until the next morning. She was living the single life she never had before. And she was acting like she had no responsibility to her children. I was a teenager. So, she did always have someone around to babysit. But, it was a reckless situation that could have had horrible consequences. Somehow, my brothers and I managed to get to school every day and stay relatively out of trouble. I really am not sure how.
With all of this time alone at home with no parents around. Our place became the hang out for some of the neighborhood kids. This was of course, when they were not harassing me and calling me names. I took it all in....the good and the bad. I was resigned to believe that I must deserve everything that I got....including one close friend.
One of the boys in my neighborhood, let's call him "Max", well.....we became close friends. We would talk on the phone for hours at a time. We would hang out and go to movies together. And we had started to experiment being physically intimate with each other. Of course, this all had to be done in secret. No one could know that we spent that much time together. And no one could ever know that we were fooling around....that would have been tragic. So, in public around other people....we became more and more distant. But alone, we always knew just what was happening.....and it happened pretty often.
During the summer of this year, my aunt Charlene came to visit from St. Louis. She is the mother of my cousin who is ten days older than me. I guess she did not like the situation that she saw when she came to visit. And she asked me if I wanted to come back to St. Louis with her....I was ready to take a break from my mother. So I said yes.....and I ended up in St. Louis. There was no plan to the end of my visit. I was just moved to their home. I tried to hang out with my cousin, Kyle. We used to have so much in common. Well, not anymore. Kyle was into heavy metal music. He hung out with a fringe crowd. And he smoked pot. He was protective of me....but he also knew we did not have anything in common anymore. I was very preppy and pop music....and he was depressed and dark. Goth.
After about a month in St. Louis, talk came up about school and the fall. I was asked a few times if I wanted to stay in St. Louis with them and go to school there. I did not know how to answer that question. I liked living with my Aunt and cousins, but I did miss my family too. I was not sure that being in St. Louis was going make things any better for me. And the larger city made things seem more dangerous. Well, fate made the decision for all of us very soon.....
My dad was playing tennis one Sunday when he experienced a burst blood vessel behind his eye...I guess it was an aneurism. It was near his brain and he fell unconscious. He experienced blindness in one eye. And he was immediately taken to the hospital in Des Moines and put on blood thinners. He was under observation for three days. It was unclear if he would have other attacks. Once I heard the news, I knew I was going back to Iowa. I was on a plane the very next day. My dad recovered from this episode. And I was right back at home.....in the middle of the divorce again, babysitting my brothers again, and back to school at Anson Jr. High again.
I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I had stayed in St. Louis.....
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