The last place I remember visiting frequently was the new jersey shore. My grandmother owned a small house on it, and every summer, my aunt, uncle & his wife, and my dad would take turns having a week long vacation there.
I remember surf fishing, playing in the samd, going mini golfing, walking my dog, my parents fighting, my dad going to drink, collecting sea shells, playing with mole crabs, washing out the sand in my bathing suit in an outside shower (they had a lot of those there), fishing with my grandfather on his boat and catching a ton of croakers and flounder (which we then ate), sand sculpture competitions, fireworks over the beach.
Lots of memories there & that concludes the places I visited as a child.
When I was 11, I began to read a lot because of the disharmony at home. I read a lot of fantasy books. The Redwall series by Brian Jacques was my favorite. I remember reading certain books in that series 5x. I was obsessed with it, and longed to live in that world because it was better than home. I also read His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman, The Abhorsen Series by Garth Nix, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, A Wrinkle In Time series by Madeline L' Engle and the first two Harry Potter books.
Books were my escape. They were how I coped.
When my dad left, I remember packing up all of his books, and trying to give him the box as he was leaving. To me, books were the most important thing to pack, to him, they were the least important. I pretty much, in my own way, helped him pack when he was leaving the family.
My brother was crying and begging him not to leave. I was helping him pack.
When I was 12, I remember climbing trees a lot in my back yard. I was a tom boy. I also fished and ran around looking for cool things in our yard. Sometimes I did find cool things, such as a deer skull, or a fish skeleton. I built a fort under the bowers of some honeysuckle bushes which were hidden by piles of logs and I would hide there when it was time to do homework.
This was also the year when my group of friends was split up. The group of friends which had been with me since 1st grade. I remember the teacher saying "I put in a reccomendation that you be split up." I don't understand still why he did that, what's wrong with having a group of friends that can talk to you? Maybe he wanted me to experience the "real world".
The next year, I was transferred to the middle school, it was 7th grade, and I remember not really having any friends that year. I saw on of my friends sometimes when I went to visit her on purpose in another classroom, but that year, I was pretty much alone.
I do remember a specific teacher though. It was my geology teacher and she took a shine to me. I remember teaching her a sign every day and when she was in a bad mood with the rest of the class, she was always nice to me.
I also remember this year as the year I started writing poetry. Lots and lots of poetry. So much poetry in fact that my mom put in a personal order at a print shop in iowa to put my poetry into a book and then sent me off to a poetry competition convention in d.c. I didn't win, but the experience was one I will never forget. I don't like my poems from that self published anthology anymore but the memory is wonderful.
Summer of this year, I went to disney world. It was here that my feeding tube began to fail in my stomach and I had to have emergency surgery in florida during my vacation to get a new feeding tube because the old one was disintigrating in my stomache. My dad had taken me to Disney, and acted as though my condition was a hindrance to his vacation.
8th grade, the year I turned 14. I had a lot of things happen that year.
this was the year I:
- Stopped talking to my dad.
-Stopped visitation with my dad.
- Had to be psychologically evaluated several times.
- Fell in with a group of kids that were mentally unstable.
-Met my first love.
I will only talk about the last two in depth.
I made friends this year. Three of them. Let's make up names for them. Melissa. Heather, Kirsten.
Melissa was a strange girl. She had long reddish hair that reached to her waist. She had this unique laugh and ate lunch with me sometimes. She smoked pot and I remember her coming to school high one time and putting her arm around me and then falling down laughing and giggling in the middle of the school lobby. She cut herself, and in later years went on several psychiatric meds, attempted suicide etc.
Heather was another strange girl, though, at this time she didn't seem that strange. I think she cut herself as well and was always mooning after one boy or another.
Kirsten was the most balanced of the 3, she had endured rape by a family member at a young age and cut as well, but, her cutting it seemed, was a way to escape the emotional numbing she felt as a consequence of her past, rather than any innate biological mental imbalance. She confided a lot in me that year.
Onto the 2nd thing which happened that year.
I met my first love. Lets call him Mike. He had curly brown hair, and had the exact same disability as I did. We met through a plastic reconstructive surgeon which my mom had taken me to to reconsider another reconstruction attempt for me. I fell in love with him. I remember first visiting him. He gave me a poetry book and a wax corn-shaped candle. I still have the poetry book. I broke the candle.
I remember reading The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank that year. I empathized a lot with anne frank, and her first love, Peter. To me, Peter = Mike and Anne = Me because we were the same ages. Anne was 14, Peter was 16 (so was Mike).
This was also the first year I remember feeling depressed & alienated from other people. I would walk alone a lot in the woods, listening to other children play on the other side of some pine trees..and I felt so alone. I would go and walk in the woods, down a ravine to a stream. The neighbors had granted me permission to walk on their land, which was a wooded area, so I did. I would sit by the stream and imagine bringing my friends there and having a great time, it never happened of course, but, those were my daydreams. I also built a stick bridge over the stream and climbed into an old rickety tree house which was built for my cousins (my uncle & aunt live close to me) and I would sit there until it became dark outside, then I would go home.
Sorry if that sounds weird. Oh well.
