My father never drank. And my step-father, I hear, was quite the drinker and violent man in his first marriage, but not after he met my mom. I never saw him drink. My father once pushed my mother down in anger when she told him she wanted a divorce. And then when we came out crying to get him to stop, he said he would not hurt her if we would get in the car. I remember this so very vividly. I was 9.
I remember going to visit my dad a few times. I know that my mom never really discussed with my father what he did wrong. She figured he should know. She was quite an enabler, and in many respects still is. I know that her divorce with my father is the reason I was firm about not divorcing. When she met my step-father, I could tell he did not love us. All of a sudden, we had some other man telling us what to do, yelling at us, and my mother was not really available to us anymore. She was always with him. She never took us anywhere, never did anything with us. We never seemed to get new things. It seemed we were not important to her. My grandma babysat us, and to top it off, she was a crabby lady that we were forced to pretend we loved. She brought my uncle who never got married. There were several issues with him. But it was mostly in his perverse mind. I guess he acted on it once with my sister, and the rest, I HOPE was just facial expressions, verbal comments, and showing perverse pictures to children. I will never forget those pictures.
When I was 9, I started going door-to-door and to ask people if they needed things done in their house for money so I could afford to buy things. I never got things. My birthday allowance was $10 for heaven's sake. Woohoo! A whole $10. We lived in a very poor side of the North end of Columbus. But at 9, I got to walk all over the place. I delivered some newspapers. My sister, Sherry, started the "Grit" newspaper route, which was a weekly paper. But I took it over. It seemed I ended up just followed about everything Sherry did.
I often walked 2 miles to the local swimming pool. I also crossed the busy road to buy cigarettes for my mom, I got to keep the change. I often went to the same store to buy some cheap candy so I break the food stamp bill and get some change for my mother so she could buy cigarettes. I do not think I ever made this trip alone, though. I think it was always with my sisters.
My sisters and I did not seem to have traditional sister issues, unless I am blinded. We seemed to get along. And in that first house away from my father, we had to all share one tiny little bedroom. My mother slept on the couch with my step-father.
My 12-year old sister got into a lot of trouble at that time, colored her hair, ran away, got into some over-the-counter drug fettish. She was already doing a lot of the things that 15-16 year olds were doing.
My mom and step-dad did, however, move to a small community because they thought it would be safer for us. But my father was so much farther away. Not that he came to see us that much. My sister started delivering the Mansfield News Journal, and so did I. I guess you could just have called me "ditto-sherry" for short. I did not realize how much so until I grew up. I made some really good money delivering newspapers.
After about a year, we moved again to a neighboring small town, which was a competitor in sports to the current one. No big deal. I don't believe that we ever lived a full year in any house. We never established a bond with any friends, we always had to pick up and move again. My father did not like being responsible or paying bills. He liked spending all of his money. Our utilities got cut off quite a bit, we got asked to leave house after house after house. My mother did get very tired of that, she could not rely on him. He was a truck driver and made pretty good money. But again, I guess she never learned to express her thoughts with her husband. Just it was time to divorce when it was time. These things are the reasons why I rely only on myself, I think. Why I have communication issues and why I feel I should not have to tell my husband he needs to be responsible. This is also why my children are staying in the exact same school from Pre-Kindergarten till graduation. Of course, with respect to communication with my spouse, I have told my husband 100 times, and 100 ways.... he truly doesn't care about being responsible. That appears to be my job and my job alone. But like my mother, enable, enable, enable. Why should he become responsible when I continue to pick up the pieces. I don't want my kids affected by any thing like this. So I pick up the pieces and leave the brunt of the work, emotional strain, etc on my shoulders. But they got the emotional strain anyway. My "protecting" them from these elements did not work.
The men we grew up around were not the responsible kind. Nor were they completely financially organized. Paycheck to Paycheck is the way everyone in my family lived. No one had a savings account with money in it. No one married well. These were my visions of men since childhoold. I so wanted my children to have different visions of men. I wanted them to see responsible, loving caring, strong, leaders. None of the men really had any class, education, religion, goals. They all worked blue collar low-paying jobs, when they worked. Most of them did not finish high school, let alone strive for college. Some of them drank. But drinking and drugs were never really introduced in my family. I never knew anyone who was addicted to anything. None of the men in my life treated their wives that well. Not bad either, I guess. They did not have good relationships, and divorce was just another word. Who cared? No one that I knew.
All of the guys I went to school with, all of the guys my sisters dated, all of the guys that were friends.... they all were the same. Not much education, not much class, not much religion, not really goal-oriented. So, I guess I figured all guys were like that. None of the guys that had a future really wanted much to do with me. I dated guys my sister's friends hung out with. I always dated way outside of my age range. When I was 13, I was dating guys who were 18. When I was 15, I dated a guy who was 20, and one who was 28. Not a great start in life....
But, I did start reaching for higher in some aspects of my life...sports. Sherry started in these sports, too, and I followed. But she did not stay in them. My grades were not important, only important enough to keep me eligible in sports. And that was not a problem. Why were grades important anyway, once you left high school, you just went out and found a $3 and hour job and lived on scratch working in some factory for the rest of your life. What was college? I never even thought about college. I did not know a lot of people who graduated from high school, let alone attended college. I don't even think I realized that there was such a thing as college. So it was a blank picture to me. I was not going to college.
In school then, we had two paths in our high school education, General and College. I took College, although I was not serious enough about it. My guidance counselor started the ball rolling with me thinking about college. Maybe it was because I loved volleyball so much. I am not sure why. So she had me thinking about careers, and I thought "legal secretary". Not bad. I did take Algebra and French. College? Maybe.
But my sister, in 11th grade, went to a technical school. Of course, the next year, I had to go to the same tech school in the same program and have the same teacher... "ditto-sherry" strikes again.
In that tech school, a whole new world opened up for me. Life wasn't what I thought. I know now because of my professional career of teaching high school mathematics, that in 11th grade, a lot of teenagers start getting real about their future. So maybe it was just time to start getting real.
Forget "Legal Secretary", I found an excitement in data accounting, computers, and writing software. My sister showed me a lot of the work that she was doing in the 12th grade class. WOW! I even ran for Vice President of the local office education association and won! But my lack of organization kinda messed that up.
During my 11th grade year, my sister was a 12th grader. She started talking to a college recruiter named Joanie for a Computer college named DeVry. And she was going to attend. I wanted to go into the air force maybe, or maybe that was another "following my sister" attempt. I don't remember.
A HUGE mistake I made in my 12th grade year, that I still regret to this day, was moving to live with my dad for my 12th grade year. I left all my friends, no volleyball, softball, no tech school. HORRIBLE! I left everything I loved in order to try to get away from my step-dad and find the real dad that I wanted to bond with. The first WORST MISTAKE I ever made, and my mom was not future minded for me at all. She let me do it. I went to this huge high school where being white truly was a minority. I began to run around the west side of columbus with all the rif-raff. My dad had absolutely no way of knowing how to raise a teenager. He tried, he did. My high school consisted of 1st period. Then I went to tech school, which was Data Entry. They did not have an opening in my field. So I withdrew from that. All of my credits were reached already so I just went on and took a city bus to a data entry job. Then White Castle, then McDonald's. On and On. But I did not forget about college.
