Little Runaway

I was 12 years old when I ran away from home, at first, finding refuge at homes where I befriended older people locally and, eventually, hitchhiking across the United States for nearly 2 years. I remember the moment I chose to leave. It felt like a do or die situation and I often ponder what my life would be like had I not made the decision to leave. I know now that Everything Happens For A Reason!!!

After a year of running away locally, being caught several times, sent to live at not-so-nice foster homes and eventually being put back in to a home filled with chaos & trauma, I decided enough was enough! I would either stay and endure physical, mental and emotional abuse or I would break free and essentially become the proverbial Black Sheep of the family. I chose to be free!!!

Going back to the "beginning", My life began before I was even born! What happened over the next 13 years was my fate, my destiny and it set the stage for how my life has manifested to present!

Tho I pride myself on not being a product of my environment or holding blame against my "parents", It all started with 1 woman's choices or inactions, albeit, her own personal trauma or insecurities. "I will be better" is my childhood motto, one of the mantras I've adopted for my story.

I've learned to be pretty blunt and not sugar coat my life. It is what it is and it was what it was.

My mother was abandoned by her mother as a child after the heartbreaking death of her father and eventually adopted by a distant Aunt & Uncle and several cousins. Tho we have been estranged for 30 + years, I grew up all my life referring to my cousins as my uncles. I understand "sign of the times" and I know my biological mother had a pretty hard upbringing. They were poor and worked on a mink farm. She not only lost her father unexpectedly but now at a young age she was dealing with the abandonment of her own mother. She eventually moved away from the farm and alleged abuse. She wound up in a small town a couple hours away where she became a prostitute or call girl. She used to tell us she was a GoGo dancer. Bluntly, she was a prostitute. Thru this course of employment she met my father and it was your classic "love story." Inexperienced man meets a beautiful woman and in 3 days she claims pregnancy and he sweeps her away from her hardships, 9 months later my older sibling, my sister, is born and then a few years after that my brother was born. At this time, my mother was plotting and begging my father to take her home and away from the South, Alabama, where they had established work and homes and because my father loved her, he granted any wish she asked for. When they moved back North they were able to obtain housing, work and "friends." It was her choice in friends that sealed more of my fate!

I was born on the coldest day of the year, in January, on a cold and snowy night in 1975...