The Rising Of Erin Phoenix

Ms. Erin Phoenix here. I'm sure you are wondering who I am, and why you should care. I guess the easiest answer is you shouldn't. I'm just a person like you. Maybe we have a similar story or maybe our tale is completely different.

It all started in Quebec, Montreal in Canada. Geeze I sound like I'm talking to my therapist here, but to go forward sometimes you need to go back and tell the whole story. Of course I don't remember anything about this, just what I've been told from my family. It's said that my mom and dad were living in Canada, as my father was working for his father's business.

It was the dead of night, snow blew down in a horizontal blur. I'm not sure why my mother didn't want to wake up my father, or call an ambulance but she decided to drive herself to the hospital. She knew she was in labor. I wish I could say the story of my birth was easy, but I can't.

An important thing to know is my mother didn't speak a lick of French, and the hospital was in the French Quarter of Canada. I should have been born on Halloween but I came 6 weeks early on September the 24th.

I was born four pounds, six ounces. A short time after being born, my left lung collapsed and I needed to airlifted to a seperate hospital about 5 hours away. I'm sure by that point my father had made it to the hospital, I think they called my grandparents to bring my sister back to New Jersey to stay with them and my aunt.

I survived, and we ended up moving back to the United States.

My earliest memories are in Towpath apartments. I guess now they call it "Towpath Village" to try and sound more updated. The apartments were located just near the M&M Mars factory that my father worked at. You could literally smell them making chocolate when you woke up in the morning.

Four was a bad age for me. One time when I was taking a bath, I went to get out of the tub and slipped on the ledge. My two front teeth went through my bottom lip. I needed stitches and there was blood everywhere. I also ended up not having my two front teeth until my adult teeth came in which spawned some cute nicknames like "Grandmawmaw"

The next thing that happened at four was my sister breaking my leg. She didn't do it on purpose of course. My sister, younger brother and I were playing in the bedroom. The game was simple, my sister would sit on the bed and my brother and I would sit on the floor at each of her legs and try to pull her off.

Well, I won and she landed square on my leg. My dad called us for lunch, it was Macaroni and cheese. No self respecting 4 year old is going to complain about the menu choice for the day. Except I couldn’t walk out of the room. I crawled out of the bedroom, down the hallway and into the kitchen.

“Get up, your not a baby”

Except, thinking back on it. I was still a baby. I ate my mac and cheese, and at some point with me continuing to crawl around they decided to take me to the doctors. I ended up in a cast for the broken leg and it wasn’t so bad, except a bit itchy.

I’d say five to six was pretty uneventful. I could remember a few bad babysitters, like the one who tried to wash the birthmark on my wrist off. Or the one that pretty much locked us in the bedroom to play the whole time she was watching us.

At six, my parents started the process of divorce. I’m not exactly sure that’s the right phrasing. I remember being at school with my sister and it being well past time to be picked up for the day. We went to the office and let them know that someone wasn’t there to pick us up yet, and I’m guessing they had contact numbers in case of an emergency.

Eventually, my mom showed up in our little run down station wagon. It looked as if everything we owned was in the back of the car.

“Girls, get in the car now.”

Something was going on. We just didn’t know what yet.