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What about you?

Life can be so blue.

By Tina MillerPublished about a year ago 6 min read
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It's the making of a star.

It all began so long ago. It seems like most of my life has been blue. I haven't had much of an upbringing. Everything wasn't sunshine and apple pie in my life.

My parents were what some people would call, Clan People. If you were blood, you stuck together no matter what. If you did not agree with that lifestyle you were shunned.

It was a struggle growing up and knowing that things were not right, but it had to be ignored or they would throw you out of the circle. As a child, I spent most of my childhood staying with other family members or friends' homes just to get away from the cayous in my own home.

Every animal we ever had; my father would shoot it after it got so big. So getting close to animals was something that always hurt us at one point in our lives.

For some reason, I am not sure of, my father let me keep my cat Fluffy, who we got when he was just a baby. He died an old cat in the bowels of a septic tank that my dad had open because he didn't want to hire a sewer sucker. My father took a pail and would scoop out the septic and take the pail to the side of the woods and dump it. My cat Fluffy fell into the sewer and died.

My first recollection of having a pet was when I was around 4 years old. My father came home with a collie puppy. He got tied to a tree outside our front house and that was how he spent his short-lived life. I was lying in bed when I heard a gunshot. When I got up in the morning, our dog was gone. I don't even remember his name.

I had a rabbit when I was a teenager and I loved that rabbit, but my father took that rabbit when it grew up and gave him to my uncle. I still don't understand why my dad made me give my rabbit away? My guess is that he didn't want to keep feeding him. He never said and you did not question him or there would be a reprimand.

You see my father liked to hit me and hit me a lot. You did not talk back or even try to get answers or there was hell to pay. He was a man with a short temper and hated everyone. He was mean speaking. My father was not good a keeping friend's. He would try to be nice, but I could always see the fakeness behind his so-called kindness. It was like he was trying to play a role that just didn't fit him. He was so obvious and horrible at it. It didn't take long for the other person to figure that out and they were gone out of our lives.

So many nice people came and went in our lives never to be seen again. I enjoyed the fresh niceness that came from the people my father would try to be nice too. When they visited, it brought a freshness to the air around me. I grew quickly to know that my home was sour.

I moved out of my families home when I was 16. I got pregnant and went on welfare to survive. It was a way for me to get away from my family. At the age of 17, I married my best friend's brother and my neighbor who was 11 years older than me. We are still together.

My husband began to see what my family really was and understood that I had been abused most of my life. He is a loving and caring man. I find that he carries a lot of my father's characteristics, but the good part of my father. My father worked hard to take care of his family and my husband worked to take care of me and my daughter.

I was eventually cut from my family because my views were not like theirs. As I said earlier, if you didn't with their lifestyle, you were shunned. I was eventually shunned when I couldn't close my eyes anymore about their ways. I would try to correct them or show them how wrong something was, and I guess they got tired of me trying to show them how I saw things and they let me go permanently.

My sister and brother grew up thieves and my parents bailed them out time and time again. They were always in some kind of trouble, but it never mattered to my parents.

I could write a book about my family and maybe someday I will. But for now, I am happy being away from that blue life that I lived withing. Today I see colors and am grateful for the life around me. I have learned and I say learned because that is what I had to do, I learned to love animals and know that there was a responsibility to those animals. There was a love that I was never able to feel before.

I hated dogs for most of my life, until one day I decided to I decided I wanted two very pretty husky pups. Twelve years later, I have one of those husky pups still with me. My heart broke when we lost one of the huskies to cancer. She was the love of my life. She was my best friend. Everywhere I went, she would hold my hand in her mouth and walk with me.

My Sheba

It took me a long time to understand that there is a lot behind the meaning of love. There is a lot of dedication, honesty, sharing, understanding, and giving. I am happy to say that I have found that love in my life and I can die happy knowing that I finally had my chance to truly be happy and know and be able to feel what love really was.

I feel sorry for my family who is stuck in a life of not knowing what kind of life is really out there and available to them if only they wanted it. Instead, they continue to stay wrapped up in that clan life. My parents are gone now, and I am still shunned from that family, but I feel better for living a life that I can be happy and proud living.

I had no help from my family. I was never told to dream of what I could be. I had no directions. I had to learn life all on my own. But I did it. I can leave that blue behind. Sometimes I still feel lonely, wishing that my family would have acknowledged me and be proud of me. So maybe some of that blue will never go away. Maybe I am stuck feeling blue about that situation for the rest of my life.

There are so many shades of blue. Which one are you?

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About the Creator

Tina Miller

I have always written. Since I can remember I have kept a diary. Now I just want to show my work.

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