Bluwoman's Blog

I  started to write that this would be very short and would only be a small part about myself, but to hell with that. I am writing this and I’m writing it for myself and maybe it will help me to get it out in the open.  It can’t hurt and since you don’t know me, who are you to judge without the entire story? So, here goes.

I grew up in a small town, the oldest of 9 kids. Most of them are still in that area, and a couple have passed on. We never had much and didn’t know we were missing anything until we got to be in our teens and started wanting to be noticed by the opposite sex. Or at least that’s the way it was for me. I can only guess as for my younger sisters and who ever knows whether boys really care how they look or not.  We were always crowded into whatever house mother moved us to that year and who daddy worked for.  My father was a farmer or truck driver for all my life.  He was also a very unlovable and unloving man. He was a hard worker and it was all mother could do to get him to take time off work for anything, even a Saturday night date with her. He had a horrible temper and didn’t care who he took it out on. I was around 5 when on a drive to my grandmothers house, while arguing with mother, he stopped the car and pulled her out of it and started hitting her on the side of the road.  He didn’t do that often to her, we were the ones that got it.  And it didn’t take very much to send him off, once when I was 15 I had written a love note to a boy in school which a younger brother  found while nosing through my purse. We plowed into each other in a fight, more me screaming at him and him taunting me in return more than anything.  But dad had to get into it, and I wound up with belt buckle marks on my face where he hit me with it. My aunt, his sister, who lived in another state came and got me that weekend to go live with her. Actually, I wasn’t there for the entire conversation and I think she originally came to just visit, but when she found out what happened, she wanted me out of there. I didn’t stay long, just a few weeks, but it was long enough to find out how a real family operated, how it was to be respected in school (thanks to my male cousin who was respected and liked, I got the backlash from that) and how it was to wear good clothes that I didn’t have to wash and iron. I didn’t mind the laundry most of the time, would rather have clean clothes as not.  But when you are also at the age of 10 onward in charge of taking care of the younger kids, making sure the house is clean, cooking, and going to school, it feels good to have someone do something for you. I went home because my mother missed me and I couldn’t stand to see mother hurt.

Ah, my mother.  She was something. How she managed to stay with my dad all those years I will never know.  Both my parents were hard workers, as were most people from their generation, and they raised us kids to be hard workers. Mother was only 15 when they got married, dad 10 years older.  I came along 3 years later, and from that point, there was a child born every year. Mother was a stay at home mom until we started getting older, then I think she went to work just to keep from going totally over the brink nuts.  She always had some guy chasing after her and she loved to laugh. She always had a joke ready for someone, always a kind word to say and if she couldn’t say something nice to someone, she just wouldn’t talk to them, same as I am today.  Years later and not to rush the story, I found out she was bi-polar and depressive, but at times she did things that just didn’t make sense. One day I came home from school, around the same time John Kennedy was killed, and she was gone. She didn’t come in that night or for 3 more days. The Highway Patrol found her car in one of those roadside parks the next day and the FBI was looking for her.  She had just had a nervous breakdown. Dad visited all her friends and 3 days later found her at one of their house. She came home and stayed, but her dr put her on some kind of liquid medicine that was to keep her calm. She gave that up after a while, and had no more episodes like that one, but there was always that worry in the back of my mind.  I was in 3rd grade at this time,  but my memory is clear on how thing went down, so people, don’t ever believe that someone that young won’t remember.  As I got older and she got older, mother and I got closer. We had that special touch where we knew the other was going to call simply because you were thinking of them. I would get bad feelings that something wasn’t quite right and call her, and sure enough something had happened to someone. It didn’t have to be family, and never was, but because she was upset, I felt it. I miss my mother everyday, her laughing eyes and smiling face. The only woman better that my mother was my maternal grandmother. Strong, caring, beautiful women both of them.

More on my father: for some reason the man has never liked me. When my mother had her stroke and the health care workers were not taking as good a care of her as we thought they should, I quit my job and stayed home so I could make sure she didn’t fall out of bed and get another black eye.  But my father never appreciated anything I did, which was staying in the house 20 hrs a day with those other 4 off when a health care worker did come, and spent at the grocery store and running other errands.  I really don’t like my father anymore than he likes me and even though I don’t wish him dead,  I don’t believe I will have a tear when he does. He never has said thank you to me for anything and any time he gets a chance he puts me down about something. Is it any wonder I left there at 18 and have only been back for short periods?  I actually left the care of my mother in my younger sisters hands and got married just to get out of there again.