Letters to My Girl

Parents

We've reach another hazy part of my history, because your grandmother plays it so close to the vest. As far as I know, she's been married six times. My second sister intimates that the number is higher, but I only know of six. Though actually, I don't know for 100% fact that she married my first sister's father. I'll tell you what I know, what I was told, and not what I suspect.

My mother and father were very young when they married, so young that Granny and Papaw had to sign something that proved they had permission to marry. My mother was wearing braces in the wedding photos, I don't think I ever told you that she wore braces too. Did she tell you? She looked beautiful, still is, though in a different way, now.

According to her, I was concieved in the coat room of a Marine Corps ball. She was 18 when she gave birth to me. She used to playfully grumble that she "missed Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners" because I was due around the first holiday, but born around the second. While she was in labor, they wouldn't even give her water, worried it would make her vomit. They gave her a wet washcloth to suck on as a compromise, and last she ever talked about it, she'd never been so parched, before or since.

Also, she said my father claimed I wasn't his. He named a different girl, and said she was the only daughter he ever had. That statement only left me with questions she'll never answer. I think I've shown you pictures of him; other than his red hair and my brunette, I'm the spitting image of him ...which is odd, because I was also the spitting image of her, and they look nothing like each other. Other than what high school he went to, what he looked like in the late 70's and the supposed existence of an older sister he sired for me, I know nothing about him.

I have no idea what my first half sister's father looks like, but one of my parents once told me he ended up in prison for raping his sister. Take that one with an entire salt lick, because no one has ever corroborated the claim to me. My second and third sisters' father, you met while you were on Spring Break, and I was staying with my second sister while waiting the necessary length of time to be allowed to re-enter Norway. I don't know when he married my mother, but they were married long enough to have the two sisters I mentioned and to adopt my first sister and me.

That man sexually abused his children, biological, adopted and step, regardless of gender. He used to threaten to spank me if I told anyone when I was younger (I don't recall any age where he did not abuse me.) When I was older, he actually told me the truth, that he would be arrested if I told, and of course, what young girl raised with that kind of abuse and not being aware that it wasn't normal wanted that? I was similarly abused by one babysitter's brother, and the two sons of a different babysitter. I am certain my mother suspected something was going on, but for whatever reason, he wasn't caught before I was an adult. I won't go into detail about that here, other than to say that while driving me to the hospital where my mother had given birth to my second sister, he had one hand on the steering wheel and sexually abused me with his other.

He was shipped overseas sometime around my mother's fourth pregnancy. I was told by another parent that he cheated on my mother there, and that was the reason they divorced. She tricked me when she gave me the choice of which parent with whom I could live. I knew where he was, and was excited to live in that country. But with him, she told me I would have to eat fish heads, "because that's all they eat there." She said if I went with her, I could ride horses and go fishing and camping, and in the winter, we could play in the snow. Guess which choice appealed to 10 year old me?

We moved away from California, and we did eventually do those things. She remarried very soon after. But my first brother's father taught her that it was okay to beat us with whatever there was at hand for even the slightest transgression. Usually, it was with our own woven, nylon cowgirl belts, and because she was usually enraged when she hit us, sometimes it was the belt buckles we were hit with. Among many other objects, she has beaten me with belts, coat hangers, a cast iron skillet, thrown the entire contents of a knife drawer and a bottle each of shampoo and conditioner at me (she hit my first sister instead, to whom she apologized, because she'd meant to hit me,) and took her car keys to my face while threatening that if I ever ran from her when she was "trying to spank" me again, she'd "go in (her) bedroom, get the shotgun from under the bed and blow (my) fucking head off."