Ice in the thorns

September Fourth, 2001.

        The day I was born was a happy one. My mother had had three other births before me, so she wasn't in an incredible amount of pain. There were no complications with my birth, except that my big toe and the toe next to it on my right foot crossed over one another. That was later fixed by wearing flip-flops for nearly the whole summer when I was eight.

        As I grew up, the whole country was moving and shifting in ways I couldn't understand. I didn't get why people would hurt other people, I didn't understand the fear of guns, and massacre was an obscure term along with "school-shooting" while "stabbing" was to be done with carrots and mashed potatoes. 

        My mother tried hard to protect me from the nasties of the world. When my father petitioned for partial custody in the summer of my third year on Earth, the wall of her protection began to quietly crumble.

        This takes me back to about nine months before I was born, give or take a little. My mother had been married (unhappily) to my brother's father. That man is the person I truly refer to as my father, he basically raised me, anyways. My mother had been working for my biological (bio) father when I was conceived. I don't know all the nasty details and certainly do not want to know; but the result was my mother having an affair and me being made.

        For the first few years of my existence, all was relatively quiet on the home front. My brother's father (I called him Dad Tim) held no grudge with me. Him and my mom had separated officially and he moved across town. My brothers (two of them, they were about seven years older than me and they were only a year or less apart in age at any given time) spent half of their time with me and my mother and half with Dad Tim. Often, I'd just go over to their dad's house to play and hang out. Once again, their dad was my dad in my book. 

        All was well, until my bio father came and shook it up. This is where the trusty State Of Wisconsin began to fail my family. It was a very complicated court proceeding, lots of money was spent and since my bio father was a business owner while my mother was only a makeup expert for Mary K and a den mother for the girl scouts, nothing stopped my dad from winning the lawyers over with his nefarious charm and fistfuls of cash. In the end, the court granted him some percentage of custody over me. I was only three, none of it really made sense to me or made any impact on my toddler world- until the first time I met my father.

        My mom had decided to rip the bandage off with this one. She had explained to me many times before about my real dad but it didn't really matter to me. My parents were the ones who were there and loved me- that was that. Mom put me in the car one day and didn't tell me where we were going- I was oblivious to useless information like that anyways. The sense of dread coming off of my mother in waves didn't even cross my mind. 

        When we got to his home, I thought immediately that my father was the president. We had pulled off of a busy street (the busiest in our town, actually) and rolled our rusty red van into a black-tar parking lot. Looming before us was a large white house- what I didn't know was that the house was actually a funeral home. That was the business my bio father owned, and later in life he went on to own many, many more. At that point in his life, he lived in the upper-level of the home. The front porch had large roman-looking columns at each corner and the front lawn was adorned with a large white sign declaring this property "John Buettgen Funeral Home". This place would be my home every wednesday and every other weekend until I was nine years old.