My Early Childhood

(I think that I needed something easy to start with and this seems as good as anything?)

I was born a week before my due date because my mother thought that going sailing on choppy Lake Erie would be a good idea for Memorial Day.  I don't really know many specifics, but I was born at exactly 5 PM, which I think is a little cool.  I was conceived a good 8 months and 3 weeks earlier, about a month after my mother started going to college at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania as an art major.  She didn't really get to do a lot of art, being there only a semester.  My uncle told me that my father, who's name is Tim and that is all that I know, looked a lot like a white version of Prince.  I say that they should have figured it all out just from that.

My mother, at that time, was a scared, young 18 year old girl.  Regrettably, I do not have much more than that.  Not from this stage.  My uncle was a boy of 15 and I guess he was pretty excited to become an uncle.  My grandmother and grandfather were a happy, very Christian couple.  My grandmother attended Christian Womens' Club every Wednesday and my grandfather was a respected supervisor at the local G.E. plant.  My great-grandmother, Gigi, having lost her husband 2 years before, was becoming something of a socialite.  And I think they were all thrilled to have me.  It certainly seems that way, based on the home videos.  I guess it was because of me, at the tender age of 2 months, that they bought a VCR and a video camera.  I was destined to be spoiled.

I guess I had pneumonia at the age of two, but who's counting?  No, I have three first memories, and no way to know which was actually first.  In one of them, the family is going out for dinner and I'm the last one out of the house.  My grandmother asks me what time it is and I run back to the VCR.  "Six.  Zero.  Zero," I shout out and am very proud of myself.  So are they.  Second memory, my grandmother and I are at a Rite Aid.  I'm browsing the kid aisle and I find a pair of underwear with my one true love on them, He-Man.  I remember asking my grandmother if we could buy them and she says no....  So I purposely shit my pants so we have to.  Even then.... even then....  The third is picking tulips from the garden for my mother and telling my grandmother that I found them growing on the beach.  I don't even know.

My memory is filled with a lot of those little flashes.  I could list two dozen more, but none of them really seem relevant.  All I do know is that when I was very young, I had a penchant for carrying around baby dolls and this fascination developed into Barbies.  I blame the Barbies bit on always watching soap operas with my grandmother.  Well.... that and the fact that she bought me Barbies in the first place.  I had three Barbies and one Ken.  And, naturally, Ken was sleeping with all of them.  And, naturally, they all found out.  So the three Barbies would concoct a plan to trap Ken and tie him up and then dangle him over a bridge (being a yardstick) and taunt him before plummeting him to his death.  This was when I was 3 or 4.

Oh, and my love of He-Man and the Sword of Destiny that he held aloft to gain fabulous magic powers was slowly replaced by a love of She-Ra.  Girl power, I dunno.

I was raised largely by my grandmother.  My mother spent all of her time working as hard as she can, saving up as much money as possible.  By the time I was 5... and she was 23 (which just fucking ASTOUNDS me), she bought us a large down payment on a house.  We moved out of my grandparents house, which rocked my little world, and into a life of our own.

I think that was pretty hard for her.  Part of me admires that in her, I don't know how I would have done, last year, trying to raise a 5 year old who I didn't know all that well.  We would run out of garbage bags and she would fill the trash with paper shopping bags from Giant Eagle.  Once, we were trying to eat breakfast and she'd forgotten to buy milk, so we tried eating cereal with water.  I refused and she tried anyway.  I remember her breaking down in tears halfway through her bowl.

Those days were pretty intense, but we learned to grow up together and trust each other.  My grandparents still played a very large part of my life.  I'm sure they still played a very large part of hers.  I think back to that time and while it is all still very fuzzy...  it is also fond.

And then she got married.