Becoming Me

This is a story of how I got where I am now, and where I want to be. Where else to start but the beginning?

My life could have been worse. For being the one living in it I thought it was pretty shitty. But the start wasn't too bad. My grandmother and her husband came from a traditional, Christian home. My grandfather being one of two kids and my grandmother being one of eight, both had kids of their own when they got married, one of each of the same sex. Grandmother having my mother and my grandfather had my uncle. Both kids were into whatever the popular thing was, which was scary for parents in that era. Drugs, sex, alcohol, rock and roll of the '70s, in their teens. My mother was said to have a mental disability that left her unable to become a "true" adult, they said she was mentally challenged in some way. I never saw that. I was also told that she would run away when she was a teen, being a wild child, and all the stories of how rebellious she was. She had her first kid at 17, she had me at 19. My brother and I were taken away from my mother when I was 2, my grandmother took us in.

My grandmother raised us believing that she could give us everything we needed and everything she never had. Something had happened and the court was involved, my grandmother won custody of us and that's where we lived. I wasn't allowed to see my mom until I was about 17. I never knew my dad until I was 27. I didn't meet him until I was 17, in court, and I didn't know he existed until I was 14. It wasn't always that my bio-dad didn't want to be part of my life, it was just that, knowing my grandma, he had no chance.

Until I was 11, I had a beautiful back yard. A one-acre field that was connected to the local forest that goes on for miles. That was my home, the woods, not the house. We had three swamps nearby and I'd pretend to be a woodland witch moving from one to the other, using mushrooms and herbs, leaves and sometimes sticks to blend things together, pretending to fly on a broom and cast spells, and for hours I'd talk to the trees and hope to see animals walk nearby. I'd never tell anyone about it. It was MY playtime. We did homeschooling then and it would take us about two hours to finish a whole day's worth, so I played almost all day, every day, in those woods. Occasionally visiting the neighbors nearby and in the winter sledding downhills. My days were filled with happiness and total ignorance of anything adultish happening.

I remember I specifically had a wallpaper in my room that was the best back scratcher I could ever ask for as a child. I'd always had a hard time sleeping at night, even then I'd spend most of the night playing with my mind stories, often quietly running around the room (that's when I turned into a ninja). I never thought twice about what my situation might be and I was always happy when the family came around. I had a pet, I had a church, my cousin was my best friend, practically sisters. My brother and I loved each other, we'd play games all the time, running over to our grandfather's mother's house, who lived next door, for cookies on Sundays and randomly for berries. And scaring the shit out of my grandparents when I stood on the roof catching the wind with everything I had, feeling like I could fly, or hanging by one leg from a tree. I was the second-fastest runner!

I felt free.