What really happened--Part 1
Friday, Dec. 20, 2002, 8:57 a.m.

So, this is the one I've been promising for a while now, the story of "what happened". Where to start...eh, I'll go back to ancient history (well, I suppose, as ancient as you can really get since I'm only 21 years old...)

When I was younger, my mom and dad were foster parents, in Colorado. Mom specified that the kids they helped were supposed to be younger than me (I was 5 or 6 when she started). She was also certified to take in physically or mentally handicapped children. Surprisingly, many people in the foster system (at least then and there) were completely unwilling to take on handicapped children. As the oldest, I was expected to help out, the same as if those kids were my own brothers or sisters. I think it's one of the things that made our house so amazing, that even though we knew that they wouldn't be with us for very long, we treated them like family. And not just the warm and fuzzy parts, either. Don't get me wrong. I was nothing near an angel. I was the oldest, I was bossy and demanding and quite a pain. :) But I think that made it more real, too. These kids were used to being treated like glass, fragile, expected to break--so is it really any wonder that so many did? But not with us. They got in trouble, along with me, they got rewarded, they got hugged and kissed and scolded. And one of the very amazing things that my mom managed to do was not to play favorites. So I helped change diapers for the little ones or helped the older ones wash their hands before meals. I had to help clean up after them, and got to play with them. The funny thing is, my relatives look at that, and the "responsibilities" I had, and say that it was too much for a little girl. But I never felt like it was. I always loved having so many friends, so many people around, so much love. Not that any of that is really to the point. It's all just tangential background information to me explaining why the year I turned 9 was…traumatic, to say the least.

In February, my grandfather committed suicide. No one could really tell me why. He was drunk at the time, but to an 8-year-old girl, that's no answer. Hell, even to a 21-year-old girl, that's no answer. He called us all beforehand, made promises about seeing us...but, much as I adored this grandfather, his death seemed so unreal to me. He lived in California, 1400 miles away and we saw him--maybe--once a year around Christmas. Going out to California for the funeral--which I didn't (wasn't allowed to? I honestly don't remember...) attend was more of an adventure than something awful, even though Mom and Dad were so sad. Except that, while we were gone, all of the foster kids had to go to temporary places. We couldn't take them out of state. And Shannon, one of the girls I absolutely adored (there will be more about her in a different entry, I promise. She deserves much more than the sentences she'll get here!) was sent to her grandmother's house. Normally, that would be a warm and fuzzy thing but...Shannon's grandmother didn't care about her. She thought Shannon a nuisance and a waste of time. I hated the woman with all of my passionate 8-year-old soul. How anyone could do anything but adore this amazing girl was beyond me. And still is. Shannon had been injured when she was barely two--or perhaps she wasn't even two years old yet...and had become paralyzed from the neck down, except for one of her arms. She would periodically stop breathing--signals getting garbled because of the damage to her brain stem--so she was continually hooked up to a respiratory monitor. If she didn't breathe regularly, the monitor would start beeping. Usually that was enough to trigger the appropriate responses in Shannon's brain, but sometimes, Mom had to come in and give mouth to mouth. Her heart would continue working normally, but the normal breathe-in-breath-out dictated by her brain wouldn't always reach the muscles. It was scary, but not terrifying when it happened. Because Mama was there. And Mama could fix anything. When we returned from my Grampa's funeral, we were informed that Shannon had "passed away", that she had simply stopped breathing one night, and died of asphyxiation. This was real. My amazing friend and sister was dead. And dead was very, very, very bad, because "dead" meant I'd never get to see her or play with her again. And then there were rumblings of a move.

Move? Why would I want to move? I have my friends, and my school, and the red-haired boy in my class that I have a crush on..."Who wants to move?"

"Well," I'm told, "your gramma is afraid to live alone, so we're moving to California to live with her."

"But I don't want to move!" As if this should settle everything.

"Your gramma needs us." And that was that. No arguments, no buts, no changes. So, we sold the trailer, Gramma came out for a while, to help us pack. After she left, Nicky (my younger brother) and I were told that Gramma had changed her mind about us coming out there, that, well, Nicky and I were kids, and kids were too much trouble after all these years. (Brief side note. I found out, almost 10 years later, that it was my parents' choice not to move out to California, that my Gramma had never said she didn't want us out there because of my brother and me. My parents decided not to go so that my dad and Larry could work on their own business. We now resume the interrupted program.)

So Larry was "kind enough" to take us in. Whoops, time to backtrack. Larry was my dad's best friend, and a bachelor co-worker. So was Rick. When we lived in Thornton (this was all before my Grampa died), Larry and Rick would periodically come over for dinner, a game of cards. Rick used to sit on the floor and color with me. I still remember him teaching me to color in circles so that my teddy bear would look fuzzy. I thought he was the most amazing guy! And Larry was kind of gruff, but he seemed nice enough, and he would play with us kids sometimes. Looking back now, I know we were a substitute family for them. They didn't have to have the cares and worries but could sometimes have the benefit of having kids around and home cooked meals by someone of the female persuasion. I think they realized that they missed out on a lot of the joys, too, but...it was enough for the time being. Anyway, Larry and Rick had a falling out--over a woman--and it turned out badly. Rick went away with the lady, and Larry retreated and became very bitter about the whole thing. Dad ended up siding with Larry through the whole thing--which, realistically, I can't help but think was the right thing in the situation--and so we didn't really see Rick anymore. Anyway, back to the point. Larry took us in, since we had already sold our house when "Gramma" decided that we couldn't live in California with her, and we didn't really have anywhere else to go. (I can't help but feel a little...well, bitter at being lied to. Thinking that Gramma didn't want us shaped so much of the way I looked at things. As it was meant to. I think it was intended to make the transition smoother, to make me grateful to Larry for taking care of us...but all it did was make me resent my grandmother, and later, as the relationship between Larry and me got worse, it made me resent him even more. It did make things a little easier at first, to think he was being very kind and generous.)

And it was pretty bad, at first. It was one thing for him to deal with my brother and me when he always knew he could just leave at any given time. But to have us around, underfoot, all the time...well, that was entirely different. I was 9, so Nicky was about 6, 6 1/2. Kids that age are difficult. And I was always a precocious child. Not that I'm trying to brag, mind you. The truth of the matter is, though, that I was reading college level books by the time I was in 4th grade. My parents never talked down to me. It's a fine line, I know, between not talking over a child's head, and talking down to one. But my parents managed it admirably. And I expected things to be the same at Larry's as they were at home. But they weren't, not at all. Strange, new rules that didn't make sense. And tension. Not to mention all the new things to learn and deal with from moving to a new place, going to a new school, finding new friends...everything, everything new.

That was in June, when we moved in with Larry. June 1, 1990. And sometime later that year, my "uncle" Randy died of leukemia. He was 16. And that was real, too. Because Randy had swung me around and around and around in circles until I was so dizzy when he stopped that I'd fall down, giggling madly. And when I asked why the moon was broken, Randy told me he didn't know, but Jesus would fix it in time. And sure enough, pretty soon, that sliver of a moon grew, and grew, and grew until it was whole again. And we watched, night after night as it got bigger and bigger, with our noses pressed against the window pane of the sliding door, the cold glass fogging up as we breathed on it. I didn't know what leukemia was, exactly, but it didn't matter, because Randy was "dead" too, just like Grampa, and just like Shannon. And I couldn't understand why everything just had to keep changing.

I also started my period that year. That's right, 9 years old. I went from no breasts to a C-cup in less than a year, and all of a sudden, I had to shave, and I kept bleeding, and I kept losing everyone. The topper on the year was that I found out that Santa didn't exist that year. I'd kind of suspected, but...well, you know, there was that Nintendo when money was so tight, and I didn't think Mom and Dad could do that. It made the Nintendo more special, but it felt, somehow, as if...the last piece of my being a kid was taken away.

To say the least, I was a pretty mixed up kid by the end of the year. Things got better over the next couple years. My life stabilized, I started dealing better with all of the changes, the tension at home eased as we all got used to each other, even if I kept rebelling against all the strange rules. Dad and Larry managed to establish their handyman business enough that they could quit their regular jobs. Mom started doing the bookkeeping for B & H (Blanchard & Hower), and Nick and I pitched in when and where we could. We were only supposed to stay living with Larry for one year, until we got the business on its feet and we could find a house of our own. But somehow, one year turned into two, and then two into three, and then we didn't want to have the added expense right now, because the business is doing so well, so somehow, it's been 4 years...and we're looking for a house now, but...it's turned into a house for all five of us, not just Mom and Dad and Nick and me, but Larry, too. So we moved out into the country, and I had to leave all my friends behind--again--and learn to fit into a new place--again--where everyone had known everyone else since they were "knee-high to a duck" and those "city people" stuck out like sore thumbs. I've received warmer welcomes in my life. We moved in somewhere around Thanksgiving, and started settling. The next Christmas went out to visit my Gramma, to see how she was doing. Somewhere along the way, Larry hurt his back. It wasn't the first time, but it was pretty severe. He didn't have health insurance, and refused to go to the doctor's because we couldn't afford it. My parents argued with him, saying it was better to deal with it now than let it get worse, but he was adamant. In the long run, he ended up quitting his job. My mom went to work as a bookkeeper at a local chicken farm, and Larry stayed home to start working on our own farm.

Hmmm...I find myself getting to the heart of the story and strangely--or maybe not so strangely--reluctant to continue. Regardless, this is a seriously long entry. I think I will go ahead and post this and work on Part 2 later.

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