Hi, my name is Misery.
Starting this post with a super quick recap, lol.
Papaw died
Kids are mean unless you pay them not to be
Nanny married a FRIEND (lol i can laugh about it now thank You, Jesus)
I had a couch to myself
Moving forward lol
I went back and forth about who I was going to live with (like I had a choice lol) At first, I wanted to stay with my dad. When nanny got married she left the trailer I grew up in to him and it was familiar. My dad and I didn’t vibe, but I was willing to deal with it rather than go to the unknown. Living with my mom was out of the question because I barely knew her at this point. Our relationship had always been so on again and off again that I really didn’t even know who she was. I also didn’t speak to her at this point so even if I had wanted to go live with her, I didn’t really know how to go about asking. I really wanted to live with my mammaw and papaw (nanny’s mom and dad who lived beside us) but when I brought it up to them I could sense their hesitancy…so rather than pressuring them to make a decision I knew they really didn’t want to make…I made the decision to not bring it up anymore.
I’ve cried OVER my dad a million times in my life, but I’ve only cried FOR him one time. The day I left everything I knew to move in with nanny and her new family…I cried like a baby for my dad. I remember him not saying much and all I wanted was for him to say “STOP! She can stay with me!” If he had said that I would’ve been out of the car in half a millisecond and my life would have probably been a lot different…good different or bad different, I’m not sure. Instead, I got the look I knew all too well. I call it the this is uncomfortable I want this to be over already look. It’s my dad’s signature look bless his heart lol.
So I went with nanny to the hell that was called the double wide. This place gave me the creeps. It was in the BACKWOODS and it got so dark at night that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face while outside. It felt like a whole days trek to get to town and I was used to living right outside of town so that took a lot of getting used to.
I knew how my life was going to go after my first night at the double wide when my nanny’s two step sons had their room all decked out and decorated. They had their beds and furniture all nicely fit in their room and it looked so cozy. I walked past their room to the end of the double wide and opened my door to find an air mattress sitting on plywood flooring (nervous laugh).
I should’ve ran away right then lol.
It was all down hill from there. I never saw my neurologist again.I can’t really tell you why. I didn’t go to the doctor regularly. If my glasses broke, I didn’t have the privilege of getting new ones, I had to tie them together with fish wire and live with it. As a matter of fact, I didn’t see a neurologist again until I almost went blind from a pseudo tumor flare up right after the girls were born. I didn’t see the family I left on the hill much and regardless of how they felt about me, I missed them. The only silver lining in moving was I got away from the creeps that liked me TOO much. It was always either people didn’t like me at all or liked me TOO much. It was never in between.
I was still on homebound when we moved but the county we moved to was really poor and it didn’t have the resources my old county had so eventually after the homebound teacher was a no show for a solid month, the school made the choice to do away with my homebound and require me to come to school.
I tried everything I knew to get out of that one lol. I pretended to trip and fall down a hill. I made my it look like a gnarly injury with purple eyeshadow. I would’ve got away with it, too, if the school hadn’t threatened truancy so nanny took me to the office to prove my foot was basically broken and when the teacher touched my foot glittery purple eyeshadow came off on her finger lol. Nanny was shook. She had no idea that I was faking it lol.
I ended up going to school, but still got in trouble for truancy because I couldn’t get to school on time. I got smart with the judge while in court so he ordered me to ride the 6am bus 2 miles to school every morning to ensure I would be on time. I didn’t know he was doing me a favor at that time. I was mad cause I had to wake up earlier but I’m glad now that he did that for me.
I’ve never understood why the kid gets in trouble for truancy. Shouldn’t the person responsible for the kid get the stern talking to? Lol I mean I was 13 I couldn’t drive myself to school lol.
After awhile I realized that the new school wasn’t as bad as my last one. It was much smaller and had less kids so there were not near as many bullies at this school. The worst thing I got called at this school was “Merina McDonalds” and I couldn’t even get mad at that one lol. It was so stupid that even I laughed when they said it lol. These kids’ vocabulary wasn’t anything like the kids’ from my last school. For some reason, most of the new kids at the new school ended up liking me. One time the bullying was brought up to the principal by a kid who felt bad for me. The principal called me in to ask me about it and I denied it all. I lied and told him nobody made fun of me and that everyone was super nice and welcoming. I think they came to like me because I didn’t rat them out. I had learned that telling on kids like that only made it worst for me when adults weren’t around.
I thrived at that school fort a short while and found myself excited to get to school and not excited to get home in the afternoons. My nanny’s husband and I didn’t vibe at all and at first I didn’t get a long with nanny’s step sons either. Eventually I came to really like one of them and we became pretty good friends but it took awhile to get to that point.
That school semester went by far too fast. Before I knew it, it was time to go to high school. Things changed even more then. I hated home and did anything to not be there. I showed my tail all the time and I’m sure I made everyone around me miserable. I was miserable myself and I loved the company. Me and nanny were always butting heads. It was me against everyone in that house and I did everything I possibly could to make them mad. I ran with the wrong crowd.I was very into the alternative thing and I wore black head to toe. I searched out troubled people to befriend. They understood me more than anybody at this point in my life. My whole freshman year was a blur. I’m pretty sure I passed my classes because my teachers didn’t want to deal with me or see me again. I had F’s all across the board all semester until the end and somehow I made it out of freshman year with straight D’s….
While freshman year was an interesting year for me…It was my sophomore year that really paved the way for me to meet Shane. My sophomore year was rough and I hate looking back on it. The only good thing I can take from it is it directly led me to Shane. If the things that went down hadn’t have went down, I might be in a totally different place…with a totally different person right now.
We’re about to get into the deep part of my story. The part that’s hard to tell. And you’re about to meet someone who is like a reoccurring character in a book. There’s nothing I want more than to skip over this whole era, but if I really want to tell my whole story…I gotta tell it all.
Grace.
I ended the last blog post vaguely, and I did that for a reason.
I didn’t want to go in to detail just yet, but I didn’t want you contemplating all the bad ways my story with nanny could be headed either. I wanted you to know that no matter where this part of my story went…that nanny was good. Nanny IS good. Nanny just wasn’t NANNY for awhile after my papaw died. Understandably so.
When papaw died, we were left with nothing. I told you that not long after his death, nanny and I left the church she had pastored for my whole life. Not only did we leave people I had known my whole life, nanny also left friends she had fellowshipped with for longer than I had even been alive at that point. Everything we had grown accustomed to over the many years was gone in a matter of months. It felt like everything was just always up in the air. Were we going to be ok? Were we going to lose the trailer? Where would our next meal come from? The questions were endless.. We lost people and we also lost the little income nanny had from pastoring. This was devastating to our livelihood.
We were left with NOTHING.
Being an adult now, I can see how this put nanny in a massive fight or flight mode. She was probably thinking “how in the world am I going to take care of myself let alone Merina and her brother, and now her dad and his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s daughter. I can’t imagine the pressure she felt. I can understand now why she made the choices she did.
I was ANGRY…beyond angry with the decisions she made during this time. Looking back, I don’t feel anger anymore. I can’t even feel it if I try. I just feel an overwhelming amount of grace towards her…and that HAS to be God, because for awhile I was angrier with her than I had ever been with my parents.
Trust that doesn’t exist can’t be broken. I never trusted my mom and dad. Nanny on the other hand, I trusted her with everything in me.
Like everything else at that time,,,that too was gone in only a matter of months.
I’m probably going to be everywhere in this specific post, and I apologize in advance. I’m running off of 2 1/2 hours of sleep but I really want to get this blog post up today. I think its a huge part of my mission to be consistent with this blog spot no matter what..
I began getting really sick only a couple of months after my papaw died. It wasn’t long til the ER visit I briefly told you about and the psuedotumor cerebri diagnosis I got. At this point I had already lost a significant amount of vision in both of my eyes, and it was only getting worse. I was throwing up in the school bathroom daily from the pain the headaches caused me. I threw up Mini Wheats so often that to this day I can’t even think about them without gagging.
I learned that the teachers didn’t believe I was in that much pain simply because they didn’t want to believe it. If I cleaned the bathroom stall after I threw up I was “faking it” because there was no evidence that I had actually been sick. If I didn’t clean up after myself I was “making myself throw up” ORRRRR my favorite…..I was “overeating breakfast and may want to skip breakfast entirely before”…LOL ….I have to laugh or I’ll cry. Do you think they would have ever said that to an average sized student? No way,
So every day I would start my day with a headache, throw up all over the school bathroom by late morning, have splotchy vision for the rest of the school day, get yelled at for not paying attention in class, make it home to the couch by the afternoon…and live there with something over my face to keep the light out of my eyes until I fell asleep and stayed asleep….only to wake up and repeat that ALL over again. I was 13 and had no quality of life.
School was brutal at that point, too. Not only was I barely making it through the school day, but I was getting bullied so bad. I was in middle school at this point and as I got older, the bullies just got meaner. I come to miss just being called “fat”. Middle schoolers were so much more cruel.
I was fighting for my life in math class one day. I had one of the worst headaches of my life. Beginning in middle school I began wearing a girdle every day to school. It didn’t make me look skinnier, I was morbidly obese after all… a girdle wasn’t going to change that. I guess it just made me feel better about myself. I can’t really tell you why I began wearing a girdle to school at such a young age, if you want me to be honest. I just know I wore them religiously. I wore them so tightly that I couldn’t roll it down by myself, meaning there was no using the bathroom for the whole eight hours I was in school. I would hold my pee til I actually cried. I wore them this tightly for all of my teenage years. Later on, I even began wearing THREE at a time.. I’ll explain that one in a minute,
ANYWAYS
So I was in math class with one of the worst headaches I’ve ever had and I hear kids behind me openly laughing. I learned VERY young that if you even suspect someone is making fun of you… DON’T bring attention to it. It only makes it worse. Act stupid and naive, they eventually get bored without a reaction. So I tried to ignore it until it got so loud that it disrupted the teacher and the whole class took a pause. Come to find out the girdle I was wearing was so tight that it caused me to have INSANE “back fat”. You know how I say I have a front butt and back butt now? Well back then I had front boobs and back boobs lol..
And the kids just thought that was hilarious.
I didn’t miss the quick hand-to-the-mouth-quick-turn-around-before-anybody-notices-you-laughing thing the teacher did. That one hurt because that teacher knew my family and they thought very highly of him. I secretly called him “turd” under my breath from then on out. I saw him not long ago on social media and still found myself calling him “turd” under my breath lol.
After that situation I did two unhinged things.
-I wore a second girdle to go underneath the first girdle. The first girdle resembled biker shorts which is what caused the back fat, and the second girdle went around my waist like a corset of sorts. They were the dream team of girdles. The corset one took care of the back fat and the biker shorts one made sure the corset one didn’t roll down lol.
-The second unhinged thing I did was I found the master bully. The really well known, popular one, and I made an agreement with him that I would pay him my lunch money every day as long as he didn’t openly embarrass me anymore. I figured skipping lunch wasn’t going to hurt me. I didn’t eat lunch in the lunch room anyway because that just made me a walking talking target so I always just saved my lunch money and used it for something else. Surprisingly, he agreed AND he stuck to his word. As a matter of fact, he even began taking up for me in class. When someone would say something mean he would say “Hey now Merina is cool! Leave her be!”….they never knew I paid him to be kind to me. They thought he saw something cool in me or something, and in return, they began to talk to me like I was a human. The teacher started being kind to me too! Somebody had said something really mean out loud about me, and the master bully openly took up for me…the teacher chuckled and said “Well Mr.**** It seems you have a crush on this here lady. I didn’t think she was your type.” The master bully did what I paid him to do and said “naw Merina is my friend. Leave her alone.”
I thought that was the best $5 I ever spent because nobody ever bothered my in that class anymore. Not even the teacher!
Little did I know I was creating a warped mindset during all this. “Paying” for friendship was something I kept doing all the way up until I met Shane. Nobody could just like me for FREE. Their friendship, their kindness, their “love” always came at a price. I still struggle with this in my adulthood. That mindset is basically engrained in me at this point.
I eventually had to leave school because of the psuedotumor cerebri and how aggressive is was attacking my brain and eyesight. I don’t remember being worried about myself. I remember being sad that I couldn’t pay anybody to be my friend anymore.
That makes me want to throw up.
The school put me on something called “homebound”. That’s when you’re too sick to go to school so a teacher comes out twice a week to give you new lessons and pick up your completed lessons. I would do school with my teacher in a nightgown sitting at the kitchen table. I didn’t have it in my to get dressed. I got used to wearing pjs around the teacher and he got used to seeing me in them lol. Maybe that’s why I’m still always in my pajamas who knows.
I liked this teacher. He was kind, and he was GOOD at teaching. He had me understanding things like math problems within 15 minutes. I thoroughly enjoyed school during my homebound days!
Not only was I on homebound because I was too sick to go to school but I was also on it because I had to be in Knoxville ALL the time. My neurologist was one of the best in the state. He was brutal and had no beside manner but he knew his stuff. It didn’t matter that he sent me home feeling like dirt…he put me to sleep during the spinal taps so I liked him lol.
He would grill me about my weight, make me feel like my blindness was all my fault for eating food, send me home crying, caused me to develop a gnarly eating disorder, and had me running laps around my trailer til I almost had a heart attack…but I overlooked at that because I didn’t have to be awake during the spinal taps. I felt like that was a pretty good trade off for the emotional and physical damages my appointments with him caused me lol.
I had to have several back to back spinal taps. A spinal tap is when they insert a needle into your back and drain excess fluid off of your brain. Essentially, psuedotumor cerebri is a false brain tumor. It’s an excessive amount of fluid on the brain that mimics an actual brain tumor. When you have the fluid drained off of your brain, it relieves the headaches for awhile. I hated the spinal tap part but I loved not having headaches for several weeks afterwards. After every new spinal tap, the headaches came back faster though. The relief periods in between spinal taps got shorter and shorter so the neurologist was suggesting I have a shunt done. The fluid was just accumulating so fast that the spinal taps were mostly in vain at this point.
I never had the shunt done. I really needed it done, but it never happened.
This is where the word GRACE shows up.
Nanny had began seeing someone during this time period. I didn’t like it, but I dealt with it because I figured she needed a friend.
That’s what I thought they were….friends.
They began going out together a lot and I began to have my suspicions that this wasn’t just a “friend”. But I ignored those feelings cause surely I would know if this person was more than a friend, right?
Not only were they going out very often, but he began coming over to the house a lot too. I hated that. In my 13 year old mind that was my papaws house, and nobody else was welcome there. I didn’t have a say, though so just lived in my room that wasn’t really my room anymore because it had been taken over by my dads girlfriends daughter…..lol. I pretended it was still my room though and was only reminded it wasn’t when she kicked me out because she didn’t feel like company lol. He also was showing up to my spinal taps. Jesus, keep me near the cross…..but I hated that.
Let’s do this rapid fire, cause I’m not sure I’m healed from this or will ever be healed from this… but GRACE, Merina, GRACE,
RAPID FIRE KEY EVENTS
Nanny comes home with a “friendship ring”.
Nanny is getting ready one day and asks me if I want to go with her.
“Where you going nanny?”
“I’m getting married today.”
BOOM. CUE THE VIOLINS. READ THE OBITUARY. MY LIFE IS OVER.
dramatic, but really though lol.
I can’t put into words the feelings I felt at that moment. I had never before felt those feelings and I haven’t felt feelings like that since. All I can tell you is that is a core memory for me, and that core memory absolutely taints every day of my life from that moment up until SHANE. I can assure you I was devastated every agonizing moment up until SHANE walked into my life. Call it a trauma bond, call it whatever you’d like to, but Shane saved my life. I would not be here if I hadn’t met him. I promise.
I stood at the top of our driveway and watched nanny drive off to get married to her friend, lol. It didn’t slip past me that I now had nobody that stayed.
My mom chose her life and left me.
My dad chose drugs and left me.
My papaw died and left me.
And now nanny had left me.
The only silver lining I could find there is at least my papaw was taken from me. He didn’t choose to go. I kept that in my pocket and thought on that often. For awhile it gave me a reason to stay on earth cause shoot, at this point..I wanted to leave me! It told me that I wasn’t so insufferable that EVERY person I loved wanted to leave. One wanted to stay. One would’ve stayed. One did stay til he couldn’t anymore.
I honestly believe God showed me so much grace in my marriage because of this….this pivotal moment in my life where I officially realized everybody had left. I think that’s why Shane found it somewhere in him to stay through everything I did to him. I TRIED to push him away. I tried everything I knew to do to push him away. I wanted him to leave. EVERYBODY left me.
But he stayed. I owe him everything, because for once SOMEBODY STAYED.
After her car was out of sight, I walked next door to my mamaw and papaws house. Apparently they knew what was going on, and they didn’t go to the wedding either. Apparently everybody but me knew what was going on. I guess everyone else was smart enough to put the pieces together. I didn’t think I had any pieces to put together though. I thought nanny told me everything, but I can’t blame her for keeping things from me. Lord knows, I kept plenty from her. The only difference is I kept what I kept away from her FOR her. She didn’t keep what she kept away from me for me. Nanny doesn’t like conflict and never has. I’m a lot like her in that way. I just wish I would’ve been worth the conflict that one time.
Its tough to look at her wedding pictures and know that everyone was there except for me.I try not to think about that when I see them. I try to find happiness somewhere in me for her. It comes a lot easier these days.
Nanny came back a married woman. She left for her honeymoon that night and I stayed on the bathroom floor until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, I moved to the couch in the living room because that’s the only thing I had that was mine anymore.
Next post 11/22/2024
The hill is STEEP.
I got called naive a lot as a child. I was always a dreamer. I had to be. I’m convinced that dreaming kept me sane as a child. I was always dreaming about things getting better, or dreaming about having a lot of friends. It was always hard for me to cope once I got thrown back into reality, though. Because I spent most of my time daydreaming about a better life, I developed something called “maladaptive daydreaming”. Maladaptive daydreaming is when you spend so much time in your mind, that you begin to recognize it as reality. It became a a trauma response for me. If I was getting bullied, violated, or hurt in some other way…I would flip what felt like a switch, and I would retreat into my own mind. It was an escape, and at the time it felt like I was doing myself a favor. Little did I know that the more I did it, the more I unknowingly numbed my brain. It got to the point where I did it so much that my real life emotions began to not feel real at all, and my emotions while daydreaming felt TOO real. I always felt like i was in the twilight zone.
Maladaptive daydreaming took over my life. My grades bombed even worse, because I was in the classroom…but not really IN the classroom. I was sitting at my desk, but I was somewhere else. I would be daydreaming about being a straight A student that got all the teachers questions right. I was the brightest person in the class….except, I wasn’t. I was getting straight F’s and teachers were constantly threatening to hold me back. As a matter of fact, I got held back in kindergarten and had to go to a transitional class rather than move on to first grade. At the time, nanny and the teachers made me feel like I had a choice. They made it seem like a fun and exciting thing, so when they asked me if I wanted to go to transition instead of first grade….of course I said yes! Little did I know they were only making it seem as if I had a choice, because they knew and had been told by my therapists that my mind was fragile, and they needed to be careful with how they transitioned me.
I would be being violated, but daydreaming that I was getting married, and my husband asked me what my favorite color was, or asked me if I liked my pretty wedding dress. I was dreaming that he asked me questions. I always thought that was weird and I’ve never really told anyone that. I realize now that I was craving for someone to ask permission, instead of just taking what they wanted from me. It’s a weird concept, but if you look in the mind of a child that has been abused in that way…you would find some really odd thoughts and feelings. I learned things I should’ve never known at only 5 and 6 years old. Because I knew things most children my age didn’t know, I couldn’t relate to kids my age. While they were playing with dolls, playing dress up, and watching cartoons…I found myself disinterested in that stuff. I would try to be interested in it, but It was almost like I didn’t know how to be a kid at times.
I can count on one hand how many board games I played as a kid! Nanny bought me Yahtzee one time and I played the heck out of that game. I would beg nanny to play with me, but even when she was busy I would play it by myself lol. I also remember playing Candyland. I played that with a therapist. I didn’t know at the time he was a therapist. I just knew nanny had taken me somewhere and a really nice man was there…and he had boardgames in his office lol. I remember being frustrated because he left the room with nanny and I wanted to keep playing Candyland with him. It wasn’t until I was much older that nanny told me the real reason I was there and the real reason he walked out of the room that day. He had been playing Candyland with me while casually making conversation to try and get me to open up…because I didn’t talk much as a kid. I was always told “don’t tell anybody”, “you better not say a word”, “nobody believes a liar”…so I listened and I didn’t say hardly anything at all to anybody. I learned early that if I didn’t talk at all, nothing could slip out.
I think that’s why I talk so much now. I’m making up for lost time LOL
I don’t remember what I said to that therapist. I don’t even really remember what we were talking about. I had Candyland on the brain. Whatever I said was enough for him to remove himself from the room to gather his emotions and give nanny specific instructions to never let me out of her sight. I never saw that man again. I don’t know why. I just assume my case was too much for him. I wish I could go back and thank him for trying to watch out for me and for reporting what he learned.
I think all the horrific things that happened to me, in addition to the maladaptive day dreaming, broke my brain. It became really difficult for me to feel emotions….ANY emotions. Anger, hurt, sadness, embarrassment, joy, excitedness….I couldn’t feel any of it. It was very muted the few times I did feel one of those things. The best way I can explain it is when an emotion broke through that barrier, it felt very watered down.
That is until my papaw died. Boy, I felt every bit of it all. It HURT. I have yet to experience anything like that since. It wasn’t just grief, it was fear. This is one of two people that took care of me and tried to watch out for me…. Now we were down to one. And if two people weren’t enough to keep me safe…one definitely wasn’t and I was not too young to realize that.
My papaw was significantly older that nanny. He was her second husband. Nanny’s first marriage was very abusive. She got married when she was 16 and her husband beat her every day. He broke her nose, held weapons to her head, taunted her, made her think every day was her last…the things that man did were horrific. He would get drunk and open the refrigerator and pour a whole gallon of milk on the floor. He would pull nanny by the hair and demand her to clean it up. She did it every time because she wasn’t just scared for her safety, she was scared for my dad’s safety too. My dad experienced all of this firsthand. It’s why I show a lot of grace towards him for the things he’s struggled with. He was just trying to cope. I chose maladaptive daydreaming to numb myself and he chose substances to numb himself.
Thank God nanny met papaw. He was so good to her. He loved her with everything in him. He worked hard in the mines to take care of us. Every night I would stand at the glass door and wave while he would drive down the hill to head off to work. I would pray the whole time “Jesus please keep him safe.” He was my person and the thought of something happened to him paralyzed me with fear.
His health started declining FAST. He struggled with diabetes amongst other health issues. One day he was sitting in his chair watching TV and he said “I can’t see.” Nanny and I thought he was playing around because he was always known to cut up. He never took anything too seriously. We quickly realized he wasn’t joking. His eyesight was there one minute, and gone the next.
It took a toll on my papaw to not be able to work. He had always provided for us. I think it really messed with him mentally. That paired with his age really affected his mind and before long he was showing signs of Alzheimer’s. He had open heart surgery and after that it just all went down hill. One day I was sitting at a middle school football game with my brother and I watched a helicopter fly across the sky. In my right ear I heard “papaw”. This was before cell phones so I had no way of knowing he was on that helicopter except for the fact that I had noticed the helicopter and heard “papaw”.
While I had been gone he had tried walking through the house looking for nanny. He fell on a vase, broke the vase, and bled out alol over the floor in a matter of minutes. God really used the medical professionals to save his life that night. He should’ve died then, but he was a fighter and he fought to stay with us.
The last time I saw my papaw alive, I was sitting beside his hospital bed in the far back room of the single wide that I grew up in. I kept telling him I loved him. It’s all I knew to say. I was 12 years old, but I was crying like a baby. Every time I said “I love you” he would try his hardest to say he loved me back. He would only get “I lo-“ out, but I said “I love you” a thousand times and he tried saying it back a thousand and one times. After awhile I felt bad that he was trying his best to say he loved me back but couldn’t so I stopped saying “I love you” and just thought it. As the day was wrapping up, I began singing that one song “I willll remember youuuu. Willll you remember me?”. I whisper sang that to him for what felt like hours. That evening my uncle who was a Pentecostal preacher (I told y’all I come from a lonnnnng line of Pentecostals) came down to the house and told my nanny God had told him that by 8 that night, my papaw would be home. He told nanny God had told him that she and I had to let him go, and we needed to tell him that it was okay to go home because he was fighting hard to stay out of fear of what would happen to us if he left. My uncles brother (another Pentecostal preacher) came down about the same time to tell us the exact same thing. I knew my uncles didn’t lie, so I knew it was coming.
Telling my PERSON that I would be ok when he went home was the last lie I ever told him.
Around 8 PM on the dot that night my papaw took his last breath. Nanny passed out from grief and I was left by myself in the living room staring at the hallway that was between me and where my papaw died. I knew my life was about to get so much worse so I did what I always did to escape, I daydreamed until I fell asleep that night.
The following months were rough. My dad divorced the really nice lady I told y’all about on page one. He moved in with nanny and I again. I had no idea where my mom was, I hadn’t seen her in awhile at this point. Not that I can remember anyway. Nanny met someone new and was voted out of being pastor at the church I grew up in. We had no money. Dad brought a new woman into the house and she had a daughter. I was eventually moved out of my own room and the daughter was given my room. One night, I was lifeless on the couch and rushed to the er only to find out I had something called “pseudo tumor cerebri”. The ER doctor tried giving me a spinal tap which is a big no-no. THAT was awful. Within only a few weeks of being diagnosed I lost my eyesight in my left eye. I had been going to my primary with headaches for months before I ended up in the ER and lost my vision. He would accuse me of trying to get out of school and he would tell me to lose weight. Everything was because of my weight. If my nose was running it was because of my weight. He actually slipped up one time while lecturing me about not lying to get out of school. He told me my head was fine and he said “being fat takes a toll on your body…THATS what we need to get control of. Your head will be fine.” After realizing he called me fat, he back tracked and apologized, but I never forgot that. I went home and ran from one end of the trailer to the other while drinking glass after glass of water. I just knew I’d wake up skinny lol.
This is the part where it gets really hard for me to talk about. I don’t like talking about this part and only Shane knows my feelings about this next situation. I still have to process a lot of hurt when I revisit these memories. Just keep in mind nanny has always loved me. Nanny went through a lot within those few months after papaws passing. Nanny is not perfect, but nanny is a good person. I love her with my whole heart and that will never change…..
But I told y’all it went down hill after my papaw died and honey, that hill is STEEP!
NEXT PAGE WILL BE POSTED 11/15 <3
He turned my woe into WOAH!
(1)He turned my woe into WOAH!
I mean it when I tell you the joy I have today is the product of God being ever so present in my life. While reading some parts of my story you might begin to think “HOW was ‘God ever so present’ in this girls life?!” …. Just wait, you’ll see. The bigger the trauma, the bigger the testimony. Trust me.
I want to turn this section of my website (OUR website — it belongs to both God and myself) into my life story. I plan to tell it all…in 20 blog posts (which is the most it allows me LOL ) Because I have so much to say, I may have to omit some details and sometimes be quite brief with what I’m telling you. I’ll try to be smart about it and leave that for the particular topics in my life that are extremely hard for me to talk about or really difficult for me to recount. I feel like some details need to remain hidden for the sake of my sanity AND for the sake of your reading experience. Try not to expect too much when it comes to grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation while reading these blog posts — remember who’s writing this lol!
So, I’m 33 years old and in the prime of my life. Some people don’t realize when they’re “in the good old days” until the good old days are over…that’s not the case for me. I realize I’m in those days right now, and that can be a double edged sword. All at once you feel blessed to be hyper aware of this stage of life because you can enjoy it and soak it all in — but on the other hand you feel a sort of panic throughout the entire season, because everything has an end and your slowly watching the end of what you know to be the prime of your life slowly approach. Honestly, I don’t know if it’s better to know or not.
Being the adult I am now, I often look back at my early childhood and cry for myself (your girl can throw a pity party LEEEEMMEEEE TELL YOUUU). And i hate it lol.
As a parent, it’s hard for me to understand the decisions the adults around me made. I forgive them, I forgave them a long time ago, but boy do I struggle to forget.
My parents were very young when they had me and their relationship, from what I know, was pretty toxic. While their story isn’t mine to tell, I can tell you the parts of their story that directly affected me…because that’s a huge part of my own story. Please, try not to judge them. It hurts my heart when I tell my story on the channel and then I have to read mean comments about my parents. I know those comments come from a good place, I know you’re hurt for me because you love me….but please try to remember that I love THEM. That’s my mom and dad I have to read those comments about. I’ve never wished anything but the best for them. I’m a product of my own life experiences, and they are the product of theirs. I can’t be mad at them for not having their life together in their late teens and early twenties….HAVE Y’ALL HEARD MY STORY?! I don’t have a single stone to throw, your girls pockets are EMPTYYYYY. Thankfully, I learned from their mistakes and even throughout all my mess in my early 20s I didn’t leave my kids. I’ve always been all about my children. They are the apple of my eye. But who knows what could’ve happened if I hadn’t lived through and learned from the mistakes they made. In a really weird and confusing way, I’m glad they left me. Because they didn’t keep me, I know what it feels like to be abandoned and that in turn makes me never want to abandon anybody. I wouldn’t wish that sort of pain on my worst enemy (I don’t have a worst enemy but if I did I wouldn’t wish that on them lol)
I say it all the time…hurt people hurt people. They were my first examples of that. My parents were the first hurt people to hurt me. So I found that saying to be true at a very young age.
My nanny always says I came straight from the hospital to her house and I believe it lol. I have very few childhood memories, but the memories I do have mostly revolve around nanny…and my papaw of course. He was my favorite person on the planet and the only male other than Shane that I could completely trust with my whole heart. When he died my life went even further down hill. It was honestly a nightmare and I wish my brain would’ve done me a favor then and blacked all of THAT out LOL where’s the amnesia when you need it?! One time I was told by one of my many childhood therapists that my brain did me a favor and blacked out most of the bad memories. Apparently, it missed a whole whacked out season of my life lol because I remember EVERYTHING from that time.
Let’s start from the beginning, because I can already tell that my (lovely) brain (that blacks out only when its convenient for it apparently lol) is wanting to get ahead of itself and skip around. I’m going to start from the beginning and try to get as much as I can into chronological order.
Like I said, I was born to really young parents. If I’m not mistaken, my mom was only 19 when she had me. I don’t make excuses for her because of her age though because well… I had Colton when I was 19 and things went a lot differently for me as a “teen-ish mom”. But I do make excuses for her because of her upbringing. People tell me not to make up excuses for her…but they don’t know the — h e double hockey sticks —she went through growing up. If our trauma is rated on a scale of 1-100…mine would be an 82, hers would be a million. Hands down. I said I “make up excuses for her”, but I should’ve worded that differently. It’s not that I make up excuses necessarily, it’s more so that I understand. I get it.
I remember seeing my mom off and on as a child. I feel like it was almost a pattern…sort of in and out of my life. I remember her coming to the door one time and she had dyed her hair blonde. It had been so long since I saw her that I didn’t recognize her and for some reason I was absolutely petrified of her. That night, I had a really hard time sleeping. Even as a small child my heart was conflicted. That was my mom, my heart knew that I loved her..but my brain didn’t know if she loved me. And that scared me for some reason.
I lived with nanny, but my dad lived with nanny, too. So I saw my dad way more than I saw my mom. Not because he made more of an effort to see me, but because we lived under the same roof and he had no choice but to see me lol. My dad fought his own demons much like my mom. He fought addiction my whole childhood. It was nothing new for my nanny to be dragging my half conscious dad across the driveway while me and my brother were at the bottom of the hill making mud pies or driving the lawn mower in circles til the tires were bald lol. Nanny went through so much with both my mom and my dad. I honestly don’t know how at her age she had the energy to go through all of that AND take care of my brother and I. I’m telling you…nanny’s a rockstar.
My dad would try his best to get clean and my mom would try her best to consistently come around and see us more often, but both of them failed over and over again. I think my dad really wanted to get clean, but he was so deep into the addiction that it probably felt like he was trying to climb his way out of a hole full of peanut butter . And I think my mom really wanted to have a relationship with us, but because we weren’t around her often and we weren’t comfortable being around her..I think she felt like she was fighting a losing battle. I can’t imagine how it would feel for your kids to be scared of you and not want to be around you. Plus, my mom recounts that time in our lives a lot differently than nanny does. Their versions of the stories clash so bad. So I really can only believe what I saw and what I felt as a child. The rest of it I learned a long time ago to just let it go. I came to the conclusion that nanny had her truth, mom had her truth, and I had mine.
Eventually, my dad got married to a really nice lady. I really loved her, and so did my brother. When dad married her he moved out of nanny’s house and my brother went with him. I’m not sure if he chose my brother to live with him or if my brother chose to live with him. I just know it went completely against the custody agreement, but they did it anyway lol. Little me was convinced that dad picked him to live with him. if I’m being honest with you…at 33 I still think that.
When my brother and my dad moved out, all that was left was me, nanny, and papaw. My nanny’s mom and dad (my mamaw and papaw2) lived right next to us on a hill that was named after them. I loved my mamaw and papaw2. Some of my best memories have them in them! Shane loved my papaw2 and still talks about him all the time. They were good people…especially my papaw2. We lived on land belonging to all of my papaw2s (nanny’s dad) family. So I was surrounded by cousins, aunts, uncles and other distant relatives. Sounds like a good time, right?
Nope.
Before I was out of elementary school, I was running from men. I wasn’t safe from relatives. I wasn’t safe from strangers. It didn’t matter to me if they had the same bloodline as me…I still was not safe. It seemed almost as if every man I came in contact with (minus my papaws) wanted to take something from me. It was something an 8 year old, 9 year old, and 10 year old should never have to give. They stole my peace, but worse, they stole my innocence. I would always watch out for myself. I would always make sure I wasn’t in a room alone with somebody. I would always stand or sit at least 3 feet away from anybody. I did not do hugs. I did not wear dresses. I did not ride in cars with people. I did not go outside by myself. I guarded myself as best as I could. It wasn’t enough, though.
Things might’ve been different if I had’ve told somebody. But the only people I had to trust were nanny and papaw. Papaws health had started to rapidly decline. Nanny was his caregiver and a pastor. I didn’t want to disrupt the little peace we had so I continued to look out for myself. I continued to watch my own back.
As I got older and became a preteen, somehow running FROM men turned into running TO men. I wish I knew why. To this day, that logic doesn’t make sense to me. I searched for attention all of the time. I would take it from anybody who would give it to me. I would be up all hours of the night in AOL chat rooms talking with grown men. I had one friend at that time and she introduced me to the chat rooms. We thought it was funny, but looking back I realize how dangerous it was. We were playing with fire.
Because nanny was so preoccupied with papaw, I basically did whatever I wanted to. I was up all hours of the night, my grades were awful, I was talking to grown men on the internet. I was giving my address to people all over the web. I was talking to people on my little Nokia phone (after 9PM of course, because back then there was no such thing as unlimited texting and calling) you either waited til 9 to talk on the phone or your phone bill was out the roof lol.
I found ways to keep myself occupied and none of those ways were good. I had this thing where I was a magnet for troubled people. I think it’s because, ironically, those were the only people who accepted me. They say “you are the company you keep” and that became true for me. I went from hanging out with the troubled kids to becoming a troubled kid myself.
During all of this I went to church every Wednesday and Sunday. I was raised in a little white Pentecostal church that my nanny pastored. I didn’t listen a lot, but I watched EVERYTHING. I never liked church people. I was around them all the time. I saw how they acted and heard what they said. There were very few times that I “saw Jesus” in any of those people. It turned me off from church entirely, and I come to LOATHE going.
Even though I “didn’t like church people” per se, there were a select few that I grew up around and I really came to love those. They had been church members for years and years. They had held me as a BABY, so when I said I didn’t like church people just know those few individuals were excluded from that lol. Don’t get me wrong, they still did everything the other church members did…but 12 year old me had a soft spot for them because I grew up around them.
I told you that there was nobody I could trust myself to be around and that was even true at CHURCH. I have faint memories from the time I was probably 3 or 4..they’re very faint, but I can remember the hands, and I can remember the smell. I didn’t remember who it was until I was older and they had left the church, but once I remembered.. it wrecked my world. I was alone with that person a lot as a baby…as a toddler…and as a small child. I don’t even want to think about situations that might’ve happened that I just don’t remember. What I remembered was enough, I didn’t pry my brain on that one. My brain felt broken after that anyway.
If I were to list all of the times I have been abused, exploited, and violated we would be here all day and night. Just know, it continued through my whole life up until I met Shane. Sunday school teachers, deacons, cousins, family, family friends…it was anybody and everybody and it went on for so many years. Shane always tells me he feels like the devil had a target on me for that kind of thing or something, cause it followed me wherever I went. It was like a shadow. A really dark shadow. And if you had told me it could get worse, I wouldn’t have believed you.
Oh, but it did.
This is not a “WOE is me” story. I slayed my dragons a long time ago. I’ve forgiven and I’ve let go.
But I have never, not for a second, forgotten. except the moments my brain forgot entirely of course lol
I don’t want pity. Goodness gracious, pleaseeeeeee don’t pity me. There’s nothing I hate more than that. But every part of my testimony is important, and all of this leads somewhere. And at the end you’ll be like “WOAH”.