Life in these United States - testimony

 In the Godless endeavors of poor judgement, my life began. Planned parenthood and the secular world would call my inception unplanned and underfunded... but God decided he had a plan, a long drawn out plan that the world could never understand. My story begins in Detroit, Michigan.  A secular discontent  Jewish girl in her twenties, my mother. And a troubled man devastated by a dramatic story of abuse that would cause him to question his worth and hide in pain for most of his life; my father.  He had Hart, but only in the Irish name that was given to him by his Irish Catholic Father who later abandoned he and his mother. He was running away and beginning then downward spiral of his adult life. They pair  met. He  drank, she liked broken things. I was conceived. He drank more. He'd soon find out that her patience would be limited.

 I was born July 1, 1976, exactly 200 years to the day to one of the most passionate debates  in the history of the United States. In Constitution Hall, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia would present a motion for Independence from the British Crown.  John Adams would make a remarkable presentation in favor of Independence. The debate would last  nine hours. The next day, the American Colonies would declare Independence. My middle name is Lee, because it was my mothers middle name. I can't help but marvel at the coincidence that it matches the name of the man that put the motion forth that started that great debate for independence.

My moms patience wore thing. Her love of broken things became less important as adulthood responsibilities started to become a priority.  My dad ended up leaving, which left my mother to depend, once again, on the charity of her parents.

My grandparents were middle class secular Jews from Detroit. My grandmother wasn't very fond of the Orthodox Jews she shared her neighborhood with. She didn't care for the meek clothes they wore,  the more than 600  strange laws they kept. She was puzzled by their obedience to religious laws that prevented them from driving  their cars or using  electricity during the weekly  Sabbath and  she was bewildered by the large number of children a single set of parents could create.

 My grandmother and grandfather, like many Jews before them,  rejected the  religious obedience to scriptural laws  that were the  pillars of  their own faith and instead opted to embrace the modern culture that was prevalent in 20th century American.

 My grandmother, Ginny,   loved the physically beautiful things in life more than the spiritual. Their house was ordained with ornate furniture and billowy tasseled curtains. Antique chairs covered in her own  needlepoint patterns in every corner. They vacationed in Hawaii every year. My grandma was a heavy stout woman who wore bright  blue eyeshadows, cherry red lipsticks, and had weekly visits to the beauty salon to get that perfectly dyed red hair. She wore long fur coats, bedazzled sweaters and gaudy clip on earrings.  Needlepoint tapestry kits from the local Joanne fabrics  adorned the walls of her house between large greekesque statues, fine art and cabinets full of china collections.  In their backyard,  an expansive  flower garden  encompassed a small man made fish pond complete with a  waterfall which was built by my uncle (their youngest son)  at their house on Ludlow place in Oak Park Michigan.

 By the time I was a teenager,  whole villages and towns were constructed  to complement my grandfathers impressive train collection that won them a feature in the Detroit Jewish News some years ago. They built entire miniature  cities that ended up covering almost their entire basement in the golden years.  Ice skating ponds, forests, churches, houses, carnivals, parks, car dealerships, it was something else. The trains didn't come until I was a teenager, but as a child the three story brick doll house my grandparents built was the highlight of their basement. The dollhouse my grandmother decorated   paralleled the good life she loved;  elegant embroidered furniture and crystal chandeliers created  the picture perfect and ideal "good life" she admired.

 Much of the suburban Detroit neighborhood my grandparents lived in consisted of a fair amount of two distinct  types of Jews. It was  a combination of orthodox law abiding Jews; men wearing strange black hats, their uncut  ringlets falling peculiarly in front of their ears. Their wives in long dull skirts and children in tow all making the trek on foot to Synagogue each Saturday morning to properly  worship the One true God. The other group was the Jewish men and women like my grandparents who assimilated to the  typical American culture of the day.  My grandmother was either embarrassed by the orthodox Jews or for the Orthodox Jews; I never could figure it out. I imagine she wondered why  as Jews they couldn't just embrace the culture and enjoy the good  life like her own Jewish family had been able to do without  experiencing the consequence and wrath of God.

 Way before I was born, my grandfather spent a number of years working for Ford Motor Companys tooling department before he was pursued by his father in law to sell furniture at my grandmothers parents "Ferndale Furniture" store. Furniture sales proved to be a difficult career for him since he  happened to be  color blind. Customers would ask to see a green couch and he would meander, with his customers in tow, over to a  red couch. Then they would wonder about his mental health. His colorblindness prevented him from enlisting in the military during WW2. He was haunted with guilt for his inability to  join all the men of his day who were going off to war....that guilt was accelerated when mothers and wives would see him in public and accuse him of dodging his responsibility while  their own sons and husbands  were risking their lives and dying by the thousands.  My grandfather quickly  moved from furniture sales to furniture distribution then later ended up back at Ford Motor company in his fifties in the tool shop again where he eventually retired.

As the sole provider for the family, he and my grandmother were able to pull off a comfortable middle class life in suburban Detroit in the 1950's.   They had three kids. Patty, my own mother, was their middle child. She had a sister two years her senior, Linda, who was blessed with genetics  that made her petite and  attractive with a great personality besides...These attributes made her naturally popular with the boys, but left my own mother , who struggled a bit with her own weight, always feeling a bit insecure in her shadow.    As a younger sister, my mom absolutely idolized her sister. The youngest of the three kids was my uncle Gary, who ended up  moving to Texas in the early eighties during the jobs boom of the day. The Jacobs family had a pretty  typical good American  life in 1950's Detroit; The God of their fathers wasn't part of it.

My mom had a muscle that didn't work in one of her eyes that gave her what people in layman's terms refer to as a "lazy" eye.  It  was an additional burden that didn't do much to strengthen her self confidence. It was her thing, perhaps her "thorn in the flesh" as the Bible calls it. Despite any burdens she faced in life, my mom was knit together with the perfect blend of work ethic and adventure. She was the hardest working person I've ever known. Fairly street smart,  an avid reader, and a restless, never content soul at heart.  She was an easy person to talk to and a  nice friend. People would always tell me "your mom is just the nicest". She was a peope pleaser and the least confrontational person Ive ever known. She loved adventure, going anywhere, the vibe of a city, the theater, anything but sitting at home. She   volunteer ushered at the Broadway theaters in Detroit when I was a kid   so she could see the productions for free. I was lucky enough   to tag along. By the time I was 12, Id seen most of the major Broadway productions in Detroit.  She signed us both up to volunteer serving beer with a synagogue group working the beer taps at the Lions Games on Thanksgiving Day. I'm pretty confident it would be illegal today to let a 10 year old kid serve draft beer, but all was Kosher in the 1980's. I saw concert after concert after concert, as a kid, because of my mom. The Rolling Stones, The Dead, Rush, Neil Diamond, and my all time favorite; Rod Stewart.

 In the late sixties and early seventies, she was caught up in the hippy counterculture that railed against "the normal". They  consumed drugs, practiced casual hook up sex, and loved rock and roll music. At 19, she married  a content Jewish boy from the Jewish social circles  and had my sister in 1969. A few years later, and discontent in life, being distracted by the fun that was being had by all the rock and rollers around her, she divorced  her boring contented  husband to hitchhiked to California with her four year old daughter (my older half sister, Lori) as my grandmother pleaded with her to leave my sister behind. She eventually came back to Michigan and experienced  another failed marriage with a man she met in the latter period of the Hippy revolution some years earlier in Detroit. He ultimately showed his true colors. He was violent and lacked serious parenting skills. He would allegedly bind up my sisters hands to prevent her from sucking her fingers which my mother found abhorrent.

Soon after, she met my own biological father  in Detroit. A few months after that, he totaled her car  driving drunk. They conceived me and landed a job managing an apartment complex together for a short time. She didn't waste too much time with him and soon he disappeared. We ended up living at my grandparents house again in Southfield, near Detroit, until I was three years old.

I spent a lot of time at my grandparents house growing up which explains my bizarre love of Readers Digest, Vernors soda, and Butter Pecan ice cream. Even after we moved out, I spent a good deal of time there.  If I wasn't  in the large tree in the front yard of their Ludlow place house, I was exploring the massive amount of antiques, ornate dollhouses and villages kept stored in their basement. They had this old typewriter and all sorts of early twentieth century objects that fascinated me. To me, their basement may have well been the storage room of the Titanic...it was that mesmerizing, every inch of their house.  I could sit by the pond in their backyard for hours, taking in the  colors of the annual flower garden my grandmother planted , or curiously inspecting  crab apples hanging from the trees that lined the back half of their corner property lot for potential  edibility...there never was any.


Living with my grandparents and later going to their house often after we moved out, was the source of  stability in my growing up years. Even after we moved out, we spent every  Sunday morning at their house gathered around a rectangular formica table topped with bagels and pastries from Diamonds , the local Jewish bakery. Bagels and cream cheese, seven layer cake, butterhorns, and sour cream coffee cake were staples at the table on Sunday mornings. It was always the same crowd. My mother, sister,  grandparents ,aunt Linda and two cousins Tracey and Lisa. I was the youngest of the four, Tracy a year older than I , Lisa a year older than Tracy, and my sister the oldest of us all, seven years my senior. We'd sit for breakfast with the grandparents and moms then converge under the stairs in the basement for our club meetings that my cousin  Lisa always headed. Lisa would grow up to preside over her sorority club at U of M and later become Vice president of the  advertising company she worked for.

While  our family wasn't  so devout to celebrate  the Sabbath each Friday sundown like the Orthodox Jews in the neighborhood, we did have meals together. Always the same crew for high holidays. We fasted for Yom Kippur, and feasted for Rosh Hashana and Hannukah on my grandmothers matzoh ball soup, store bought Gifilte fish, Challah bread and more. Menorahs were lit for Hanukkah, dradles were spun, and small netted sacks of gold chocolate coins were given to the kids. We celebrated with food and laughter.  We  ignored the prayers, the meaning, and amazing history and stories of what God had done for our ancestors. But we were able to do these things without experiencing the consequences and wrath of God that put fear in the hearts of the orthodox Jews that were sporadically living in  the same neighborhoods we lived in. In all truth, we celebrated the festivals, just on our own terms and ignored the directives given to us by God.

 When I was about three, my mother met my future dad/stepdad on a trip to Florida while accompanying a  friend of hers  who was visiting her incarcerated boyfriend in the Florida state penitentiary . The incarcerated boyfriend had a fellow incarcerated friend who took an instant liking to my mom and  declared he would  "come find that woman" when he was released from his cell....which he eventually was and he eventually did.

So, in 1979, about the time my earliest memories started recording, I had a dad. I never knew he wasn't my biological parent ....even though every single person in the family had a different last name, you'd think that would clue me in.... but what did I know? I was three.  My mom was a Jacobs, my sister  a Greenwald, my own last name was "White" (named  after the hand binder psychopath I'd never even met). Evidently she couldn't locate him to properly divorce so by the time of my own birth she legally had to give me his last name.  My mom and what I understood to be my dad eventually married when I was about 6 and were the "Witkowskies."

 I was born in 1976 so being a child during that time was pretty great. I lived in Oak Park, Michigan in a 1,000 square foot house  on Leslie street by the time I was five years old after a short few years in another apartment complex. We were only a short drive from my grandparents house. We lived in your typical ranch three bedroom home of the day. We had two pets... a   white cat we called "snowball" and a brilliant  cocker spaniel mutt  I named "Princess". People say cats are smarter than dogs, but not in our house, this mutt took the reigns for IQ. I taught her every trick I could think of. I probably should have exploited her talents for fame and money. The cat just sat around contemplating ways to murder me.

My bedroom had that cheapo yellow contact wallpaper that would fall off the walls they hung from  every so often. Have you ever woken up from early from a nap because your wallpaper fell on you? I have.  There was a contemporary mod  orange, yellow and brown seventies looking  three foot wide stripe, for absolutely no reason, that spanned the entire length  of the living room walls...the distinguishing feature that gave us the edge against our neighbors bland walls. Peanuts characters were painted on the basement walls...clearly we bought this house from contemporary geniuses true to the times.

 On Leslie street, my friends were mostly boys. there were two kids I could find to play with me for hours on end.  BJ Nugent and Jeff Meceras.  Just recently I was on a walk with my mom in her neighborhood , about thirty miles from Leslie street,  when she said "remember your friend Jeff?? His parents live right up here...then she spent the next 20 minutes trying to remember their first names. "Is it jack and Betty?...no, Ed and Lily? no, thats not it either."  I said "you could literally just make up two names..Ted and Tina, I wouldn't know the difference, so lets just go with that"....she finally remembered...but I still don't remember what she said.

 It was a pretty diverse neighborhood. My friends were a mixed crowd of Jews, blacks, arabs. ...it was diversity at its finest. Imagine Sesame Street without the muppets.  There was a handful of kids littered around the streets of Oak Park to play with. I had a friend named Afi in the neighborhood whose parents put plastic over every piece of furniture they owned. Large plastic runners over the high trafficked carpet areas.  Afi swore up and down she was Tina turners cousin and Tina would drop by often and give her $5...I was always skeptical...I never saw Tina myself.


We used to walk nearly a mile to school, even as kindergartners.  The elementary school had  a giant field behind it framed in by looming bushes with  a crevice large enough to host a club roomy enough for at least ten-twelve 4th graders. Once, we had a troop of us in the bushes singing "We are the world" no joke...what can I say...we were heavily influenced by the USA for Africa troop and Cindi Lauper. :), My liberal ideologies of tolerance were being formed by MTV and Sesame Street.

Now, if you're about my age, I dont even need to tell you about Saturday mornings in the eighties.  You would clearly already know the deal, unless of course you had the sort of awful parents that didn't believe it was good for your family to own a television set, if thats the case, I'm so sorry for you. . For the Millennials reading this, I lived in a time where we had one prominent portion of one  day dedicated to  cartoons and that was Saturday mornings. In autistic fashion, I'd line up my thirty or so stuffed animals along the couches and floor for the occasion and binge watch  Smurfs, Care bears, Looney Tunes and Muppet Babies until my eyes bled.

My step dad, David,  was a drug dealer and part of a biker gang in Detroit called the Iron Mustangs. They were pretty legitimate, they had matching leather coats with logos of horses with wings, they had several bar brawls and a few of the members walked with canes after unfortunate motorcycle collisions. my stepdad was "little Dave", there was "Big Dave" too...I don't recall a "Medium Dave", but I do remember they all had these sort of nicknames they gave eachother.   I thought it was pretty normal to know what a triple beam scale was and the lingering fragrance of weed during a weekend party with your parents. Little Dave actually treated me like I was his own kid, by the grace of God he made me feel valued and loved ( a true gift for a little kid).  At bedtime he would tuck me in and Id give him a little kid kiss on his cheek, then he'd spin away dizzied. I knew then that I possessed real superpowers. His lifestyle wasn't ideal,  but he certainly stepped up to the plate in some respects as a father. God was never spoken of in our household, but I do think he had a hand in this.

Early on  both Little Dave and my mom worked as cabdrivers in Detroit with a base office in Southfield ...at some point my mom was maced and robbed and she gave up taxi driving and went to work for Farmer Jacks grocery store in their meat department. She made a decent wage and benefits which you could do without a college degree in 1985. Little Dave sold drugs to help support the family, but he also ran a landscaping business. I'm not sure if the landscaping business was a front to claim income or an earnest attempt at a normal life. There was a ton of parties, camping up north with the iron mustangs, Saturday night summer drive ins with super inappropriate content for young eyes..(Porkies, revenge of the nerds, Cheech and Chong) . My parents had this giant Tupperware bowl filled with popcorn they'd raise up between their seats to block me from seeing the sex scenes. It never worked.

The Iron Mustangs owned a dirt bike track with concessions. When I was about 6 or 7, I had free reign of the entire property during the races.  Id get lost in the landscape of the dusty  and sometimes muddied dirt trails, being careful to not get run over if there was a race and a biker came whizzing by. When I wasn't off roaming the tracks, I could go to the concession stand and take whatever I wanted. The night ended with a few dozen bikers winding down in the lodge on the property.


Another fun daddy/daughter spot was the local dive biker bars in Detroit. These were just Iron Mustang hangouts, and pretty mellow.   I'd get a few quarters for the pinball machine in the corner, probably a bag of chips and a soda. My most vivid memories as a 6/7 years old are driving around Detroit with Little Dave inhaling  second hand cigarette smoke, made bearable only by the Motown music that was playing on the radio. To this day, I still love Motown music. I can almost close my eyes and remember exactly what it was like driving in that old car, cracked window, freezing cold air, second hand smoke, gazing at the large Wonderbread  sign that sat atop the factory as we drove into the heart of Detroit , all while listening to the Shirelles singing  soldier Boy on fm radio. We'd go to these old giant falling down houses in Detroit...old linoleum floors peeling up at the corners of the kitchen. If it was a  drug deal..they'd send me either outside or  upstairs to a musty attic full of old things to explore (once it was a stack of playboy magazines, I was about 6 at the time) confining me to the attic with the porn mags would keep me from seeing the ins and outs of breaking up and weighing weed and coke  on the triple beam.

So my  childhood had some great  positives despite the serious and obvious negatives most child psychologists might urge you to avoid while raising children. I had a lot of freedom at a young age in my neighborhood. I remember seeing pornography VHS tapes with neighborhood kids as young as 7 , and with more regularity than I'd like to admit. That pornography was a step  beyond the unsuitable movies and culture my parents participated in for many years without too much concern over the effect it might have in my life.

 As messed up as my stepdad  was with drugs and gang activity, somehow he still provided me as a kid with the love I needed in the absence of my biological father. He had an adoptive spirit. That's a rare and awesome quality to posses . During this time, my mom was increasingly  anxious about the drugs, and gang activity. They fought often and later my mom would tell me he would resort to violence in dealing with his anger. Not violence that ended with black eyes and broken bones, but violence nonetheless that made my mom uncomfortable and discontent in her marriage. Little David was a scrapper, he legitimately  boxed for a group in Detroit off and on when he wasn't brawling in the bars. He was intensely loyal and very intimidating if you were on the wrong side of him. My mom started looking for an out when I was about eight.

My aunt, who my mom still very much looked up to was not at all involved in drugs or the lifestyle my mom adopted. My aunt had stayed within the margins of proper secular Judaism; marrying a Jewish  bookie with some chutzpah hailing  from  wealthy Jewish parents. They drove a station wagon with wood panels, listened to Barry Manilow, had a playroom full of the latest toys for my cousins. Imagine a playroom with giant barbie doll houses and Barbie doll cars, big wheels in the driveway, the new Atari game system sitting on top of their giant television console. Their vacations were spent in the tropics. That always made playing with my cousins very exciting because we didn't have many toys at our house. My Aunt Linda didn't buy into the era of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and experimental drugs. She listened to Barbara Streisand and Billy Joel. My cousins grew up with Casey Casem playing the top hits and dancing to Olivia Newton Johns Xanadu. They probably saw the same amount of Broadway productions that I saw while accompanying my mom as she ushered the theaters, but they could buy tickets, and occasionally hire a limo to bring them to the show. My mom could whip out a flashight and show them where their seats were.


When I was about 8 or 9  years old, in the middle of the night my mom had me put all my clothes into a giant black trash bag and we left Little David and the house on Leslie street for a short time. We went to my aunts house in the middle of the night...this amazing house that was half built on stilts over a huge drop that led down to a creek. They divorced and short time later Little David died from drug and alcohol abuse to his body...at least that’s what I was told in later years. I remember those months after they split up, he would still pick me up for visitation, ignoring the fact that he wasn't actually my biological dad. I think he eventually  had a new girlfriend for a bit. We never went to his funeral.

After Little David died, I was in the car with my mom driving around a neighborhood near downtown Detroit. We had gone to some Mexican restaurant for dinner. When we left we were driving around Detroit  and she decided to tell me about my other dad, the biological one,  the one who disappeared that she failed to mention I had.  It went something like this: "Davids not really your dad anyways, you actually have another dad and he's from somewhere around here".  He was from Detroit, and  had a grandmother who still possibly lived there and maybe I would like to meet her? We drove to this old house in Detroit and my  dad opened the door. He was living in the basement of his grandmother’s house, he must have been about 30 years old then. They struck up another relationship and he moved into our Oak park home with us. A short time later, halfway through my fifth grade school year,  we moved out to Farmington to an apartment complex in a mostly white catholic protestant neighborhood with "good schools" and alot of white people.

The next year wasn't great, my biological, and now living with us,  dad struggled with depression,alcoholism, and an inability to show kindness towards me. He was tough to live with.  I remember him working in the basement of the Leslie street house before we moved to Farmington  on heating and cooling drawings (that was his line of work);  the entire basement would be littered with beer cans,  fifty or so empty Budweiser cans just everywhere in his work space.

This new apartment complex comprised of  large white and black brick buildings off Grand river road;  the complex itself was named "Chatham Hills". My new and actual  dad, Jeff, drank more and more. Sometimes his friends, or this new adult cousin Id met from his family named Timmy,  (who worked as a gay stripper at a bar in Detroit), would bring him home and he was so pathetically drunk his pants would be wet from urinating himself...so they'd dump him in our living room and leave. His antics would eventually cost him his reputation and his business.

In Chatham hills, there was  an extraordinary park right over a  brick wall at the bottom of the hill next to our building...I could jump the wall and spend hours roaming several acres of park that had a stream running through which was oddly bordered by these small white rocks wrapped in wire.  Everything seemed so magical as a kid to me, these open spaces I could just get lost in. We had a few other girls in the building I made friends with. We'd rollerskate in the dark poorly lit storage area in the basements of our building, or up and down the large hilly drives of the apartment complex.  We had a heated   indoor pool directly across the lawn from our building, lawns to compete in our amateur gymnastics,  and I picked up handball at the wall on the backside of our building.

There was some great things about that move, but my dad's unfortunate and miserable mindset wasn't healthy and he yearned for control which resulted in me spending a great amount of time grounded to my bedroom watching my friends playing  outside of my bedroom window that was on the third floor over the parking garage. He could find fault with anything I did...missing a spot vacuuming, my deteriorating attitude and frustrations to his unkindness and treatment of me.   Once I mustered up the courage to tell him he was "crummy"... that landed me weeks more confined to my room.

My mom began to  feel so sorry for me so she would sneak me out of my bedroom when he was sleeping or out drinking. He ended up trying to commit suicide and spent a week in the hospital, the grass wasn’t as green as she had hoped it would be.

 The summer after 6th grade,a year and a half living in this new town,  I was getting ready to leave for camp. I used to attend an overnight camp for Jewish kids for a month each summer (paid for by generous donors to the Jewish Community Center).  It happened to be my birthday ,July 1st,...I was getting ready to go to the Jewish Community Center to catch the Tamarack bus...my dad was struggling to muster up some kindness towards me...and my mom was upset that he couldn’t refrain from his unkindness towards me on my birthday.  I left for camp and when I returned a month later, we drove "home" to a different place.  My mom announced  that she'd moved while I was at camp... and my dad didn't move with her. So there we were in a new rental house....again. I'd be going to a different school again after the 1 1/2 years I spent in the last town. I was relieved honestly  and hopeful.  I had already figured out how to make friends so didn't anticipate problems doing it again. So we moved from Farmington down the road to the next town, Farmington Hills.

Camp was probably the place I learned the most about God, spending a month each summer there from the age of six to thirteen. We celebrated the Sabbath, lit Shabbat candles  Friday nights, recited the prayers in Hebrew and worshiped Saturday mornings singing the songs of our "faith". Although I had no idea what I was  saying reciting the prayers in Hebrew... "Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha‑olam"...I would later find out as a believer what i was saying was  "Blessed are you,Lord our God, Sovereign of the universe".  Sabbath was most peaceful unlike the rest of the week at camp  where I stuck out like a sore thumb being the poor kid on a charity dime amongst hundreds of  tightly knit wealthy Jewish kids....including my own cousins.

We moved a few miles up the road on the edge of Farmington Hills.  We rented the  house on the property of a dog kennel business my aunts longterm boyfriend and veterinarian owned. It was an unusually  large sized property for a neighborhood. The house was a few hundred feet down a long dirt road off   12 mile road  behind a party store, a hardware store, and apartment complex. the kennel was the next business followed by all residential homes.  I would get lost in the secluded partially wooded acres behind the kennel...i LOVED being alone surrounded by nature, pondering the wonder of it all. When the kennel was closed on the weekends, I would sneak in through the dog doors in the runs and play with the dogs....no pressure, no judgement...just barking dogs of various sizes and breeds and the awful stench of animals and Clorox. There was a cat house I could sneak into as well, it was basically in my backyard. We had a small fenced in backyard area then this small cat house directly behind that..the drive to the kennel  went along the side of our rented house maybe 200 or so feet back to a circle drive. Then untouched woods and fields behind that. My bedroom was somewhat unique and unusual, it had a secret door off the den room. So basically there was what appeared to be a wall that you pushed on and that was the door to my bedroom.

 I was going into seventh grade, in a school with a respectably high percentage of kids from very wealthy homes.  I was the poor kid from a single parent  rented home with one pair of shoes, fresh middle school acne and a white girl afro.  My mom worked in the meat department at  Farmer Jacks in Detroit. Child support was never collected from my dad who was now living in an one room  efficiency motel room and for some reason I was still made to go visit every so often...most likely to give my mom a break from my constant talking about the things I'd learned in school or the things Id pondered on in the woods.

 On holidays as a younger kid, she would work for double pay, and I would  come along spending the eight hour shift climbing the towers of food storage racks in the back of the store. I could sit for hours watching employees come in and out of the storage room. If I wasn't roaming at the bakery looking for samples or perched up 40 feet in the air on a storage rack  spying on other Farmer Jack employees, that meant I was stuck in my moms work area which was a giant fridge room. It smelled of cold animal flesh and blood. It was a cold brightly lit,  giant refrigerated room with glaring white fluorescent lights exposing the horrors of everything meatwrapping entailed. My mom scurrying around in a blood stained white lab coat wrapping packages of boody meat before sending them down conveyor rollers to a bucket that eventually made its way to stock the meat department shelves..

Like I mentioned, we lived in the "poorer" section which really wasn't  bad at all in a moderately wealthy American  town, it basically meant we had a dirt road and a decent 3 bedroom  1,000 square foot ranch house that hadn't been updated in decades, it wasn't a sprawling mansion like some of the others in Farmington hills had, but it was fine and the schools were good, academically speaking. The problem is, when you're a kid, you compare yourself to those around you with limited knowledge and perspective of the real world.. My choice of friends came down to this: wealthy kids who didn't live in my neighborhood,  or the kids (many from single parent homes) who lived down the dirt road from us. My neighbors across the street were Marlboro smoking metal head rednecks...this was all new to me. So I hung out with these neighborhood kids, ratted my bangs and stole my first music tape from a Kmart down the road..Poison. I became best friends once again with two new girls in the neighborhood. Angela Westlake and Barbara something. The boys at school called Angela "A.W. Brute beer". She looked like a younger Michelle Pfeiffer, A super pretty girl who all the boys hopelessly drooled after, but  a mean spirited girl who'd fight anyone including the boys. Barbara was a nice girl with terrible greasy dandruff...and I still had my acne and giant afro hair, but now with ratted bangs which stunk of  Aquanet hair spray. I was doing my part to usher in human activated Global warming by using generous amounts of Aquanet.

The other kids in the neighborhood were little skater punk kids our age and always smaller in size than us, pretty typical for seventh graders. Most were smoking cigarettes by age 11...this was my new source of influence...birds of a feather I guess. I tried smoking for the first time... I started stealing as well that year, a sin that consumed me for the next eight years. At first we stole candy from the 7/11 down the road, then it was music tapes from the closest Kmart, and candy from the bulk food store at Orchard Lake and 12 mile rd. The rich kids didn't seem to like me, I really only remember being teased for having only one pair of shoes and hanging out with A.W. Brutebeer which was manageable.

 A year later we moved north again. Three miles to another school district; West Bloomfield.
My mom was going through a phase where  she wanted to live more like a Jew...not so much faith wise but in lifestyle appearances and certainly and most importantly by the men she would date. She really limited herself to the secular Jewish men. The biker drug dealers, the Irish drunks, she'd had enough of them for awhile.

We rented some bedrooms from my Aunt Linda and shared a house with both her and my cousins. My sister had been living with her own dad for several years at this point and was on her own, she was 20 years old by this point.  It was a large 3,000 square foot house in West Bloomfield. Well large for me anyways. It was  my Aunt Lindas ex husbands house. This was the home my cousins had been growing up in and lived in with their father for the prior eight  years after their parents  divorced. Their father had sold the house to my aunt a year earlier so my cousins  wouldn't have to switch schools or friends and could maintain stability; thus the house was sold to my aunt who ran a thriving travel agency..their dad moved to another home in the same subdivision to maintain stability for the kids.

So you can imagine how thrilled they were when their afro'd cousin with the Marlboros in her pocket showed up to live with them in this nice neighborhood . They were both pretty popular and well liked. I was the kid who smoked and couldn't  afford the type of clothes needed to look like every other kid in West Bloomfield, evidently Kmart style  was no good.  I tried desperately to fit in to the new school and environment, my predominant method was stealing and wearing my cousins clothes so I at least appeared like I was one of them; that didn't help our relationship. The stealing got worse, my new casualty  was Hudsons Department store at Twelve oaks mall.

My mom  worked  at the Farmer Jacks in West Bloomfield. I didn't have a chance with the wealthy kids,  I just looked for the other messed up kids I now identified with.  Ironically, the only ones I could find were the handful of girls who had just switched to the public school from  the local  private Catholic school. They were pretty wealthy too, but they seemed to rebel against all that. They came with all sorts of adolescent problems; smoking , drug use, sexual exploitation's . I was a shoe in....and well they were some of the only ones who would talk to me. Plus, they hung out with the skater boys...and I was used to those boys, they were shorter than me and smoked Marlboros back in Farmington Hills.  Except the skater boys these girls hung out with were a few years older and they weren't shorter than me anymore.  Some of these new boys lived right around the block from me. In retrospect, its probably why these girls hung out with me in the first place, my proximity to the Heller boys.

The Heller boys were fraternal triplet skater boys a few years older than me and their house was a hangout for their skater friends since their parents were never around. They lived a block away from us . In my first six months in West Bloomfield  I was sexually assaulted twice.  The first time wasn't exactly an assault but  peer pressure to do something I didn't want to do but eventually did at the nagging of a bunch of catholic girls and older boys at the Heller house. I listened to hours of  persuasion from this group of guys and girls that I had to do something sexual with one of these Heller boys and that they all did this sort of thing so I shouldn't be a baby about it. The second  time was an actual assault, two of them  came directly to my aunts house and forced their way inside when I was home alone.  I started stealing more clothes in an effort to fit in better and change my friends. I got really good at it and a new clique of girls accepted me.  I quit smoking. I quit hanging out with the catholic girls and the skater boys.

The skater mob was relentless with me by the time I was a freshman in high school. The boys spent the next few years throwing food at me in the cafeteria, calling me a whore  and kicking me in the back as I walked down the hallway. I was mortified and I hated them...I was terrified of them...for years.  I earnestly hoped for  terrible things to happen to them all the way into my adult life. I was so anxious and terrified to run into them even after I left that  particular high school in 11th grade. The fear continued after I graduated high school altogether. I was consumed with  worry  I could run into them at any public place.  I buried my bitterness pretty deep  although I was too ashamed to ever talk about it or  tell anyone about what had happened.

Halfway through 11th grade we moved again...to another school district  although this time it was  by my own petitioning.In 10th grade I had taken a job at an arcade in Farmington Hills called  "Marvins Marvelous Mechanical Museum". It was a place for me to stake a new identity and try to hit reset. I had grown my Afro hair out and resembled a normal teenage girl. Boys  started having crushes on me without assaulting me and calling me names. I met a coworker  from Union Lake who  introduced me to her world of friends and I seemed to fit in.   They weren't overly wealthy, or judgmental, they were spontaneous and funny seemingly real world teenagers. I begged my mom to move, begged her to leave West Bloomfield. She finally moved to an apartment in Waterford and I used my work friends  address so I could finish my last year and a half of high school at Walled Lake Central.

I felt like Id  found my tribe. Some were big partyers, experimental, hilarious, kind ...I was so relieved to be away from West Bloomfield high school and enjoying my high school years.  I relaxed a little and could again embrace  adventure in life ...but this time it was in an entirely new subculture of  psychedellic drugs, the pixies, smashing pumpkins, hitchhiking, craziness, The Grateful dead,Jack Kerouac, parties and typical teenage promiscuity. I jumped in to all of this headfirst  but still had my unhealed scars from previous lives. My heart had some walls around it and my soul was profoundly cracked. I was taking acid or mushrooms almost weekly, smoking pot daily. Drinking until we blacked out or ended up in some really weird  situations.  I worked to pay for my recreation (drugs, cigarettes, beer and roadtrips).  I paid for my own clothing...the clothes I didn’t steal. I bought  a car. I found my new hope and comfort...it was money, and these friends. The money made me feel safe and it was the only thing I could control...it gave me independence and an ability to do what I thought was fun.  Evidently I was smart. My friends were dropping out of school left and right and I never understood it. I figured if you had your priorities straight  you could do your homework, go to school and then do  drugs, all in that order. I did that and I graduated high school in 1994 with good grades despite my constant drug use.

I left for Central Michigan  the next year and took a year off from drugs and partying which were losing their luster. I think I was just mentally exhausted from it all. I had a boyfriend I started dating the second half of my senior year of high school and my first year at CMU. He was"straightedge"( which meant he wasn't into drugs).  His straightedge facade actually turned out to be a lie as he led a double life and had another girlfriend i'd later find out about. A chubby Gothic girl he was living with and doing drugs with while I was away at college trying to be good watching 90210  with my dorm mates and doing homework.He was using my car while I was away at school and  was actually living with the Gothic girl . I met her at a mall after my first year of  college ended. I was just walking through the mall when she stopped me, explained who she was  and began to fill me in on their relationship. She started showing me pictures of him standing on a chair sucking a heavy cloud of marijuana  out of  a six foot bong. I was so distraught over the entire thing  I  swallowed a bottle full of whatever i found in the closest medicine cabinet later that night at his parents house in hopes of ending my life. It didn't work, it just ended with me in the hospital getting my stomach pumped and embarrassing myself. My boyfriend and his other girlfriend showed up at the hospital to comfort me. In hindsight, all my hopes and happiness were so dependent on him...when it failed I couldn't handle it. He was a bad god. I went back to drugs and fun spontaneous adventures to get over it. Actually I went on a crazy east coast road trip with my friend Steph.

Here I was after completing one year of college at CMU, early in the summer, I took a two month east coast trip with a  friend. Let me pause here. This friend Stephanie Powers was such a blessing at this stage in my life. Her family let me stay at their house for almost a month. I'm not sure they even realized I had no other place to go. My mom had moved in with  a boyfriend (a nonjew, new phase) that didn't like me or kids in general very much  and I wasn't allowed to live with them. Steph's parents never asked questions, I just stayed there and ate their food.  We had ample freedom to explore life as it suited us. Her parents gave her the money and the convertible and we had no rules that I was aware of...there was always food in the fridge. In essence, it was complete enabling, but for me...I had no other place to go. The East Coast trip was something else,  it was an adventure, ..it kept my mind off wanting to die and my attempted suicide.

 I went right into my second year of CMU  slowly immersing myself into the drug and partying world. By the end of my second year of college, my  grades were suffering. I was selling coke, mushrooms and acid and had some really good customers at the frat houses....I sold drugs and would do coke with my 40 something year old philosophy professor before class. I was addicted to coke.  I was a mess... I stayed in Mount Pleasant when school ended for the summer and sold drugs since I didn't have a home to go to for the summer (my mom was still living with her boyfriend). I went to a midnight rave in an abandoned warehouse in downtown Detroit with my summer roommate Cara. Some dj gave me 4 hits of ecstasy which Id never taken before, I was so messed up from the overdose, I didn't even realize he  took me to his house and raped me the entire night until the sun came up. I intermittently remember waking up on and off to this horror. Cara couldn't find me anywhere at the rave (aka abandoned warehouse in detroit) so she left at 7 am and drove the 3 hours  back to Mount Pleasant. The DJ  drove me the three hours back to Mount Pleasant, it was an awkward 2 hour drive. He wanted to stay and hang out. I vaguely remember him setting up a sound system in our parking lot, it was super weird. I just wanted him to go and eventually he did. It was really messed up and I just did more drugs to forget it even happened.

A week later I had a few sheets of acid I wanted to sell and started entertaining just leaving Mount Pleasant to do Phish tour for the summer.   My friends band was playing at the Peace festival in Lowell, Mi.... I last minute hopped in a van with friends from CMU for the weekend.  It was a perfect venue for making money to go on Phish tour. I met Jon there, he was a total addict so naturally he was hanging out with the girl with all the drugs. His grandparents had just bought  him an old beat up Chevy van with like 300,000 miles on it. We were all on my acid and throughout the night it seemed like a brilliant idea to start driving ....... to Mexico. So we literally left...on acid...with a van full of people that neither of us knew. And I didn't even really know him, Id met him the day before. We ended up driving to Milwaukee where his friends lived and stayed with them for a week. I  bought more acid and ecstasy from his friend to sell on Phish tour.  I also stopped in Chicago and picked up a five foot nitrous oxide tank to sell balloons on Phish tour, which ended up being a  big moneymaker. We bailed on the Mexico idea and headed west to Redrocks amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado.. I ended up on the front page of the Denver post in the summer of 1996 as the poster child for a riot that broke out between a bunch of intoxicated grungy dead heads and the local police. Beer bottles were thrown at police, riduculous dirty dreadlocked kids "just wanting to have fun and do what we want, man". I was tripping on acid and climbed up ravines and mountains to hear the show not far away after I'd accidentally given my tickets away at the height of my acid trip.

 In the fall, after a month long trip through Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and more that contain a trove of stories on their own...we drove to Winter Park Colorado where our van broke down at the YMCA of the Rockies. The  staff said they had jobs available, so we stayed in their dorms and cleaned cabins with a crew of international kids from all over the world. They gave us  season passes to winter park, room and board, a dining hall pass,  and a little cash. Life was GOOD. I LOVED snowboarding...more than drugs. Jon LOVED drugs, more than snowboarding. I tried to break up with him a few times by convincing him to head back to Wisconsin and turn himself into the authorities where he had a warrant for his arrest so I could go on with my life. My skills of persuasion weren't so great, he stuck around.

 In February, we decided to move to Florida and work the Daytona bike week to get enough money to come back to Colorado and rent a condo. We'd bailed on the YMCA job after they complained of us smoking pot in our rooms. We took a job  at the Beaver Creek lodge which was closer to the park and they were okay with us drinking  at the bar being underage and smoking marijuana in our tiny inhumane dorm rooms. It was awful there. It was full of cockroaches and I had a tiny crowded dorm room under the restaurant with four other pothead girls. we quit that job and hitchhiked out of winter park in a blizzard in the back of an open pickup truck drinking beer looking over the deathly mountain drops off to our side and the frozen snow-packed ground under the tires. We stayed in Dillon for a week with a gal we knew from the Beaver Creek lodge that quit before us. We struggled getting rides once we got to Pueblo, Colorado and decided to buy a bus ticket for the trip.

I made a pit stop in Texas to meet a cousin from my biological dad's side I'd never met since I barely knew his family at all, I bought a brick of cheap marijuana from him, he could easily drive across the border into Mexico to fulfill any drug supply we wanted for rock bottom prices. Weed was always easy to sell, and a brick of cheap Mexican weed was only about $200 and could bring us more than $1500 if we sold in dime bags and eighths at Daytonas Bike Week. I probably had about $400 saved for the trip after we purchased bus tickets which wouldn't have been enough to rent a place in Daytona so I was relying on the drug sale cash.  On a greyhound stop in New Orleans, we both got off to use the bathroom, leaving the weed, my drivers license and meager savings in the overhead compartment above our seats. Returning to our bus, we saw  police officers and  drug dogs  literally on the bus at our seats...by my weed..by my id....we decided to not get back on that bus. We exited the station  quick before we could be identified and arrested. The bus station was in the heart of New Orleans on Loyola street, blocks from the Superdome that had literally JUST ended with superbowl game XXXI, a packers win. So we blended into the crowd of cheese head Wisconsinites headed to Bourbon street. I had $20 in the back pocket of the pale pink nurse pants I was wearing. I bought a beer on bourbon street and tried to consider our  next option in this seriously messed up situation. By 7 am,  we decided there was really only one option. We had to hitchhike to the bus station in Fort Myers Florida in hopes of retrieving our clothes and other belongings that were stored in the under compartments of that Greyhound bus that couldn't be traced back to us...then continue on with the plan to find employment and save enough money to get back to Colorado. I knew it would be difficult, I now had zero money  and no drivers license or i.d.

 Our first ride hitchhiking  picked us up outside of New Orleans, on that famous stretch of hiway most people remembered seeing after hurricane Katrina that people  were stranded on. Our ride rolled up  in an old tired classic car that probably dated back to the 1950's. Our drivers name was John,  John had been locked up in prison in California since the sixties and recently been released on parole. His parole terms required him to stay in California, but he wanted to get home to Ocala Florida...so he stole the car, then he sparechanged his way as far as New Orleans,Louisiana where he saw two gutter punk kids hitchhiking, one pimping a dirty pale pair of pink nursing pants with hot pink hair. John, the car thief driver,  had zero money, he was probably hoping we could help pay for gas, but we also  had zero money.   We found an after party in Kiln, Missouri where Bret Favre grew up and were able to talk the owners of this bar into letting us help them clean up the property for a tank of gas. I was roaming around this grassy area picking up beer cans and these Wisconsinites were taking pictures of us because they thought maybe we knew Brett Favre, thinking we were from his hometown. It was so weird and funny. Between that and asking for spare change at gas stations, we were able to make it as far as Ocala (without being arrested).

After Ocala, we had a few sketchy rides...one guy with a loud muffler who asked me to show him my boobs. I refused....he dropped us off on the side of the highway between exits, which was way better than being raped and murdered or  raped and left locked up in a creepy basement for the next two decades.  The final  ride came from  a professional sailor headed to Captiva to  do Sailing instruction at a resort on Captivas tip, which is an Island connected to  Sanibel Island, off the coast of  Fort Myers Florida. We were so exhausted from the other festivities over the recent days, we both fell asleep in the back of his pickup truck and never alerted him when we got to Fort Myers.  He actually drove right past Fort Myers, through Sanibel Island and to  the very tip of  Captiva where he needed to be. We rolled in late, maybe 3 am and just passed out on the beach. The next morning we had a  14 mile hike back towards the bus station in Fort Myers hoping  to retrieve our backpacks and my snowboard.  I REALLY  just wanted my toothbrush. Eventually we made it and ended up with clothes and toothbrushes again.  We were homeless in Florida  for a month walking around trying to figure out a gameplan. I had  my 4 foot summit mountain pack strapped to my back; it contained everything I had to my name. My hair was still pink , I was carrying my  snowboard around in 90 degree weather, I'm sure it was a sight. After a month of wandering around like this,  I  ended up with  pneumonia..  At this point, I surrendered and called my mom for help. Patti was willing to  pay for my $120 bus ticket only if  I agreed to apply for a job as a city bus driver in downtown Detroit. Evidently she'd seen an ad. I decided I wasn't that desperate and had an alternative plan of my own to head back to Central Michigan University, stay with friends and get a job.  She refused and said "you made your bed, you lie it." and the payphone went dead.  The next call was to Jon’s mom, she sent us bus fare with no conditions attached.

 I went back to CMU and stayed with generous friends, I worked at a Pizza Hut and paid Jons mom back within weeks for the bus fare they had sent me. I  broke up with Jon after he refused to keep a job and mainly just stayed at my friends apartment smoking pot and eating their food. That lasted almost a month  and I finally  sent him back to Spring lake to live with his grandparents who'd bought him that van that got me into this mess in the first place. I stayed in Mount Pleasant for a few months before I ended up moving to New Baltimore to stay with my actual dad of all people.

 I picked up a job waiting tables  at a Big Boy restaurant and lived in an apartment complex with my dad. I actually had some time to get to know my dad a little, he liked to argue, like me and he could easily smoke two packs of menthols in a 24 hour period. I planned on staying there a few months until Mackinac Island summer tourist season started. I'd actually  locked up  a job waiting tables on the Island that had room and board. In that intermittent waiting period living with my dad, waiting for my next chapter to begin,  I decided to go visit Jon in Spring Lake and ended up getting pregnant.  I was back in New Baltimore when I took the pregnancy test and was devastated that my plans could be ruined.

I told my mom I was pregnant, I didn't really have anyone else around me to tell. She was living a few hours away.  She thought it made the most sense  to get an abortion right away and move on with my life. I was on the same page. I couldnt even imagine how I would ever be capable of having a baby, I had big plans! I wanted to get to Mackinac and save money to get back to Colorado for the winter ski season. My life revolved around my wants, nobody elses.

My mom drove me to an abortion clinic a few days later in my first few weeks of pregnancy. I walked in... wrote my name on the patient list attached to the clipoard at the front desk, sat down and waited in silence with my thoughts. There were a handful of young kids and babies here and there in the waiting room, and pictures of babies covered the walls. I sat there for nearly 20 minutes staring at this wide eyed baby sitting on the floor who stared right back into my soul until the receptionist told me I was in the wrong office. My mom had dropped me off  at a  pediatricians office. The abortion clinic was next door.  It was likely an effort by God to pierce my conscience, but my conscience was seared.  I went next door and had the abortion.

The abortion clinic was bare, there were no children around, just sad hopeless looking women sitting in old dirty waiting room chairs nervously waiting for their names to be called so they could get on with their lives like myself. The receptionist had me fill out some paperwork, she took my $300 and I sat down and waited for my name to be called. No one sat me down and talked to me about what I was about to do, what other options I might have, it was very impersonal. I never met or spoke with  the doctor who would perform my abortion. I just sat there and waited maybe 20 minutes in a blank quiet room littered with a handful of quiet sad women waiting for my name to be called. When they called me back, they gave me a hospital gown to change in to, then  led me to a room where I was given a drug that didn't make me unconscious but made me not care what was happening to me or the life that was inside of me. It was almost an out of body experience, where the situation is so  unimaginably awful, even with the justification that one does or believes that this really isn't a life or a baby, its nothing but a clump of unformed cells and a simple medical procedure to get me back on track. Even when you tell yourself this lie, theres something profound, a quiet voice inside of you that recognizes what you believe isn't true and what you are doing is awful, so you separate your mind from your body and ignore the reality of what is about to take place. As I'm laying on my back, there was a loud sound of machinery whizzing almost like a large dentists drill that entered my body and removed the life I thought of as an obstruction to my own happiness. When the doctor was done, they led me to another room to get dressed and recover for a few moments and then led me out the back door to go home lest I be seen by their other customers in the waiting room who had already paid.The day after my abortion,   my mom drove me five hours up to  Mackinac Island and left me there alone.

I was one of the first people of the season to show up to a ghostly island at the tip of Michigan, none of my roommates had arrived. I was still numb and most likely having some PTSD   from the abortion that had literally happened just a day earlier. My first few days I went to the restaurant I was assigned to work at and trained with year round employees. I'd met a Nigerian guy that worked at the Grand Hotel and hung out roaming the main island for a few days with my new friend. I never told him I'd literally had an abortion just days before, I was alone with that waiting for the shock to leave me so I could resume to whatever normal was.After a week, I just disappeared. I left the belongings I couldn't carry in the empty dorm room, I got on a bus in Mackinac city and came to Grand Rapids and stayed with one of Jons friends.  The managers I signed up to work for at Mackinac Island thought somebody kidnapped me.

 I was pregnant again just  a few months after my abortion . I  jumped from staying with his friend in Grand Rapids, to living  in a converted school bus in Allendale, to renting a room in an old house in Heritage hills, Grand Rapids to a small two bedroom duplex in Grand Haven. We moved to the duplex in February 1998, Zoe was born in March 1998.   I abandoned my dreams of returning to Colorado in the short term and tried to earn a living apart from selling drugs.  I waited tables at the Clover bar and came home and watched QVC every night  until I fell asleep. I bought some weird rake that picked up leaves that broke a week after using it, a fold up table, and a giant makeup bag which made zero sense because I never wore makeup. I lived in a small two bedroom duplex on Bignell street. I was the most normal I'd been in years. My hair was even brown again.

 No one ever told me about Jesus, not my coworkers in the handful of restaurants I worked in, nor the neighbors I talked to. I was drawn to churches here. I think I visited at least once  nearly every single church in the Grand Haven/Spring Lake area by myself over an eight year period. I'd sit in the back and listen from time to time.  I always felt too dirty to be there...too broken. I would sit there and see  nice intact families, mothers and fathers driving clean minivans to church with their children in tow  who appeared to have it all together...I wasn't even close. Nobody there could ever understand the things Id gone through. Most of them were from the area, raised in Christian homes and had seemingly nice typical suburban middle class  families. Fathers day, Mothers day, Christmas..I'd made the mistake once or twice of coming on these days,. I just sat alone and cried, embarrassed and feeling so far away from normal....I barely had a clue who Jesus was...I just knew that I was drawn to those messages, they always seemed to resonate with something inside of me.  As I was being drawn to the messages, equally  my shame and embarrassment was repelling me from talking to anyone else there.

Jon had grown up in the church and wanted nothing to do with it. His family went to church. I looked to his grandparents for guidance on what it meant to believe in God, what it looked like to be one of his followers.  They were lifelong Christians, raised by their parents to be Christians. His grandmothers grandfather had built the church they attended and we were married in at the end of the neighborhood road they lived on. His grandmother was perpetually unhappy and often talked about killing herself to appease the people around her. She wanted to manipulate our feelings so we'd feel sorry for her. She often complained about pains here and there always to get a prescription for some pain relievers. Vicodin, Valium, she was on them the entire time I knew her. She wasn't a great model of what a saved redeemed Christian life looked like.

 Jons parents still lived in Wisconsin. Jons mom and grandparents modeled very well what it looked like to enable a drug addict, and that was in the spirit and duty of Christianity. It never seemed to work and actually appeared to  incentivise even worse behavior on his part. It was confusing to me that Christianity could have such a negative consequence.  It wasn't what i heard in the sermons that was confusing, but its what I saw modeled by the only people I actually talked to that professed Christianity. Id never gone to Jons grandparents church to hear a sermon, it was too small for me to hide in. His  grandparents minister had actually married Jon and I, a few years later he was found south of town exchanging sexual favors with other men at a rest stop and was sent away and never spoken about in his family again.

While I was busy watching QVC, Jon was dabbling in  heroin and Oxycotin. Life was pretty terrible, ..heroin and drug addiction became a siphon that took away his time, any lingering motivation to work and all our money. He was growing pot plants in the basement of our rented duplex on Bignell street. I wanted to get away from everything and anything that had to do with marijuana. Id been around it since I was a kid and I wanted nothing to do with any of it anymore. We fought quite a bit about being responsible, saving and spending money, the dangers of  building a grow room and pot plants in a rented duplex. He stole money from my wallet and savings account on a pretty regular basis. I thought I was hearing voices...like going mental from the stress of living with him and trying to pay our bills to keep our family afloat. Jon stole everything from us, including the meager  $300 savings I started for Zoe's college.

When I was pregnant with Miles, Jon  was just gone, Oxycotin addiction was full blown.  I ended up having a c-section  at North Ottawa Hospital and stayed there for 3 days. I barely saw him at the hospital. When they let me go home  he came to take me home and we were given basic c-section care instructions. No driving for two weeks, take it easy, no heavy lifting. That kind of stuff. When we got home he told me he was addicted to Heroin and Oxycotin and he'd just burned a bridge with his drug dealer and had no access to heroin and was close to withdrawal freak out...and that I should probably not be around for that. So I packed up  a two year old Zoe and days old Miles and drove the three hour trip to Detroit to  stay with my mom (who now lived on her own after breaking up with Bob). Jon vowed to get help over the next few months, but 3 months later,  right before Christmas I got a call at Applebees (where I was now waiting tables) that Jon had been arrested by WMET for growing hundreds of pot plants at a friends house. I filed for divorce. He came back to the house and I struggled for a few weeks to get him out. Thankfully, when he was sentenced he was locked up for a few months before they eventually put him on a tether at his grandparents house.  He ended up going to prison on and off (mostly on) for the next 7 years.

I worked two jobs with zero child support and no family around  just to pay rent and bills and feed the kids. I had more boyfriends that didn't work out, some healthier relationships than others, most of them left me feeling empty and heartbroken and lost whether I broke up with them or they with me.  I had a host of various jobs waiting tables, usually leaving one job in search of more income for my small family. I eventually went back to college and finished my bachelor’s degree in finance. I was a girl who pulled herself up by the bootstraps (so I thought). Somewhere during that really hard  period of being a single parent who didn't have a clue about the Lord.... He spoke to me.

It was probably 2001 or 2002. I was driving down Waverly avenue  towards Beechtree street on my way to work at Applebee's  crying, the same boyfriend had broken up with me for the 7th time. I was broke, and stressed out from being a single parent; tears streaming down my face  asking a God I didn't even know  "Why me?!...Why does everything terrible happen to me?!" For the first time in my life, He answered me... speaking audibly through my heart, he said just a few words..... "Because I love you" (that got my attention) but it made zero sense...how can a person who loves me let so many awful things happen to me?  So He continued... "I'm forming you into a warrior".  I asked Him to somehow help me get back to college and out of poverty.

Five or six years later, that prayer started to materialize. I enrolled in school a few years after that experience on Waverly road. I  graduated college in 2006, and I was hired as an intern for a local Holding company as an accountant. After six months they hired me full time as a staff accountant. I didn’t give God the credit He was due. I credited myself. I was full of pride for my accomplishments....I know it sounds strange with the life I'd had so far but I do consider that period in my life to be  the height of my foolishness.  I had it all figured out.  I had the degree and the ability to leave poverty behind. I would find a hot guy who didn’t do shoot heroin or snort Oxycotin and also  had a college degree, a job, and get married. I'd buy a house and create a good life for  Zoe and Miles...all by the time I was 30.  I could change the tide by  MY accomplishments,MY smarts, MY plan.  Matchmaker.com here I come. I was such a smart enlightened cookie and led myself so well. I met someone on match.com and he moved in  five months later.  We bought a house using my savings I managed to put together and  I was pregnant with twins within the year.

 After the short honeymoon phase that ended before we were married and shortly after I was pregnant with twins living in a house with both our names on the title....the blue prints I had drawn up didn't seem to match the reality that was going on around me. It wasn't a great situation. Two sinners with no map and no Jesus and lots of unmet expectations. The hot guy with the job had a bit of an anger issue, was jealous of  my accomplishments, had lied about finishing college, came with a ton of debt and a family that didn't like Jews or black people.  I came with a bunch of emotional baggage, arrogance in my accomplishments, criticism of him and his racist family, not a clue how to raise kids even though Miles and Zoe  were halfway raised already, and a bunch of unresolved pain and unforgiveness buried deep in my heart that snowballed since childhood. Without Jesus, this is a recipe for disaster. Oh and the twins I was pregnant with? at 13 months , doctors started telling us they had  "red flags" for autism. We had  four kids in the house, we both of  worked full time and neither of us had family in the area to help.

I had been working for the holding company for about a year when we hired a new secretary my age; the other 12 or 13 employees were considerably older and more professional than I.  She started right before I was pregnant with my twins and was a literal bible believing Baptist who was homeschooled by her parents, her dad a pastor. I thought she was must have been some kind of  a repressed idiot, I mean really.... WHO literally believes the Bible?! I'd never met anyone who was foolish enough to admit the things she did, the faith she had...out loud.  I, on the other hand, was  one of the "enlightened" ones...sure, I'd read parts of the bible. I listened to NPR, I knew everything about politics from watching CNN and the "Daily show". I'd read Al Frankens "Lies ,lies and the lying liars who tell them. I hated Bill O'reilley and Fox news like a good progressive should.  I'd read Howard Zinns " A peoples history". I studied middle east conflicts, I wasn't one of the dumb ones. I knew Jesus was a socialist who railed against the Roman capitalists and the religious of his day. . I was PRO- choice, pro-gay marriage, pro everything extremely left politically speaking. The new secretary, who was also a Jen and also had twins, would invite me to her church. I'd read a lot of the Bible. I liked Jesus. I just wasn’t sure I liked his fan club, totally didn't get the part about him raising from the dead or why that would even matter...and anyways these stories weren't literal. An enlightened person, like myself,  knew what to pick and choose from scripture to combine with other religions until you created your own religion that fit into your ideals of how things should be. All religions were true right? Truth is relative after all, and anyone that claims otherwise would be a small minded  bigot brainwashed into some religion that they were falsely indoctrinated into by their parents.

Secretary Jen kept inviting me to church. I would laugh at the idea and say no. Besides,  I'd  already been to every church in Grand Haven. Those people couldn't even come close to relating to the stuff I'd been through. Plus, it made me cry and have to deal with my own insufficiency.  At some point during that time I came  across something on social media about a suicide. It was one of my old neighbors in West Bloomfield where Id lived with my cousins. A Heller boy who had sexually assaulted me. One that  still, nearly 20 years later, left a calloused old wound so ancient and buried  I would have only known it still existed if I had run into one of them or heard their name in a conversation. I had willed internally for years for bad things to happen to these boys out of my bitter and hurting heart....and now I was reading about this persons suicide.

 I came across a  piece on social media written by  his  brother. He wrote about their childhood, explaining the depression he'd endured since childhood. They had limited parental guidance or involvement, with both their parents working all the time they were left to themselves as adolescents. They were exposed to pornography through magazines and videotapes at young ages. He'd struggled with depression his entire life and eventually in his early thirties decided he'd had enough and took his own life. Depression was something I understood well. I felt as if  God had given me this window into the life of the person who had hurt me so many years before. For the first time,  I was able to see him from Gods view, Gods window. Instead of my own broken and bitter human  window I'd been limited to for almost two decades. I was suddenly ashamed for the years I'd  harbored  hatred and illwill towards him. I was filled with compassion for him. I forgave him.

My bitterness and unforgiveness left me that day. I saw him as a broken child in need of redemption and healing....and I clearly and finally for the first time saw myself also broken and in great need of redemption and healing. I went to the secretaries church after six months of invitations and in a few weeks I  nearly climbed into the tithing basket as it made its way down my row. It wasn't the first time I went...It may have been the second or the third time Im not really sure. It was the fall of 2007. I thought the people there were so odd...they kept talking about the blood of the lamb which was so strange to me. But I listened, and as the preacher preached, the things he said again resonated with everything inside of me. The lights were low, it was safe to cry. I just remember thinking "This is true, this is true, this is all true". I couldn't believe it.

Immediately I began to  see and understand the  things of God in analogies, metaphors, symbolic parallells in things all around me. God just filled me up constantly with His wisdom, he answered a prayer I asked him before I knew Him when I was 17 and I'd read for the first time the new testament gospels. I'd asked him for wisdom...here I was 13/14 years later receiving it. 

One of those early analogies  Jesus gave me  was about fourth of July sparklers. That tradition of lighting them excitedly with friends as children do each summer.  That picture I can remember so clearly of a dark, warm summer night. A friend, whose sparkler is bursting in glorious display of fire and light is holding her sparkler touching it against my   dull grey powder coated stick waiting in hopeless expectation as it fails to light for a moment when ...suddenly..... it ignites  in a magnificent display of fire and sparkle. That's what happened to me in the  fall of 2007 when I accepted an invitation from a secretary bursting with the light of Jesus...I was ignited  with a consuming and healing eternal fire that never goes out. That dull grey powder that enveloped the stick was something I contained all along. I just needed a friend and the divine intervention of a Holy God to bring it..... to bring me...to life....and that's truly where my new life began....all because of a literal bible believing secretary and a God who was there all along knocking, waiting for me to open the door. He changed me, He healed me. He changed my life in unimaginable ways. He changed the trajectory of my life and my families life forever. It was something I never expected, I never even knew was possible.

Here I am , 10 years later, no regrets. I decided to follow Jesus , no turning back, no turning back. His promises are true, His faithfulness is great and I am eternally grateful for His patience and mercy and blessing over me. He chose me, He adopted me as His own...the little punk kid who sold drugs and stole stuff...the woman at the well who married too many times, the kid who's father didn't care enough to stick around. God picked me as His own. Oh and I just want everyone to know of the love this God has for them, His unending Goodness, His brilliance and His awesome power and ability to do the impossible. Taste and see friend, taste and see.