I know my mother is between the ages of 50 and 52. According to what she maintained after she married Daddy she was born in 1961 but Daddy swears he saw documents that said '59. Her birthday is sometime in June. She lived with us until I was about 4, then she and Daddy split up. I think she was born in South Carolina. I saw her occasionally until I was 9. I last saw her on my ninth birthday. I last spoke to her on the phone when I was 11. So that's been about 15 years ago. My sister apparently looks a lot like her, but they have different colored eyes and hair. All I remember about her is the time she didn't come get me out of the pool when I walked to the deep end, that she told me I was weird for dipping strawberry poptarts in orange juice, that she used to lock me out of the house, there exists only one set of pictures of us together and that almost any time she spoke to me it was screaming. And the last time I saw her she was really, really skinny. And she'd never been skinny.

Daddy is pretty great, even though he has a lot of problems. He raised me and Sarah, my sister. Which probably explains a lot of my personality. He was born in Newport News, VA so he grew up in a very different area than me. Coastal, urban, mixed ethnic groups and races. He had a hard time growing up, for the most part. When he was very young his parents fought all the time. Mema, his mother, tells stories now of how she threatened her first husband, his father, with death a lot. And she was serious. He and his two sisters lived with his grandparents after their youngest brother, Michael, died at 3 years old from complications due to the meningitis he'd suffered as an infant. His grandparents, my great grandparents, had always been very close to the kids anyway, and they stayed there a lot. When he was a little older, 10 or 11 I think, they moved back in with Mema and her new husband, Bobby. Bobby was probably a better father than Grandpa Carl, but that relationship didn't last very long. Mema drank a lot and did speed.

Sometimes it's really hard for me to believe that she was the child of my great grandparents. They were hardworking, clean living, pull yourself up and behave type of people.

At any rate when they retired, Grandpa from the shipyard and Grandma from the Coca Cola plant, they moved back down here, where they had grown up and first tried to make a life. Daddy decided he'd come down here with them. He partied with hillbillies and learned to farm but didn't continue it when I was born. Instead he went into factory work and construction. He met my mother in the late 70's and they got married in either '79 or '80. Five years later they had the accident of me. And kids pretty much took over his life. He tried really, really hard to not let us grow up like he did. And he made some mistakes. But not many.