When The Past Meets The Present

Diary - Entry 13

Yes, once again it is the middle of the night or should I say, morning. . .I am sleepless again, even though the pills work for a few hours, I enevitabley end up.  The puppy, Knox, is sitting in my lap.  Wanting to play, but I do not, as I am not in the mood.

This journal entry is not so much about our childhood, but about step-parenting.  My mother had the uncanny ability to pick the wrong men for herself, as well as my father did for himself.  Case in point:  My fathers girlfriend at the time, Carolyn, had three children from a previous marriage, as did my father. 

While they were in the 'dating phase' everthing was great.   Then dad decided to marry her and build her a house at the the family 'compound' (which is what I refer to it as everyone that lived there was related).  Anyway, on one of my last visits to the farm, my father had my brothers and I going throught the space where the house was to be built and remove any big rocks and things.  Carolyn and her kids, did nothing.  Once the house was built, they did not include rooms for myself and my brothers. . .only rooms for her three children.  Terry had the largest bedroom with her own private bath.

I came down once more.  Carolyn was having her friends over for lunch and we were never allowed to eat in my fathers house, she would send us down the gravel road to my grandparents, yet, her own kids, could stay and have lunch with her friends.  Slowly the marriage deteriorated and my father came home to find the house stripped bare.  Carolyn thought she would get everything including the house, but my family has set things up that nobody, other than a blood McFarland can reside and own property within the family.  At least that is what my grandmother told me.

My mother, well, she married a man 10 years her junior. So Randy, in theory, was only 9 years older than me.  They had a baby, my brother Michael, whom I adored.  Life with my mother was not easy.  She expected me to get my brothers ready for school, daycare, cook the meals, do the laundry and keep the house clean (and I mean toothbrush clean), maintain my grades and still be on the cheerleading squad and do gymnastics.  I was 12 but felt like 40.  I had bleeding ulcers by the time I was 14.  Eventually my brother Todd could not take the pressure of living with her constant abuse for the smallest infraction and went to live with my dad, whom I had, at that point, not seen in several years.

Randy, my mothers husband, had no real parenting skills. . .he was barely out of high school and old enough to drink.  So, I continued.  I missed Todd terribly, Vic was 4 years younger and Michael was just a baby.
It was about this time when things changed for me as well.  I have always been an "old soul", so when I met 'him', I knew that we were two halves of the same whole.  When my mother tired of being married, she left the house, with us in tow and I suspect, it somehow devestated Randy for he was her first real love and he continued to love her till the day she died, just as my father had done.  Which is why he brought my mothers body back here to be buried, 'where she belonged' and where I suspect he could see her every day, although my father, by this time had been married to his third wife, Barb for nearly 30 years. 

Time dragged on and with that passage, it brought changes that still effect me to day.  It is sometimes hard letting go of the past, when the present is staring you in the face as a daily reminder of what should of, could of and never will be.

I became a step-mother myself and tried desperatly to not make the mistakes that had warped my sense of what a parents responsibilties are, no matter when and where they come from.  Children do not get to choose their parents. . .