a note from the writer

ii

I've been seriously writing with the hopes of selling something for nearly the past thirty years. As that didn't work out very well and I'm reaching my Fiftieth birthday, I thought I'd do one last writing effort and put this story of my life together so I can have it as my ultimate and final unsold effort. Perhaps it'll simply be serialized in a blog after all the publishers have taken a pass.

In my twenties, I remembered many conversations word for word, so I didn't need to write them down. By my forties I realized I should have written them down. These recollections are largely based on my less vivid than they used to be memories. While I no longer remember the conversations word for word, I still remember a phrase or sentence of some of them and put those in quotes. The rest I just type as prose.

The next major source of information for this work are the stories my mother told me. But this is problematic as she would often recount her stories to make herself the victim and the hero at the same time. When something happened that she didn't like her role in, she would immediately start recounting to herself in a mumbling way how it should have been, over and over. The first time I realized this was when she pulled out of a parking lot and hit the side of a passing car. This all happened at low speed and the passing car ended up with a small dent by the driver's side rear wheel. After they had traded driver's license and insurance information, he drove off and my mother pulled the car back into the parking lot and stared out the window repeating ''He's the one that hit me. He's the one that hit me,'' over and over again. And then, for days later, that's how she'd tell the story to other people... Even though the only visible damage to her car were some scuffs on the passenger side of the front bumper.

And yet she told me many, many of her stories over and over again from my late single digit years of age until the end of the nineteen nineties when the shadow of Alzheimer's fell upon her. Given so much experience, I began to piece through these recountings and feel confident of some bits of them and immediately distrust other parts. Generally, any part that didn't paint her in the best possible light were most likely true. Those parts where she was the hero, were most likely not true. Those parts were she was the victim, probably had a kernel of truth to them.

When it comes to names used in this text, they are most often pseudonyms, I've used the trick of first presenting the 'name' in single quotes, then just using them as names. This is a story about my life and experiences. Explicitly naming others would only, eventually, bring the spotlight to them. This would be an annoyance to friends and family who just want to live their lives in peace, and would provide a platform for abusers to once again try to take a chunk out of me.

The final bits for putting all this together are snippets I've gotten from my siblings, friends and other adults over the decades mixed with my own historical check-pointing. An example is the story of my birth where I did the math over and over again to make sure it worked and my sister confirming that our mother had taken little role in my early up-bringing due to troubles with my birth. Completing this example, my mother told me the story of my birth as the 'How I had traumatized her at an early age' tale, with me sorting through the details she told me and tying it together into a cohesive whole that, hopefully, is more objective.

Of course my therapist will tell me that I've simply spun it into my own tale, making myself both a victim and a hero at the same time...

(if i had a therapist.)