History, Part 1

This is going to be a long post, and I am trying to decide if I should write it in chapters or parts; long posts can be tedious and hard to read. I will see how it goes. It sounds like a made up story, and I swear on the lives of my children that it is the truth, and not some stolen soap opera storyline.....


If you have read my blog from the beginning, then you already know that i was born to a great mother and a son of a bitch for a father.I have not previously posted all the gory details of my life, but I have told of a few....I have two sisters, and each of us have different fathers, my mother was married to all of them....MY father was particularly assy...he beat the hell out of my mother regularly, he molested my older sister and I....just a mean, mean man. My parents divorced when I was six, and my mother encouraged a relationship between he and I. Yes, I know...I think she tried in her own way to protect me...but that is for another blog post. I grew up afraid of him, guilty for unknown reasons, meek, scared...you name it. Once I was grown, I decided that he was the only father I had and he could no longer hurt me. I tried the best I know how to have any relationship with him. He remarried when I was eight, and I spent a good amount of time with her over the years...she was okay, but I could always feel some sort of undercurrent running between she and I...when I was young, I didn't understand that she was jealous of me...heaven knows why...he didn't care about me any more than he cared about her....maybe it was because she could not have children, which in my opinion was the best thing that ever happened to her, considering who she was married to.

Once I had children, she jumped into the grandma role and my kids really loved her. I tried hard at that relationship for them. She and my dad were pretty wealthy, he had a knack for making money---as far as I could tell, the only thing he really ever had going for him. My stepmother provided alot of things for my kids back when we were struggling. I don't know what we would have done without her, and again, my kids really cared about her.

Over the years, my dad and I attempted some kind of relationship, but I was never good enough. The first strike against me was the fact that i was a girl. Hence, the name Jamie. His name was James, I was to be James, jr. Except for one small problem---I didn't have the correct equipment in the important areas. The day that I was born, he lost more than a thousand dollars on bets with his friends that I would be a boy. In 1960, that was ALOT of money. He never got over that, or missed an opportunity to tell me that i was born wrong. He blamed my mother and I----the stupid shit, as if SHE was the determining factor.(I never said he was too smart :))

We would get along somewhat, then something that i did would set him off....and we would not speak for a while. My ex-husband and I even ended up living in their town, WORKING for him for awhile, but again, that is another story. After I could no longer take his mental and verbal abuse, we left the area, and our relationship became sporadic again. I used to berate myself for not being able to be good enough to keep him in my life, and I would feel such a strange love/HATE when I was around him. Mostly, he and my stepmother made me nervous. I could not relax when I had to deal with them. Once I realized that, I had a long talk with God, and I came to understand that for me, the relationship was not healthy. By then, my kids were grown, and they could choose to be around her or not. I just couldn't take any more of the guilt, my nerves.....and I never formally ended it, I just quit trying to communicate with them. One of them would call from time to time and sometimes I would take the call, sometimes I wouldn't. But I felt that it was okay...the whole mess was okay...I had made my peace with God about it, and I wasn't doing anything wrong. I really did love him, I never doubted that. But he was not possible to love---at least not to show love to, or be kind to....he was such a screwed up human being. It still hurt that he didn't care about me,but some things are just not meant to be.

Fast forward to 2004. I got a call from a good friend of his, they are a wonderful, wonderful, did I mention WONDERFUL couple...that loved him, were seriously FRIENDS of his....and had been for many years. I know them pretty well from being there...and I often wondered how they managed to be close to him, and no one else could. At first I thought that there must be something wrong with them...but I am serious when I say that their friendship was genuine, and so was his with them. They had kids that cared about him (daughters....and sometimes I wonder about that, but again, I am getting off the subject)so I knew that in some ways, he could be normal, apparently just not with me. But anyway, they called me in August of 2004. They said that he was quite ill, and the medical community was unable to figure out why. They asked that I call him, and please don't tell him that they called me. I talked with H, and we decided to make a quick trip there the following morning. They live in a small town in southern Missouri, the town that I am from, sort of, and the only place I ever felt a real connection with, by the way, but that is of no importance to the story. To be continued.....