Every life begins uniquely. Sometimes tragically, and sometimes magically. The tragedy of my life began long before I was conceived.

I don't know much about my family's history or about any of the individual members because people in my family are very secretive. They do, however, love to talk about other people as long as those discussions are not too emotional, deep or meaningful. People in my family are very shallow and not interested in solving any of our family's problems so they quickly opt out of those discussions as much as they can. More often than not those discussions devolve into them gaslighting me about my perception of our family's problems and how to solve them. They don't acknowledge that our family has any problems needing resolution, and if they did acknowledge any problems, those problems don't belong to them and are not able to be fixed by anything they may do or say. They claim to be powerless to influence our family's direction and interpersonal interactions.

My parents' marriage, at the very least, was a tragedy in itself. If there were two people who should have never met, married or had children, my parents are them. I still wonder how they managed to have sex twice to conceive my brother and me. They were not an affectionate or loving couple and made a point to keep their distance from each other. They almost never kissed or hugged each other, and never told each other that they were loved. 

According to my mother, her marriage to my father was borne from her perceived religious obligation and her desperation to have someone take care of her. I don't know how or when my parents met so I will have to make certain presumptions based on the few details I do know. My mother said she lived with her parents and siblings until she graduated from Mount Merici High School in Waterville, Maine at 18 years old, which would have been June 1964. She told me about having to spend most of her paycheck on rent and tires for her car to get to work and would not have any money left for food. She said that after she met my father she would look forward to going out to lunch with him every Wednesday at Mike's Restaurant in Augusta for pea soup. She said that was her only meal each week, which I have difficulty believing is true considering how she likes to eat. 

She told me that when she first met my father she was not at all attracted to him physically or in any other way and actually found him to be annoyingly aggressive and persistent. He would show up at the stores where she shopped and the restaurants where she would eat until she surrendered to his persistence and agreed to go out with him. I'm not sure how long before my father was able to convince her to have sex with him, but knowing my mother and her prudish asexual nature, I suspect it took quite some time. My mother has said that her father, being the religious zealot that he was, always told her that she was required to marry the first man she had sex with. Thus, her marriage to my father for that and other reasons.

My mother has told me that she got pregnant with my brother during her first sexual intercourse with my father. According to the reverse due date calculator, my mother conceived my brother between January 24 - 31, 1966 and gave birth to him on November 7, 1966. Those dates, and the date of their marriage certificate in this article of April 16, 1966, seem to confirm my mother's story that she had sex with my father and got pregnant before they were married. This picture of my parents at their wedding is the only picture that I've ever seen of them together. I cannot recall any other photos of them except for those when they were in my aunt and uncle's wedding. 

Fast forward to November 7, 1966 when my brother was born. My mother has said that she stayed home with my brother for a year after he was born and only decided to return to work because their finances were getting tight with only my father working. She said the frequency and severity of their arguments was increasing as was the stress of living with him because she wasn't working and helping pay the bills. My father's mother and sister contest my mother's story about staying home with my brother but they've not provided me with any verifiable details to refute my mother's version. So, according to my mother, she returned to work when my brother was 1 year old.

About 6 weeks after starting her new job, which would be around April 18, 1968, she discovered that she was pregnant with me, to her great dismay. She has told me that being pregnant and having another child was the last thing she wanted at that moment. She has also gone so far as to tell me that if Roe v. Wade had been decided and codified into law by then, she would have chosen to legally terminate the pregnancy and not give birth to me at all. But that was not possible, and because that was not possible to do legally, she opted for other methods to kill me. She has told me that she would beat herself in the stomach to try to cause a miscarriage and she would starve herself because she didn't want to "get fat" again. None of those methods worked.

Despite my mother's attempts to prevent it, I was born on December 17, 1968. I don't know any details about her labor and delivery, or how my father reacted to my conception and birth. What I do know is that despite my mother claiming to stay home with my brother for an entire year after his birth and devoting herself to caring for him, that is not what she chose when I was born. Instead, she went back to work fulltime when I was a mere 21 days old and found someone to care for me while she was working. When she got out of work each day she would pick me up from the babysitter, bring me home, place me in my bassinet and put the bassinet in the bathroom with the door closed so she could make supper for my father and brother and clean the house. She would do this each and every day, even if I was screaming and crying for her attention and affection. She said she put me in the bathroom with the door closed to muffle the sounds of my cries because it upset my father. It didn't seem to matter to her that all I wanted was for some of her attention and affection, and the more she ignored me, the louder and harder I screamed and cried.

That's the way my life began, and that's the way my life has progressed ~ never succeeding in creating any kind of loving relationship with my mother because she has refused to facilitate one. My existence has always been an unwelcome liability and marital obligation such that my mother has recently said that if she could turn back time, she would choose to not have any children at all.