Picture it: Roanoke Memorial Hospital. May 9th 1981. It’s a Tuesday morning in the Southwestern Virginia valley town.
A 19 year old holds her baby girl for the first time, after three days of agonizing, exhausting, medically hindered and then “vacuum-assisted” delivery of the 9 pound, 15 ounce bundle.
A ray of sunlight falls on the newborn’s head. Ten years later she’ll tell me that’s how she chose my middle name.
That 19 year old woman grew up on a dairy farm in Hagerstown, Maryland, the oldest of nine children.
She was valedictorian of her senior class of three circa 1978, in her church’s school.
She’d never been allowed to cut her hair, nor to wear pants as a girl. She grew up working on the farm, and singing gospel in church with her father on his guitar.
In a recent conversation, my aunt described Mom as mean to her younger siblings until she was a teenager.
If Mom was like me, she was probably still mean as a teen and adult, just with words and laughter instead of hands, even when she thought she was just being funny.
In her teens, she got to know and love country classics like Conway Twitty, and rock legends like Elvis.
Her youngest brother told me she ran away from home as a teen once, and their father beat her with a switch until blood ran down her legs – not for running away, but for wearing pants when she did it.
My grandmother divorced him, and moved back with her mother, near Roanoke, Virginia, around 1977.
After graduating high school, my mother left the farm in Hagerstown to join her mother in Virginia.
At a family reunion in Virginia, she met my father, a much older, recently divorced former coal miner from West Virginia, also an Elvis fan with a peg leg from a motorcycle accident who, it turns out, looked a lot like Conway Twitty.
I was 42 years old when I learned that my mother got migraines from the sun growing up, just like me, but only because I never thought to ask.
When I was eighteen, Grandma gave me a box of photos that had been my mother’s when my biological father shot her.
In the box I found her report cards, and in the notes from her teachers learned that my mother had been chatty and impulsive as a child, just like me.
She’d loved reading, writing, music, and science over Bible studies, just like me.
I was young when I found out how much older than my mother my father had been, and it grossed me out.
But in recent years, I’ve asked my mother’s sister, and my biological father’s sister, about my parents and their relationship.
Both sides of the family say my mother pursued my father, and if my mother was anything like me…
Well, try telling me no.
I don’t think my father would have tried very hard to resist. But my mother’s sister told me he was concerned about their age difference, and that changed how I think of him.
My mother was beautiful, with bright blue eyes and auburn highlights in her long brown hair. Young. Strong. Playful. Fun loving. Passionate.
Our culture even today considers a 19 year old grown enough to marry a man twice her age, so even though it icks me out, I’m trying to let the age difference go…separate it from the list of “bad” things I remember about him.
I know my mother was moody like me. She had a temper much worse than mine, though, and she was bigger and quicker than me until I was in fifth grade, around ten years old.
And when I fell pregnant…
Isn’t that a fantastic turn of phrase? Like, I just fell over, pregnant, one day?
When I fell pregnant at twenty-seven, all I could think about was all the ways my mother messed up in the paltry twelve years she was given to me on Earth.
I wrote a whole book about all the ways she messed up. It was my thesis for my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.
My mother died in December 1993, and I grew up in central Florida, far from our family.
I wrote my book completely from my own perspective. It was my memories I was writing. My story. My truth. So what was there to research?
I don’t know that it ever occurred to me that I could interview my family to learn more about myself!
I only thought about learning about my deceased biological parents when I visited them, and I never developed the habit of calling my aunts or grandmother’s, or Dad, or siblings.
Why didn’t I call?
Oh, I had lots of reasons. Lots of stories I told myself to explain my mysterious behavior.
I studied psychology for fun, my whole life. If I didn’t, I may never have figured out my brain is different than most people’s in my late thirties.
My whole life, I thought I was broken because of my childhood traumas. That’s the person who wrote that book pictured about – the me who thought I was broken because I didn’t understand myself, yet.
The first four decades of my life, I believed that I needed special help from doctors and special schools to fix my broken brain.
I couldn’t afford help. I couldn’t keep a job, for reasons that were clear to me only in hindsight, and sometimes not even then.
I struggled to make enough to survive as a self-employed single mother for eight years, and thusly, I had no healthcare outside rare, only when I was scared I was dying rare visits to the Emergency room or emergency dentist for extraction.
From the day my Dad decided to teach me to “be responsible” by refusing me dental and doctor visits unless I scheduled the appointments myself when I was in ninth grade, fourteen or fifteen years old, until I married in my mid-thirties, except when I was pregnant until I gave birth and could qualify for Medicaid, I had no access to the healthcare my Dad had through the military, because he didn’t feel like adding me to his veteran’s insurance policy those years he could have was his responsibility.
He believed I could work. I was better educated than him, smarter than him, he said. He saw no reason I couldn’t work my way through college, like most people.
How I raged at him when, at forty, I found out I actually HAD been disabled my whole life, that I really was never just lazy or lying, as he’d accused me when I was a teen.
I raged at the whole world when I found out for sure that I really was disabled developmentally and emotionally, when I was diagnosed with autism at forty years old…
Autism Spectrum Disorder we call it now, on top of the ADHD, PTSD, OCD, MDD, and GAD diagnoses I have been collecting since my first major mental health crisis as an adult legally responsible for meeting my own needs, at nineteen.
on top of the ADHD, PTSD, OCD, MDD, and GAD diagnoses I had started collecting at nineteen.
When I wrote and published my first memoir, I was booksmart, super educated, and thought I was an expert on human behavior, with my Anthropology degree and lifelong passion for learning everything.
As I revised it for publication, I found happiness and purpose in my life, and thought I knew why I was here, what I want to do with my life, while raising my first son with the help of my friends.
I married my best friend. He adopted my first and we gave him a brother. In our joy, we took in a single mom and her baby, as my friend had taken me in when my baby and I were in need.
And then there was COVID.
But my life started changing dramatically just before the pandemic.
In 2018, while researching ADHD to help my son, I figured out I needed to be evaluated. I was diagnosed in 2019.
Understanding that my brain was different, that life wasn’t supposed to be so damn hard all day everyday…
In 2020, under the pressures of the pandemic, my ADHD symptoms now being managed both with medication and skill building, I was having problems that could only be partly explained by ADHD and PTSD.
First, my psychiatrist decided I was OCD and instead of having me evaluated, medicated me accordingly.
I lost 160 pounds, mostly on purpose, but over the course of eight months…which my psychiatrist, who I had to physically visit every month for my Adderall prescription because of Florida law and schedule 2 drugs…
He didn’t notice. He blew up at me when I told him I was seeking and autism evaluation, because he was convinced I would have been diagnosed as a child.
21st century America has a lot of problems. One of them is education.
Are the people in charge of prescribing Adderall and Clonazepam required to keep up their studies every year on advancements in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and nutrition?
No. No, they are not.
As adults, we are responsible for educating ourselves, and our children.
We have a horrible public school system. Especially in Florida. And every discussion involving kids gets heated.
Adventures of an Earthborn Alien 