Asklemmy

My dad was my age in 1989. He was a pretty horrible person, but was actually doing alright. My mom’s father had retired and bequeathed a plumbing company onto him a few years prior, which my parents had managed to grow quite a bit. But he was an alcoholic, smoked a lot of pot, and did enough coke to be considered an addict. I’m pretty sure this happened when he was 40 - I was 6 at the time, I think. I remember he took me to the store with his girlfriend to get cigarettes. Mom was at work - this was before they divorced. He had me in the bed of his truck, and he swerved off the road to drive up ‘the back way’ to our house. I wasn’t braced for the sudden maneuver, and I slid and hit my face, getting a nose bleed. A moment later, a police officer pulled into our driveway and saw him standing over me (who was crying), and said they’d followed him from the convenience store - I assume because he was drunk and had a kid in the back of his truck. He got so belligerent that by the end of it, 6 cops showed up and beat him in our driveway before arresting him. His girlfriend slunk off, and my mom had to spring him from jail. After my parents divorced, he lived in a trailer park with a new woman who seemed nice, and he died a few years later of a suspected heart attack in his sleep. I’ve got about 2 1/2 years before I’m older than he was.

My mom was 40 in ‘92. She had divorced my dad, and she told us a lot of things that we probably should have been shielded from. The plumbing business failed - a lot of equipment ‘went missing’ and some of the vehicles started having random maintenance issues. Our own family minivan stopped running after the fuel was tampered with. And a bunch of our pets started dying or disappearing (cats and dogs disappeared, rabbits just had broken necks in the coop, one horse was shot, another poisoned with antifreeze in their water). She had also began using drugs, or at least, was using them at a level where her addiction was obvious. She got a job halfway across the country, and we moved. We were living in a small farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, and she moved her boyfriend in, who happened to be her drug dealer. And then one day she was gone. The school truancy officer managed to contact family, who arranged to have us rescued before we wound up in foster care. About a year later, she reappeared in a battered women’s shelter, in rehab, and we moved in with her at the shelter.
What I now know - after having gone through her things a few years ago, after her death - is that she got pregnant, ran away, brought the child (a boy) to term, and gave the kid up for adoption before reappearing and keeping this secret from her family the rest of her life.

So, you know. Fun times all around.
(I’m fine, just a bit weird.)