OK so I was reading my friends blog and it inspired me to blog some of my memories from my strange past. There is so much to say though I am not quite sure where to begin, I was born in Lafayette IN, OK maybe that is too far back lol. Although that time in my life is quite a story even though I don't remember most of it since I was just a baby. I only know what I was told.
BTW the pic is of me and my big sister Diane.
My parents Tom and Liz divorced when I was 8 months old. We lived near my fathers family and my Aunt and Uncle (father's brother) were the only people in the family nice to my mother, so she would call on them to help her out sometimes and soon I was spending more time with them than my own mother and father. There was a lot of back and forth and the time I spent with my mother got shorter and shorter. Finally my Aunt and Uncle gave her an ultimatum and said that the back and forth was too much on me, and offered to raise me as their own. My mother knowing the life they could offer me was so much better than what she could agreed.
So my Dad is my Uncle and my Mom is my Aunt, I know it sounds like we are hillbillies or something lol.
But life went on and my new family loved me as one of their own, of course they had previous experience in that area, my older sister Diane (see pic above) was adopted from an orphanage when she was 3. And my parents spent some time being foster parents for a while also. They had a lot of love in their hearts and they still do. I could not have asked for a better family my mother gave me more than she could ever realize by allowing them to raise me.
After 12 years of my life living with my parents (the Aunt and Uncle) and have some contact with my father and less with my mother I lost track of my mother which at the time I had other things I thought was way more important at the time and so it didn't bother me much until I was older.
The contact I have always had with my father has been much more strained over the years. When I was young I didn't realize what kind of person he was. I knew I had 2 daddies so he became my 2Daddy (ah the mind of a 3 year old) I received a phone call every year in November from him asking what I wanted for Christmas and my birthday (which is in Dec also) and then I got a big box of presents. We had moved to Texas when I was 5 but went back to IN every summer to visit family I always had to spend 3 or 4 days with him, now I know he was forced to spend that time with me, if it was up to him he probably would never have spent any time with me. Now that I am an adult I realize so much about him that I didn't before he didn't buy me those gifts because he loved me, he bought them out of guilt because he knew she should have been a bigger part of my life. When I realized that truth it was hard I was already married and had 2 of my beautiful children, he didn't come see them when they were born but sent gifts as usual, and they got much more expensive it was then I realized they were guilt gifts and not out of true love. I think he sensed that I was onto him because the gifts stopped, now we don't even get as much as a Christmas card from him much less birthday anything not even a phone call. Can you tell I am a little bitter? I try every day to forgive him for the way he has treated me over the years but that is not easy, epically now as a mother myself and this is affecting my own children. They know who he is, Grandpa Tom, but the only time they see him and his new family is when WE go there. I try to tell myself that it is his loss, he is missing out on being a part of their lives of his own free will. We live only 9 hours from him right now and in the 2 years we have lived here he has been down to see us 1 time after I had the baby (the only one of my kids he has seen as a newborn) they stayed for a whopping 2 days! And this time not one single gift. Not that I care about the gifts but it kinda symbolizes how our relationship has been over the years. It had dwindled down to the point that he is just an Uncle to me now and not my father. Although I will always try to do the right thing and keep him posted on what we are up to and how we are but I have come to accept the fact that it will never be nothing more than a few phone calls a year usually made by me.
OK so I just realized how flippin long this is, sorry! If you want to know what happened with my birth mother check back tomorrow.
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