I was born at 15 minutes past midnight the morning of February 21st, 1953, to my 16 year old mother and my 22 year old father. I was supposed to be a boy and was to be named James Kenneth. Alas, I was a 7 pound 15 ounce, 21 inch long girl. They named me Debra. For most of my life I would be called Debbie.
My parents fought and divorced and my father was granted custody. They reconciled and remarried, fought and divorced and my mother was granted custody.
In November of 1955, my father remarried the woman he is still married to these 42 years later.
When I was three years old my mother remarried. It was a short, drunken, violent marriage. My memories begin here in this marriage. Memories of being left alone, locked in my room all night and then beaten for wetting myself...memories of wild parties and vomitting. Memories of my mother being beaten and in turn myself being beaten. Into this violent marriage, one light shined down...my mother had another child.
My brother was born January 17th, 1957. The son my mother had longed for. He weighed a mere one half ounce more than I did at birth and was the same length. He was my baby doll. He was my salvation. He was my friend and my companion. He was my nemesis. He was also my beloved burden...for I came to love him in the moment I laid eyes on him and I swore to protect him from all harm...quite a task for an almost four year old girl.
My mother soon divorced and we three were on our own. My brother and I were alone most of the time for mom was always working, drunk or partying. Mostly she worked as a waitress, but often she was a bartender. She was a beautiful woman and very personable so she did well in any position requiring customer service.
I don't know how to describe our life. We were almost always hungry and alone. There were lots of parties and lots of people, but usually when we were asleep. I didn't sleep much. In this, my brother was blessed for he could have slept through the house falling down on him!!!
My mother remarried when I was in the second grade. A tall lanky, red- headed man who drove an ambulance. We moved to California, away from everything I knew. Away from the rock in my life, my grandmother.
My step-father was a strict, violent man. There were fights where the police had to be called out of fear that one of them would kill the other. And there were the nights... This was the first man in my life to sexually abuse me. I never told my mother about this out of fear until I was a grown woman. I feared her more than I feared him... And soon, they too, were divorced...thank God.
There were always men around our house. They drank and partied with my mother. They fought and almost killed each other over my mother. Often I would have to pick up bloody teeth from the front yard after a particularly bad fight. Even our cousin by marriage was madly in love with my mother. And she wasn't always interested in them at the time they were interested in her. So they would be milling about, filled with anger, feeling rejected and jealous of the current lover...it was a dangerous situation fraught with constant tension.
Physically, I developed very early. This came to be a curse. Men around my mother would not believe how old I was, assuming I was much older. They also assumed I was just like her, a party animal, when in fact, I was timid and frightened almost all of the time. As the tension and jealousy in the house escalated...some of the men began looking at me...in a way that frightened me...
I was molested twice more by the time I was 10. Once by our cousin and another time by a boyfriend of my mother's. Again, I didn't talk, being more afraid of mother and her wrath than of anything else. I was dying inside but didn't know how to do anything to stop this. And then we met "him".
My brother was father hungry and he had a habit of adopting men to be his father. Most of the time it was a boyfriend of mom's, but this time it was a strange man we met in Cannon Park. This man gave off scary vibrations, but my brother seemed not to notice this and he brought him home to mom. And eventually he and mom were engaged to be married...and they were fighting.
She left us alone with him one night to go to a party and he took us to a drive-in movie. My brother sat in the back seat, I was in the front fighting off the advances of a 32 year old man. When we got home, my brother went to bed and I was left alone with him. For many years after this night all I could remember was the sound of his belt, either buckling or unbuckling...I don't know which...and I remember that I didn't have the terminology to tell anyone what had happened...and so I didn't. He disappeared after that night and I thought I would never have to talk about it...but I was wrong.
He came back to our house two months later...walked boldly into our lives and asked my mother if he could take my brother and I to the drive-in movies again. I guess something in my face gave me away because my mother took me into the bathroom and began questioning me about my reaction. I told her as much as I could remember and, amazingly, she didn't beat me...she went out of the bathroom, through the kitchen, grabbed a knife and tried to kill him, but he was fleeing out the front door. My brother was crying, not understanding and there was utter chaos for awhile.
First came the doctor. It was determined that I had been raped and impregnated. I learned about the pregnant part later. They did an abortion without asking me what I would have wanted. (That hurt me so much later, when I began to search for God...that perhaps He would reject me because I had had an abortion when I was 11.)
Then came the police woman. I wasn't allowed to have my mother present during the questioning, and I was terrified. This woman began asking me how I had enticed this man...how I had moved, had I sat in his lap...she made me feel like it had all been my fault, even though I had done none of these things. I spent most of the rest of my life feeling like the rape had somehow been my fault. Another roadblock when I began to search for God.
The following October, my mother packed her bags and moved away, leaving my brother and I to fend for ourselves. I thought she left us because I was such a bad, evil girl that my own mother couldn't bear to be around me. I found out twenty years later that she was in trouble with the police because her boyfriends had used our basement to run a check/fraud ring...but that didn't help me throughout most of my life.
Because of the parenting I did and did not receive and the destruction I saw around me as a child I made many decisions about my life by the time I was 12 years old. I wanted children, because I had been lonely, and because I wanted to do it better, more love and more care. I vowed never to drink to excess. Never to do drugs, the destructive power of these things were everywhere in my life. And I promised myself that no matter what, once I had children with a man, I would stay with him...my children would never have a step-parent in their lives.
In November my brothers father came to take him to live with he and his second wife. We had never been separated and he had to be dragged, kicking and screaming into the car. I was broken, feeling like I could never be whole again. Two months later, my father came for me. I was to live with him and his wife. They had had a baby, finally, after 10 years of marriage...and my step-mother was pregnant again. After 10 years of a childless marriage they had two babies thirteen months apart and a teenager moved in in the middle...God help us all.
