Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Growing up...

I've never so much really shared my story growing up for many reasons; mainly because I feel like I like to live in the "now" and not the past but I feel inspired enough now to share where I come from! Now we all come from different backgrounds, religions, etc...



My mother, Darla Gray, is my inspiration for all that I do, she is my best friend, my shoulder to lean on, the best Grandma I can ask for my daughter, and the funniest person I know!!! She was 19 when she had me and she had been married to my biological father for 2 years before she had me. She stresses, to this very day, how much she loved (and still does love) him but also stresses how many painful years he put her through. Well when I was 2 years old, they got a divorce and Mom ran away with me to get me out of the incest, drugs, alcohol abuse, and un-necessary drama to bring me into a better world with a better up bringing. I still cannot thank her enough for it after I have slowly learned what kind of life my biological father has lead for the past 21 years of my life! We'll get back to that later on in the story...

So, my mom moves to Texas from Arkansas to be with my grandparents and start a new life, and meets my step-father, James. She said he fell in love with me from the moment he met me and i grew up knowing him as "My James" but never called him Dad, i just didn't feel any comfort in calling him Dad, not to say that I didn't love him at all. They then gave me the two best things that i could ask for at that point in my life, two little bratty brothers! J.D. (James Daniel) and A.J. (Anthony Joseph). Later on when we finally decided my biological father could give a shit less about getting to know me, James stepped up and told my mother that he wanted to adopt me, so he did, and I still have his last name, GRAY. Well a few years down the road, Robert (my bio dad) calls my mom demading to see me and she basically told him he hadn't earned it nor deserved it! Well then she gave in and wanted me to have the oppurtunity to know who he was and make my judgement on him based on MY facts and understanding of him and not go by what she had told me about him (which wasn't ALL bad things). So I met him and i could not even express the nervous feeling I had in my stomach the whole time on my way to meet him! I hadn't known him for the past 10 years of my life...i was scared, to say the least!

Well I met him, my step-mom, and my brother I never knew about. It wasn't so bad but I just felt like he was still a stranger and i didn't care about him much! So we talked on and off for 3 years, the last time i talked to him for 3 more years was on my 15th birthday! After that he said he had stopped calling because he could sense that I did not want to have anything to do with him and he felt as if he were messing up my already established family! Which was true!
So I go from the age of 15 to 17 going through the most horrible teenage years you could imagine, not so much related with drugs and alcohol but more of just wanting to be independant and not getting the Independance I though I deserved. My mom and James were really strict and hardly ever allowed me to do anything outside of home, so that made me rebel BIG TIME...mainly with John, he was my boyfriend through out high school and i would sneak him in the house and do everything i can to be with him, even if it meant lying to my parents. So then it got to a point where James would get violent here and there, hitting me and my mom! You can only put up with it for so long until you just break! So when I was 17, i broke! He hit my mom and i had dealt with it for the last time, I called the cops and then got kicked out. i moved in with my Grandmother and Grandfather, come to find out was 10x worse than living at home, they never hit me or anything of that nature, they were just too anal for my teenage ways! Yea so it was definitely my fault. (I resented my mother for letting James tell me I needed to find another place to live. She was stuck in the middle, of course. Torn between her daughter and her husband!!!!!!!!)

Then after some breaking up with John and back and forth with him we finally decided to stay together and move in together, that was the biggest step i had taken in my whole life! A step for the best, i must say!!!!! So i moved in with him at 17 and he was 18, well we lived 30 minutes away from my school, it was a chore to get up and go to school everyday but i made it, i graduated my senior year on time with my diploma, which was quite an accomplishment for a young girl who had no clue on how to get a handle on the real world!

SOOOOO....after a few months of living with John, i finally had the independance i wanted, WE finally had the independance we wanted...we made a life together and I wanted my Biological father to be proud of what I had turned out to be so I FINALLY felt comfortable within myself to iniate the contact with him. So I did and now i talk and text him all the time, we are close BUT I am even closer with James, despite the past confrontations and so forth...I just like my parents a lot more when I don't live with them and now that I have established a family of my own, they are all proud of me for doing all this on my own with very little of their help!!!!

My biological father is still into the drugs for all I am concerned (per my stepmother) but now if i don't ask, they don't tell...so I like not knowing, just as long as he doesn't bring it around me and my family!!!

1 comment:

Danyell said...

It's nice getting it out in the open isn't it? I'm proud of you too as I am sure your family is. Seems like you have made a wonderful life for youself!