Childhood part I

I was born to an eccentric genius and the perfect woman. I was the 7th of my mother's 8 children, 10th of my dad's 11, and the only living girl. My parents decided mere days before my mother discovered her pregnancy with me that they were going to have no more children. They had tried for a girl repeatedly and it hadn't happened. When I came along, they were surprised and overjoyed.

I don't think any girl can live up to that kind of pressure.

Some of my earliest memories are of playing with firecrackers with my brothers in the sandbox, blowing up army men, and of a secret club they allowed me to peek into. They referred to it as "fire secrets". They made bombs. I wanted to be just like them. I was seven years younger than my youngest older brother, however, and my glimpse into my brothers' world was stunted by my age, gender, and propensity to tattle tale. More than anything I wanted a sister. Then Blake came along, and I made him into one. We were best friends and enemies, and had a childhood not easily replicated, I'd wager.

Immediately behind my childhood home is a gigantic field, behind which stands a hill referred to by the locals as the 'R' hill. That field became a vast wilderness in which we hunted for treasure, collected old bottles of various shapes and colors, and had all manners of adventures. Also behind my home is my dad's own personal junkyard, referred to lovingly and exasperatedly as "the mess" by my mother, who does not believe in messes. My dad had a collection of hundreds of cars, tanks, gravel, wood, mattresses, old appliances, mysterious sheds with mysterious belongings, stacks of tires, various pieces of equipment, flanges, strange bolts and parts, and even an old school bus and all manners of treasures all strewn about and divided by winding dirt roads on two acres of childhood heaven. The stack of wood was our ship, the mattresses, our trampoline, the "H tanks", a secret meeting place. The tire stacks became space capsules we huddled in and communicated to each other through old stretches of hose we ran from one to the other like those string and cup telephones your teacher helps you make in kindergarten.

I never went to Disneyland. Disneyland was my back yard.

On finding love and losing my religion: part 1.

I've always been an awkward person. Maybe not always. Okay, Perhaps always.

Right now, I'm laying down next to my husband in my childhood bedroom in Roosevelt, Utah, and I'm thinking about my life so far. I'm in pain. It's physical. My heart though, is pretty full.

I'm happy to be where I am, I think. Part of me though, is bewildered at how I ended up here; married and areligious, when once, not so long ago, for more than seventeen years of my life, I was described as anti-male, even cynical, and according to one church leader, perhaps even lesbian, and a devoted Mormon.

I have decided it's time to work out what happened, and what better forum to air the most intimate details of my life than a public one, eh? This makes me nervous, but I'm going to buck up. Maybe somebody somewhere will stumble across this and identify with part of it. Maybe my hypothetical future children will want to understand what their mother was thinking at a ripe 22. Maybe I'm just feeling particularly mortal today. Maybe I'm anticipating maybe being cooped up in a small apartment in Texas this summer, maybe recovering from heart surgery.

In any case, this is the beginning of an attempt to tell my life story. I guess I'll start with childhood.