So many stories of where I've been

Part one here and part two here.

I'm not sure I ever heard the ins-and-outs of what happened between the running away and the wedding, or if I've just forgotten the details (I have this strange tendency to forget EVERYTHING unless it's something I find personally significant (and even then I seem to have a pretty sketchy system of determining of what is significant enough to retain), or until someone reminds me, at which point I can recall it).

I do know that my 16-year old mother was given an ultimatum: get married, give the baby up for adoption, or have an abortion, because she wasn't living under their roof with a baby. Abortion wasn't an option for my mom, and she knew with every fiber of her being that she wouldn't be able to bear to part with a baby if she carried it for nine months. So, she chose the only option she felt she had and agreed to marry a man seven years her senior. A man she had nothing in common with. A man she didn't really like so much anymore. A man who had pressured her into having sex with him.

There was much hullabaloo involved in the wedding that cost my grandparents $10,000+, an enormous sum in a tiny little logging town in 1977. On her father's arm, my mother cried all the way down the aisle. Not because she was overcome with the emotion of the day: these were not tears of happiness. They were tears of fear, of regret, of desperately wanting to turn and run the other way. She had an inkling of what she was getting herself into and wanted no part of that future.

Yet again, my grandfather did nothing.

Life as a pregnant 16-year old wife wasn't too bad for Mom (well, during the week, anyhow: my father was at logging camp during the week and only came home on weekends). All of a sudden, she found herself free from the terror she had endured for so long. Unfortunately, married life wasn't all roses. Mom found herself married to an overgrown child who would waste hours on a Saturday watching cartoons. He was more interested in drinking and building model planes than buying diapers and groceries. And so on.

She lasted about a year and a half before leaving him and moving home. Yes, living under their roof with a baby. Mostly because my grandmother doted on me. I was her little princess! A little doll to dress up and parade around! Plus, I was just one additional way to rub my mother's nose in the fact that Mommy Dearest didn't like her. It gives me a small, vindictive measure of satisfaction that they wasted $10,000 on a sham wedding.

Mom and I lived with the grandparents briefly before everyone moved "home." Shortly thereafter, Mom met the man I called Dad for the majority of my life. He wasn't a fantastic man and he didn't treat my mother like gold, but he treated better than she was used to and seemed to embrace me instead of casting Mom aside for having baggage. My parents' divorce and the subsequent custody battle were ugly. My father (I cannot begin to express how much it calls me to refer to him as "my father"; in fact, I'm going to refer to him from here on out as I do in real life -- The Donor) acted despicably and used the abuse Mom suffered at the hands of her mother as "proof" that she was an unfit parent who was doomed to do the same to me. Luckily Mom had a decent support system between Dad, a good friend, and a great lawyer.

As it turns out, the great lawyer wasn't really much of a necessity. You see, sometimes even cocky men start to doubt themselves. However, most of them are probably smart enough not to shoot themselves in the foot. The Donor travelled to our home town under the pretense of visiting me: the arrangement was that he would spend the weekend with me at his aunt's house (she lived in the same town) and return me to Mom on Sunday night. Imagine her fear when, after he failed to bring me home, she called his aunt's house, only to hear a very surprised woman say that he had never arranged to stay there. He headed back to his home town right after he left Mom's. In effect, he kidnapped me.

Mom was sick with worry and afraid to take on his whole family in order to get me back. The Donor, while not a large man, comes from a family of large (in both height and weight) men (and women -- damned genetics anyhow! somehow I ended up "blessed" with my maternal height and my paternal girth) who were all loggers. Who take a shining to large, angry dogs. She drove up to That Other Place with Dad, her good friend, and her lawyer, where they were met by the local police. They waited until midday Monday before descending on my (paternal) grandparent's house because they knew all the men would be at camp.

When they got through the door, Mom was relieved to see that I was okay. Well, if by "okay" you mean still wearing the same pajamas I had been on the Friday night. I hadn't been given a bath in three days and had developed ringworm around the thumb I sucked. Needless to say, after Mom's lawyer pointed out how stupid The Donor's stunt was, he very quietly dropped the custody case.