Mother

My mother and I have a very complicated non-existent relationship. As soon as I was born, my grandparents requested that I be drug tested. I was positive for cocaine and heroin. She was expected to go to jail and complete a treatment program of sorts and I was sent to live with my grandmother, who is equally as crazy as my mother and my aunt in-law who is a gem of a woman, flaws and all.
Fast forward to years later, when I was about seven years old. My mother came to visit on Easter. She was too skinny, and too sketchy, so when she showed up and requested that I accompany her to pick up "some friends" my father denied her of this privilege. She had actually kidnapped me before, which a very hard thing to understand when you are a kid. How could your own parent kidnap you? She put up a fuss at being told no, but calmed down and said that she would be back within the hour.

I waited by the window, looking out and hoping that every car that passed would be her and her friend, coming to spend time with me. I waited some more, Easter basket being of no interest to me. Finally dinner came and went, the sun went down and it was time to get ready for bed. I waited almost 3 years for her. The next time I would hear from her would be over the phone, with an automated operator asking me if I would accept a phone call from an inmate. That inmate ended up being my mother.

In the beginning...

I am writing this because I needed to tell my story somewhere. A personal confessional, in the hopes that perhaps someone somewhere will read it, and laugh and cry and maybe someone will see it and feel a little bit more like they aren't the only one with a messy past that sits under an uncertain future.

I was born 25 years, 7 months, 29 days and 4 hours ago in Anchorage, Alaska. My mother, barely 19 years young, gave birth to a 7 pound 7 ounce baby girl. She had run away from everything--my father, her family and a possibility for a good life for both of us--to live with her drug dealing 40-something year old boyfriend. She told me, many years later that she had also been dealing drugs while she was pregnant with me, and was offered five-thousand dollars to name me Kilo at one point. Obviously she didn't, though I joke that she really should have taken the money and done it. Instead, she decided to give me the last name of her drug dealing boyfriend, for no money. That is how my life started, with some stranger's name as mine, testing positive for cocaine and heroine. I could write it off as being in the 80's, and that was just part of the culture of the decade, but you really can't excuse anything like that. I could also pretend that I am not still angry about it, that I have forgiven her, and that she has seen the error of her ways, but I can't tell you that. This is not a happy story, and it has no happy ending...yet. I will say that after many years, I reconnected with family and found out that my aunt in-law took care of me the first seven months of my life, and this gave me a fighting chance.