La Mère et le Père

My whole family, give or take a few members, have been in the fishing industry for many years. My father worked as a dungeness crab fisherman in Alaska. It was a dangerous job, but my dad, like many of the Lloyd clan, were "adrenaline junkies". In their old age, which for us is past 45, most of them have settled down, gotten sober, and even a little chubby. My mother's father and my father worked on or around the same boats. From the beginning the relationship was destined to be tumultuous. 9 years her senior, and she was just 16. She was tall and beautiful, at least for 80's standards, with big hair and pastel-gloss lips. To this day I forget what color her eyes are, because she has never had the same eye color as me, and frankly I have never taken much to looking her in the eye; lies hurt me less that way. They fought all the time, as would be expected for a 16 year old girl who thinks she knows everything about the world and rarely ever really knows anything at all, at least not the stuff that comes with time and life lived.
2 years later, and pregnant with me, my grandmother sat her son and my mother down and told them what everyone else already knew: that they should give the baby up for adoption, because neither of them were ready to have children. They both agreed, though eventually my very pregnant mother ran away. I still do not understand this, though she has always been really good at running away from her problems, and perhaps this is where I learned to never deal with mine. She shacked up with some 45 year old drug dealer in Anchorage, while my father's family papered Alaska with "missing" posters. While everyone was worried, she was dealing drugs. They only found her once she was in labor at the hospital. 10 days after I was born I was taken away by my mother's mother for testing positive for heroin and cocaine, and I didn't see my mother or father for almost 18 months, when my mother came to get me with her new and terrifying husband.