My life as I know it began on October 28th, 1977, in Lawton, Oklahoma. My mother was in the Army at the time, assigned to Fort Sill, and my father was starting college. We lived in Lawton for two years, until she was reassigned to Fort Benning, GA (Columbus, GA) in January of 1980. We lived in a quaint little brick house near post for 10 years. In that time, I did a lot of growing up.
In February of 1982, my mother, Colette, left on an unaccompanied tour of Korea, and it was the first time she had been away for a long period of time. I was only 4 years old, but I asked my father, Martin, the day after she left: “Dad, why did Mommy leave?” He sat me down and told me that the Army said she had to go, but I never believed him, and he says I’ve never been the same since. She came back in September of 1983, and my father packed me up for the two-hour trip to Atlanta to pick her up from Hartsfield Airport. On the way back, they had a long conversation that I listened to while I pretended to be napping in the back seat of our Chevy Blazer. I may have been only going on 6 years old at the time, but even then I understood why my mother left: the conversation was my mother’s confession of cheating on Dad while she was in Korea.
This was only the beginning of a long series of incidents of Mom cheating on Dad that lasted for years. Her last trip, an unaccompanied tour of Germany in 1987(which had originally been accompanied, but Mom changed her mind three weeks before she left) was the last straw, both for Dad and for the Army. She was kicked out of the Army upon her return from Germany just before New Year’s Eve, and we went through two years of constant struggling, arguing, and agony. Dad had to sell the truck, and we eventually lost the house due to Mom’s credit card debt, and we were evicted on January 15th, 1990.
In those ten years, Dad was the one who mainly raised me. I was home-schooled for five years, and he taught me much better than public schools at the time were teaching other kids my age. I was educated in the basics, plus music, art, technology, and computers; basically anything and everything. When I left that little brick house at 12 years old, it hurt that I had to leave my childhood home behind so soon. I promised myself that someday I would return there, buy it back, and raise my family there. It’s been almost 11 years now, and I’ve never been back. Maybe someday I will be. Or maybe I’ve lost that part of my life forever. There’s the old saying, “You can never go home again.” I guess it’s true…
The History or Story Behind My Site
|
 |
