Here is Carolynn's Story so far...

Carolynn Marguerite was born on May 25, 1994 at 2:36 pm via Emergency C-Section. She was 12 weeks early and weighed 2 lbs 6 3/4 oz.

I will get to the reasons surrounding her early entry introduction into this world further down this page. For now I will start at the beginning... that seems like the best place to begin a story. :) To understand Carolynn's Story, you have to be somewhat familiar with my (Carolynnsmom's) story...

At the time I became pregnant with Carolynn, I was 27 years old, unmarried, and had been told from the age of 16 that I would never be able to conceive a child. I had been born with some screwy genetics and among those bad genes were Stein-Leventhal Syndrome (also known as Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome). Clicking the link will take you to a very straightforward and well written explanation of this nasty problem.

My own Mother and Father had 3 children. My eldest brother (20 years my senior), another Brother (14 years my senior), and finally, Me. I was born in 1965 when my Mother was 43 and my Father was 45. My Father always referred to me as a 'mistake', but I prefer the term 'unexpected surprise'. My Mother was a very overweight lady who probably had many different medical problems, none of which were diagnosed however since she never went to the Doctor. She died when she was 50 years old when a brain aneurysm that had gone undetected, burst during her nap. I was 7 years old.

My Father spent the next 9 years of my life blaming me for her death. I had argued with my Mother the day she died over not wanting to eat the ham and sweet potatoes she had fixed. In my house, if you didn't eat what was in front of you, you were doing some horrid injustice to the many starving children in China or India or whatever Country was in the news that week. Anyway, I was a 'picky eater' at that age and for whatever reason I didn't want to eat the food she had fixed. She yelled and screamed at me and finally gave up and sent me outside to play. Apparently she then lay down to take the nap she never awoke from.

At her funeral in Southern Illinois I was told by one of my Aunts not to cry because it would upset my Father. So I didn't. I was also not allowed to go to the graveside funeral as I was 'too young' to understand. So, I never really said goodbye to the woman who gave me life but whom I no longer have any memory of whatsoever other than through the one photo I still have of her and my Father on their wedding day.

Upon returning home to Indiana, my Father proceeded to become an abusive monster. I wasn't even 8 years old and this man who I was supposed to rely on and trust and love with my whole heart was telling me that I killed my own Mother. He told me she had become so upset over my not eating my meal that day that she had gone to bed and had a heart attack and died. That was also when the beatings began. My Father began beating me for every little mistake. He would, more often than not, use one of his belts. However if a belt wasn't handy, he would use his hands, a shoe, whatever was available at the moment.

I quickly learned to fear and dispise my Father. The one positive and wonderful thing that man did for me my entire life however was to marry my Step-Mother and give me a whole new set of Brothers and Sisters. My Step-Mother, who from here on out will simply be referred to as 'Mom' because that is who she is to me, is a wonderful lady. She had lost her husband to cancer a year or two before my Mother had died. So this was a remarriage for both of my Parents. The difference was that her children treated my father like gold from the moment they met him. The same can not be said of my own Brothers' attitudes towards her however.

I was a rotten step-kid for a few years of course, because at the time the memories of my 'real' Mother were still fresh in my mind. I had also never yet grieved over her loss. Through everything I put my Mom through though, she loved me anyway. My Father however, was determined to ruin the best thing that had ever happened to him. He disrespected my Mom and treated her horribly, all the while continuing to beat and mentally/verbally abuse me. If Mom stuck up for me, he would start yelling at her about this 'thing' of a daughter he had and what a worthless child I was and that I would never amount to anything.

Over the course of the next 10 years or so, Mom would get fed up with him and toss him out. I would have to go with him of course. The first time she threw him out, I desperately wanted to stay with her and escape the abuse and beatings from my Father. My Brothers came to the 'rescue' and forced me to go with my Father. We moved to a mobile home and my life became a living hell. I acted out in many different ways including skipping school for over a week straight. Through it all, my Father would tell my Brothers about what a horrid person I was and they would berate me for giving 'Dad' such a difficult time. Needless to say, I lost a lot of respect for both of my Brothers at this point in my life.

Anyway, my Mom eventually took my Father back, but because he refused to change or even make an effort to be a decent human being, she threw him out again. At that point I was finished with my Freshman year of High School and my Step Brother Bill and his Wife Marguerite told my Father that I was coming to live with them because I didn't deserve to be shuffled around and never really know what a 'Home' was like. I thank the Gods every day for Bill and Marguerite. When I use the words 'family' and 'brother' and 'sister', it was they that taught me the true meanings of those words...

I also need to say that when I was 16 years old, Marguerite and Bill finally sat my Father down and got him to admit, tearfully, the actual cause of my Mother's death and admit that he had abused me and blamed me for her death all this time. It was Marguerite and Bill that went to bat for me against my Father and realized that while I was less than the perfect kid, there were very deep, underlying reasons for my behavior. They did not just take his word for it and berate me for making his life so hard. Up to this point, that is all I had ever heard from my own Brothers.

Upon graduating from High School, I moved in with some friends of mine and after a month or so, that didn't go well and Marguerite and Bill got me out of that situation too and took me back in. It was then that my eldest Brother phoned me up and told me that as the 'unmarried' sibling, it was my 'job' to move to Southern Illinois and live with our Father and take care of him. I did as I was told. I spent a couple of years living as I had done in my youth, with this person who went right back into smacking me around and calling me names and making my life hell. The day he stopped physically abusing me was the day I stood up to him and hit him back. I had finally had enough. I was 20 years old and 6' tall and outweighed him by a good 50 pounds at that point probably. He came at me swinging and I shoved him backwards so hard he ended up on the other side of the room on the sofa in a heap. I told him that day that he would NEVER again lay a hand on me... and he never did. In fact, he basically stopped talking to me at all.

I had begun to notice that he was getting more an more frail as time went on. He began having really noticible problems with his memory and things started to change drastically. The car was repossessed due to him failing to make the payments... He could no longer do stairs and needed help in the bathroom and so forth. I tried telling my Brothers that Dad needed more care than I could provide. Their advice, grow up and deal with it and take care of him the way he had taken care of me all these years. If they only knew...

I don't remember exactly what finally got them to come and see for themselves, but they blew into town and before they left again, my Father was in a Nursing Home and I was left to fend for myself in an apartment in a town where I had no friends, no transportation, no job, nothing. The bills would be paid by my Father's Sister... the same one who had given me the brilliant advice not to cry at my Mother's wake all those years ago. Oh, and before my Brothers left, they made sure to explain to me how fat I was and that I should eat better. Then, they were gone. Gee... thanks?

I was in Southern Illinois because I had been told it was my 'job' to be there. Now that my 'job' was in a Nursing Home, I was desperate to get out of that horrid place and back to the Chicago area where I had grown up and had many friends and my Mom and Marguerite and Bill and the other people who truly loved me. In order to do this, I had to figure out something to do with all the crap that had been left with me. Since my Brothers had proved so useful advising my life up to that point, I was pretty well done with them. I began catalogging everything in the apartment that I could sell to get a bus ticket to get out of there. It was then that I saw an ad in the paper for a live in Nanny in a Chicago suburb. I gave the remainder of the stuff in the apartment I hadn't been able to sell or hadn't wanted to sell to a church member to hold for me, packed up what few belongings I had and headed for my new job and my new life.

My Brothers found my catalog of items I had made when I was trying to get the money to get out of that place. Rather than try to understand any of it or even bother to ask me for my side of things after all these years, they assumed I had been 'planning' our Father's demise so that I could profit from selling his things. It has been over 17 years that our Father has been dead now... one of my Brothers still refuses to have any contact with me. I can't say I'm all that sorry for his choice. He always reminded me of our Father.

Ok, moving on... More of this story on the next page...

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