Prologue
For as long as I can remember, things around my house were not typical. My mother, though extremely loving, was never like my other friend's mothers. She was not feminine, she wore her hair short, her nails short, and never wore makeup. Her wardrobe consisted of Nurse's scrubs, t-shirts, and jeans. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I mean she was a busy woman and her appearance wasn't on her mind. She was concerned with work, and me.
Im Janet. The only daughter of my mother and father. Dad wasn't there and he probably won't appear much in this tale either. My mother, well she's pretty much the focus of this I suppose. She was my life support, and what made me the way I am today.
This isn't one of "those" stories either. My mother didn't ruin my life. If anything she made it interesting and fun. I didn't get everything my heart desired, but I got most of it. She worked very hard so that I could have the things that I had, and for that I have a great debt of gratitude. Just keep an open mind. Someone once said that it is not important for everyone to live a cookie cutter life. That everyone's life is different in some way. This is a tale of mine.
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Part 1
Technocolored Mother
"You know I could write a book about your life, and I don't say that to everyone you know!" Jenkins said through a smile.
"Well it's been different, that is true."
"But you, I mean, the way you just explained things....the way that you are..."He trailed off.
Jenkins is really high. As a matter of fact so am I. Im sitting in someone's house, DJ on the turntables, rolling on ecstasy. I have just had to explain to a room full of onlookers that the really neat light toy im playing with was given to me by my mother. I guess it's sort of weird that my own mom supports my drug habits, but really I mean, what is she going to do? Im 22 years old today, Im married, im more or less grown, even though there is a pacifier around my neck and im wearing plastic beads.
I just got through telling a story. I always have new rave toys. Can't say that I buy any of the myself, but they seem to come to me from the most unlikely of sources. My mom. Blinky lights, photon lasers, glowsticks, trance cd's, these are the little gifts that my mom buys me these days.
All right, all right so im a raver! Big deal, I go to parties, listen to techno, and I dance strangely chaotic for someone who took 14 years of classical dance. My mom, a hippie from the 70's, can oddly relate with my post teenage years rebel phase. She is probably the reason that I like all this stuff to begin with.
Im 6 years old. We have just returned from Atlanta, and I am laying in my bed lights off in my room playing with a fiberoptic light that she bought me at the laser show at Stone Mountain In the front room she's listening to Synergy, some of the earliest techno. The colors of the fibers change from blue to green to red, and the music hypnotizes me. I cross my eyes and the colors bleed into one another and I am transfixed in the swirly tornado of light in front of me. That is my earliest memory of how cool my mom could be.
Im 12 years old. My mom and cousin are both helping me glue glow in the dark stars to my ceiling. I got the idea from a dorm room at the University of Georgia that I stayed in on a state 4-H trip. The room had little dots of glow in the dark paint all over. We substituted the stars because we couldn't find paint. We covered the ceiling with the stars.
That night my cousin and I lay on our backs and look up at the ceiling. My mom comes in and checks it out. She says it's really cool and leaves to get a tape. She puts in the tape and pushes play. The song is 'Welcome to the Machine' by Pink Floyd. She says to concentrate on the music, to listen to the sounds and melodies and let the world just go away.
So I did. I stared up at the stars and let the music take me where it would. I crossed my eyes and the stars twisted around on my ceiling. The music was so loud and pounding in my head. It was my second memory of how cool my mom could be.
These are things that people just don't have. Some kids have cool parents, you know like mom's that smoke their kids out, or don't mind that they do drugs. Most people just don't have the memories that I have. Most people didn't have the kind of mother that I have either.
"So let me get this straight. All those toys you have all the time, your mom buys them?" a girl says.
"Yea, she kinda knows what is cool and what's not."
"That's awesome!"
"It's different....but I guess that it's kinda cool." I say embarrassed.
I keep twirling the ball of light on the end of the stick and watch the swirls of colored light forming into circles. I feel another wave of euphoria hit me and I sink back against the couch and listen to the hypnotic music being played by my friend Pat. I close my eyes and hold my breath as the drums begin to roll and the song rushes in an exciting swell. I let out my breath and I feel suspended in air. I try and open my eyes but my eyes are rolled back in my head, and the only thing that I can think of is that I feel really great.
Ecstasy is a wonderful thing. It's really not that great for you. It's something I wish I had never started. I would just rather not know that you can feel that great. There are all the myths about it also....Ecstasy does not make you want to have mad sex with the first person you see. You don't loose control of your bladder or anything like that. It is in all aspects the perfect drug. The only problem is that after time you have periods of depression. The Depression is terrible. That is why I wish that I hadn't started taking X.
But let's not get off track here. See this isn't a story about me being on drugs, it's about my mom. She wasn't a saint, I wouldn't even say she was a mother of the year, but she's my mom and I love her and that is all that really matters here.
I will never forget my 5th birthday party. I woke up that morning, and for your information this is one of the first memories of my childhood. I glanced out of the window of our trailer and in the field next to my house was a gigantic bouncy tent! Not only that but in my front yard was a cotton candy machine and a popcorn popper. My mom had also moved our dining room table outside. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen! I mean imagine being 5 years old and waking up to a small carnival in your front yard!
I bound up out of my bed, threw on some shorts and a shirt and ran outside. I ran straight for the bouncy tent and jumped inside. I think I must have bounced around in that thing for hours that day. My cousin Adam, and a few of my friends came by as well. We had cake and ice cream, and I opened presents.
Now how many kids in this world can say that they had a carnival ride at their birthday. Especially kids that didn't grow up in big houses with big front yards.
We never really had a whole lot of money. We always lived in the same place, Woodland Trailer Park. It wasn't the worst place in the world, but it was a far cry from the best. I wasn't one of those only children that got everything they wanted, but I know that my mom tried really hard to buy me most of it.
I always wore name brand clothing, back then it was Levis and Guess. I had everything that all my rich friends had except for a big house in a fancy neighborhood. I was well taken care of.
I never really thought that my life growing up was different, but apparently it was. My mom, being the hippy love child that she was, was way more relaxed than my other friend's mothers. This could have been terrible for her if I hadn't been so timid as a child. I was soft spoken and shy. She never hit me, rarely yelled, and hardly had to punish me. The funny thing was, she let me know when I was pushing her buttons with this look.
Oh my god the look. It was terrible! She looked at me like she would tear me limb from limb with her teeth and then spit me out in a river. She never did, but the possibility was there and I wasn't stupid. My other friends, they would push their parents to the breaking point and they got grounded and all kinds of scary shit. I wouldn't have that.
The only thing I really remember getting in a whole lot of trouble for was my grades. Mom wouldn't accept anything less than a B and when I made a C I would be grounded for the next 6 weeks until the next progress report came. The only time that would majorly suck was if I messed up the second 6 weeks of first semester. Then I would be grounded from watching television. That meant I would have to miss all those great Christmas shows and movies, and to be honest Christmas was my favorite time to watch television.
I also wouldn't get to go to any Christmas parties that my friends were having. Believe me missing one of my friend's parties would have been like missing a movie opening in Hollywood!
That is because all my friends were the daughters of lawyers, doctors, or politicians. They were all really rich, and they had the most amazing parties. I hated to miss them because they were so much fun. I guess mom knew that, and that is why she punished me the way that she did. She knew how to push my buttons and I knew how to push her's. I generally tried not to push her buttons. That is of course until Highschool, puberty, and my new found freedom of life came around.
Part 2
Glynn Academy we shall honor may we never fail!
Ha ha ha! Got another good one?
Glynn Academy High School is probably the source of all of my current mental problems. In fact im pretty much sure of that. All my rich friends, they turned into snobby stuck up bitches. They must have figured that I wasn't really a human being with feelings, because they all abandoned me when I got to Glynn Academy.
Two of them became cheerleaders, the other ones took their respective places in cliques, and there I was "Individual Janet" left to my own devices, free of peer influence, because I didn't have any peers. At least I didn't think so.
Not to alienate any of the people that I hung out with in High school or anything. Cause it's not like I was the weird goth girl that hissed at people as they walked by, I just didn't really make any real great friends in High School.
Perhaps it was my religion(which I will selectively not talk about), maybe it was the fact that I was overweight, or it could have been my clothing, I don't know. I have not really changed the way I dress still to this day. Now a days my attire inspires people to be themselves.
Who really cared about High School anyway. I had plenty of friends....just not at school. School was torture. I was a joiner though. I was in the band, the drama club, the future georgia educators(although the thought of becoming a teacher still scares me), and the 4-H club. It also seemed like I had school spirit cause I like to dress up for the spirit days. On Red and white day I would go totally overboard, on tacky day I would go WAY over board. On Decade day I would let my mom dress me.
We used to love Decade day. She would show me how to tye-dye, she would layer on my jewelry and necklaces, and paint a peace sign on my face. I think it took her back to the old days. She used to shake her head and say:
"If your Grandmother could see you now she would have a stroke. You look just like I did when I was in high school."
It's true. I have seen her prom picture with my Dad. I do look a lot like a young mom....er my mom young. I had her blond hair, her fair skin, her short bone structure. Now of course I have colored over the hair.
Coloring hair makes me remember my freshman year. I was going through some rough times with my mom that year. Dad reappeared after a 6 year disappearance, and wanted to be daddy dearest. I met a friend named Jodie that liked to smoke pot and get drunk, and she lived in my Dad's neighborhood. So of course it made since for me to spend a lot of time over there.
My grades slipped. Hahahaha my grades dive bombed! I made a D in Biology. Probably had to do with all those days that I just slept through class cause I had been up really late at Dad's watching the big screen tv he had.
Dad had to go out of town for a week, and he needed someone to say with my Granny so I volunteered. He told me it was time to show my maturity so I was alone for a whole week with dear old granny, and 6 party animals whose names I don't even remember today. We listened to my CD's and we drank my dad's tequila and triple sec. Then we polished off some other kid's dad's Crown Royal. Mixed with Diet Coke it wasn't so bad. I was drunk, and stupid, and it is a real wonder that I was able to cook dinner for my granny at all.
When Dad got home, he was furious. He didn't know about the liquor cause I made my friends replace what they drank before he got home. However the jacuzzi bath was really dirty, someone had written a message on the mirror in deodorant that I missed, and my hair was easter egg pink cause I had tried to dye it purple with Kool-Aid but I didn't leave in the Kool-Aid long enough.
He told my mom. I don't know how she figured it out, but two days later I was in the doctor's office with a rubber band around my arm. She was doing a blood test to see what drugs I had been doing.
Now I knew that mom smoked pot when I was a child, but I figured that she had stopped. I was nervous, my hands were shaking. She was going to know! She was going to kill me!
"Ok Ok! I have smoked pot....but only twice!"
"Well then your test should come up negative now shouldn't it?"
I hope so....cause the twice thing was the truth. I was still real worried about it. I mean what if someone had laced that one joint with cocaine then mom would think I was snorting coke! I didn't want her to think her 15 year old daughter was a crack head druggie!
She took me back to my Dad's and Jodie was waiting on me there. She waved and ran up all silly to the car and I could tell she was high. Oh Shit. Oh shit.
Thankfully mom didn't say anything to her. I just knew mom was gonna say something to her and make me look all lame. Before I got out of the car my mom said:
"Janet, maybe you should consider the kind of people your hanging out with."
"Whatever...." I said and shut the door and waited till she drove off to say anything.
"My mom's a bitch. She drug tested me."
"Oh shit dude!"
"She said that if I have really only smoked twice that it should come up negative."
"Oh well do you want to get high now?"
I smiled at Jodie. "Yea might as well get high now huh?"
"By the way, your hair looks really cool."
Jodie was such a bad influence on me.
The rest of the years at GA went by in such a blur of Band trips and spirit days. I wish that I had some memories that were....well memorable but I don't. Nothing happened to me that was real cool, or real bad. I was the target of a lot of ridicule, and my boyfriend Arthur went on his mission trip. My only other friend, Josh had made a whole lot more other friends and I was just another nameless face in the sea of students on this huge campus.
Now my senior year, that is a whole other story in it's self I guess. I'll try and sum it up for you.
I dropped band. There were some other classes that I had to take and I didn't have the room for it. Probably wasn't the best idea because Mr. Cordell, the band director died that year. It was also a bad idea because it seems like band and my other clubs were what kept me busy, without them I went a little bit nuts. I started skipping a lot of school. In fact I think that I missed more days than I was actually there. I would also skip classes while I was at school.
Needless to say I was in trouble a lot with my mom. With how she felt about my grades and school im surprised that she didn't kill me. I ended up screwing up my entire senior year and the way it looked I was going to have to repeat the year. I could not handle the embarrassment so I simply got my GED instead. Then everything changed for me some how.
Part 3
Growing and Changing
Mom had a lot of new friends, and she was doing a lot more different things than she did. She was going out partying in clubs in Jacksonville. Not just any clubs either, gay bars. Now I didn't think that she was gay, she told me that she was helping her friend who was coming out of the closet. I believed her, and honestly for her behalf she was telling the truth. However it was making things for me really hard. She wasn't around much, there was never food in the house, and she was constantly on my ass to get a job and support myself.
During this time we fought a lot about things. Everything actually.
One night I received a phone call from a friend of my mom's. Kim was asking me what was going on with my mother. I tried to explain to her that I didn't know what was wrong with her, but that she had been acting extremely strange. She told me that Mom had left a suicide note, taken a bunch of muscle relaxers and gotten on the back of a Motorcycle with her friend Carol. Kim had me convinced that my mother was trying to kill herself.
What follows is well....I suppose it is a two sided story. I knew that my mom needed help. What she was doing was very harmful, and I didn't want for her to end up hurting herself. I didn't know what to do, so I called a local mental health crisis line to ask advice. They told me that I should go with a relative who knows her well to a local hospital and discuss what we had been noticing with a councilor who would be able to help us find a conclusion.
I called my aunt who I figured was the only person who would be able to help me. She agreed that this is what we should do and we went to talk to the person at the mental health hospital.
While at the hospital things got away from me a bit. My aunt brought up the fact that my mom had been drinking more and using prescription medication. I answered all the questions that were asked of me, and I collected all the prescriptions from the house. Unfortunately, some of the bottles didn't have her name on them, and I think that that got her in a bit of trouble.
They committed her on the grounds of substance abuse. I had never meant for that subject to even come up, however it did. I can't really change things, though looking back if I had the knowledge then that I have now, I would have just left it up to my mom to figure out that she needed the help.
I was probably being the most selfish that I had ever been that summer. I was so convinced that it was time that I got out on my own that nobody could tell me otherwise. I look back on it and am so very sad at all my actions. The first one was leaving Brunswick for Seattle, Washington without saying good bye to my mom.
She wanted me to come and visit her at the hospital before I left. I thought that if I went there she would try and convince me not to go. Honestly I knew that if I had seen her I wouldn't have gone. I probably shouldn't have gone, but that is a whole other story.
So I was off for the Pacific Northwest. Once there I realized a whole lot. I realized that things aren't always what they seem, and that you really can't trust anybody. Both of my aunts had me convinced that this was the right thing to do, however once I got to Washington I realized that it was the total WRONG thing to do. I was bounced from house to house. I barely had any money. I didn't have any food, or any friends. I called my boyfriend, who by that point was pretty much my ex-boyfriend. He thought my situation was the funniest thing he had ever heard. I called some of my friends and they all told me to try and make the best of it, but to take the first ride home I could find.
So that is what I did. I tried to have as much fun as possible while still trying to find a way home. I explored the Pacific coastline, the beautiful Pugent Sound, fields of multicolored tulips, and most importantly myself. I met some pretty decent kids there as well. They helped me out a whole lot. I even shot off fireworks on the 4th of July, while freezing to death in the 48 degree weather.
It was my father who decided that it would be best to send me a plane ticket home. So that was that, and I came back to Brunswick with a book thick of memories and lessons learned.
End of that summer...the story of that ending with my Mom and I finally finding a way to be with each other.
I can't imagine what my life would be like now if we hadn't found a way to come together with each other. She would have missed out on so many important parts of my life. My first day in college, my engagement to my Husband, my Marrige....all things that are so very important in a daughter and mother's life.
I know that things with my Mom aren't exactly normal or orthodox, but im not really a normal or orthodox daughter, and she's not a normal orthodox mother. I am just happy that we aren't boring, otherwise I would have nothing to write about.
I thank the Lord above for so many things each day. For my husband who loves me, for the happiness in my life, for the blessings that I receive, and most of all for my Technocolored Mother.
This short story is dedicated to
My Mother, without you this would be an extreamly farfetched fiction now wouldn't it?
Jason McKinnon, Thanks for the inspiration to write this.
My Husband John Richard Dominy, because you believe in me and understand me.