Experience

To a greater or lesser degree people are shaped by their environment and culture. Of course, personality has something to do with this shaping process as well, but popular culture plays a huge part for most people. The thought of mass groups of people having the same general thoughts and ideas has always been distasteful to me. Especially since the thoughts and ideas are often distasteful to me, to begin with. I am making generalizations, I apologize, but perhaps that is because of my own situation...and personalty.

A person is first shaped in the home as a child. They are shaped by experiences and relationships with events and people they come into contact with as well as whatever media is allowed into the home.

In my case I was shaped with a bit of madness, drug addiction, poverty and freedom to roam the streets of the west bank of Minneapolis alone at the age of four. I was also shaped by Grizzly Adams, Battle Star Galactica, The Lone Ranger, and Sesame Street.

As I remember those times I remember very little interaction with people. I was close to my Grandmother. She is the only person I felt particularly attached to.

My mother told me during a long talk when I was about thirteen that she had contemplated having an abortion when she was pregnant with me, in fact she didn't stop contemplating it until it was too late. I think what overcame her lack of desire to have a child was her not wanting to hurt a living thing. She was one of those people that appears to feel more for animals than for people. And so this is how I ended up being.

I don't remember ever feeling attached to my mother. In all the time I spent crying for my mother it was the idea of a mother I cried for, a mother of my imagination. My fondness for my Grandmother was the only real bond I remember having.

We lived with my Grandmother when I was a baby, my mother and myself. She was eighteen when she had me, just a kid. Her father had died when she was fourteen and that was the person she was close to. My Grandmother was alcoholic and abused prescription drugs. My mother was the only child left at home and was abused or neglected during her teen years. When my mother had me my Grandmother felt guilty and for my sake she did the best she could to pull her life together in order to help take care of me. As I said, my mom was still a kid, she lived the life of a college kid.

During the same aforementioned talk with my mother she told me that I was the product of a one night stand while she was tripping on acid. What thirteen-year-old doesn't want that kind of information? It does wonders for the self-esteem. She had known the young man. She was seventeen and he was eighteen. They happened to run into each other at a summer fest/outdoor concert. This man's name (if my memory is correct and what she told me is true) is Marcus.
When Marcus found out that my mother was pregnant he asked her if I was his baby. She told him, "No." I have gotten to different stories regarding why she did this. (How very interesting...I have been capitalizing 'Grandmother', but not 'mother' and my father, whom I do not know, is the only person whose name I've given...all not deliberate.)

My grandmother's story is that she was scared that Marcus' mother would want to take me and she didn't want to loose me so she told me that she told my mother to say I wasn't his. My mother told me that she did not want to marry him, and during that time that would have been the natural outcome, so she lied and said I was not his.

"Oh, welcome to the world, child!"