My Life Re-written

Hello.

If you’re here again it means you’re intrigued, so I’m glad, and I’m sorry i took so much time to make a new entry but is my 1st time using this site so I’m learning with a youtube tutorial.

So, I started this blog explaining my reasons to do this, the root of my problems and a quick recap of my solution.

So I’ll start this post by sharing my story from the beginning.

I hate it when tv series or movies start at the middle of a story and give you flashbacks of the past as clues (except This Is Us, they do it expertly), but I’m not going to do that, i like my stories in a more linear way.

I was born in 1983, in Dominican Republic to a Dominican mom and an Italian dad. They met in Italy, while she was traveling with a dancing company (a company she was not part of,…….. more on this later).

According to my dad the story goes something like this:

“I was opening my car door for two lovely ladies i was with, we were going to have a very good afternoon, if you know what i mean.

When i looked up i saw the most beautiful woman walking past us in the sidewalk, it was your mother, she took my breath away.

So i went after her. I just left the two ladies sitting in my car. So i introduced myself and asked her for coffee.”

According to him, he’s always been a ladies man, even though he was married before my mom. What a great conversation to have with your daughter dad, thanks a lot.

So that was the beginning of their love story, i think this is an amazing start for a love story, if only he would have been man enough to see it all the way through.

So, as i understand it, they dated for a time in Italy and then they moved in together, (i’m not sure about the details in this part of the story but if i ever find out more i’ll write it down), i think this went on for a 3-4 years.

They decided to go back to DR and moved in with my mom’s family. She comes from a really big family, counting her my grandparents had 12 kids, they were all born and raised in a town in the countryside. They owned two huge plots of land were they had different types of plantation and animals.

i don’t want to dig deep into my mom’s family and her past because i need to devote several entries just for her but here I’ll just write the part relevant to this chapter.

So in this two-story house lived everyone cramped up into several bedrooms, i don’t know if the distribution was different at this time. They moved into a bedroom in the second floor. Not long after this she got pregnant with me and they held a little civil ceremony in the open area of the second floor (I’ve seen the pictures), this patio was huge, laid with fake grass and surrounded by black metal fence. I was born in this house, soon after my birth we moved to new neighborhood to the 2nd floor of another house.

For a time he was the breadwinner, my mom at home with me and he worked at a restaurant. As i said i don’t remember much about this time, i mean i was younger than 3, but I’m sure it was bliss. Having my mom and dad at home with me, this is my idyllic family life. I also know that my grandma on my dad’s side came to stay for a time with us, you have no idea how much i loved her.

I know they had a big party for my first birthday in a private club, and I’m sure i was the happiest little girl.

After about a year in that house we moved again to another house but this one only 3 streets away from my grandparents house and stayed there no more than a year, maybe.

And because i couldn’t have been happy for a long time tragedy struck. By the time i turned 3 years old my dad said to my mom he needed to go back to Italy for better opportunities and left us with two thousand dollars and a kiss. He never came back (this is a whole other chapter because is quite a story)

This has always been one of my biggest “what if’s“, and i have a lot of them. Most I’ve been uncovering and dealing with during my healing process but they will always be in the bottom of my mind.

But this one…. this one is a biggie.

What if my dad never left? My life would have been completely different.

I have a lot of gaps in my memory. This has always been a pet peeve of mine, the fear that maybe my memory is so screwed up because of everything i have been through. That’s maybe the second reason for writing this blog, i like the idea of having my life in writing, like a forever diary, specially the good parts but like everyone knows you can’t have the good without the bad, ying/yang.

So, my dad left and we moved back to the one i remember as my childhood house, it was amazing, we really did had a village to raise me. My grandparents were amazing, they spoiled me rotten, i have so many fond memories of them. And i had all of my aunts and uncles in the house, everyone helped with something, i even have an aunt that is only 7 years older than me, so we were kind of playmates.

My childhood was nice enough, the stuff i remember is more of like a movie that’s in pieces. I remember moments and sensations more than anything. I just hope as i re-live my stories that i find these moments to be good more than bad.

As i told you earlier I’m starting at the beginning, so here goes the pieces of my movie as detailed as i can.

I remember my grandpa (on my mom’s side), he had a colmado (in English i think it’s called a bodega), he was the sweetest man, he used to sharpen my pencils with a pocket knife, i used to sneak into the bodega and steal crackers and he knew, he was a really heavy smoker, he did the little horsey in his knee with me, we used to watch the WWE matches together, and i loved him like a father.

My grandma, that thank God, is still with us. She was harsh but i love her dearly, she was the one that made me eat everything on my plate, she was loud and the disciplinarian.

I remember my best friend at the time, we used to be inseparable. We used to play making a little kitchen, we made salads by picking flowers and leaves all around the block.

By this time, with my dad gone, mom had to find some work, so she started traveling and buying clothes and reselling them here. She wandered to offices and to clients with her bags to find clients. She eventually got so good at it, that managed to set up a little store in one of the bedrooms in the house. I remember this little room fondly, the floor was all carpeted and i enjoyed playing beneath the clothes.

The business did good, i remember my 1st school was a private, American one. We used to take annual Christmas trips to Italy, to visit my grandma and my dad.

So a couple of times a year my mom had to travel for shopping and i would be with all the aunts and uncles, and my grandparents, that remained in the house. Everything I’m recalling here was between the ages of 3 and 10.

My school years, those were tough. I remember being a happy really social child, but there is a gap here, a big one. There was a time i recall perfectly as playing happily with others and loving my school but then comes a time were my grades drop, every year i get enroll in summer school and that decline eventually lead to me getting kicked out and finishing highschool in another one.

As know i think of my older child’s schoolwork and his age and grade when they started leaving the hard, math and english homework, i think i was about the same age.

And my mom, my poor mom that couldn’t even finish primary school for work, couldn’t help me with any math or english. So she delegated to her village. The same village that was helping her raise me.

One of her brother’s at the time was working (or studiyng in university) with computers, he always had a knack for software and computer stuff. He knew english and was considered one of the smartest in the family, he offered to help. I remember coming home from school and after eating, sitting down on the dinning room with him and all my books. We always were in plain sight of everyone.

Now the layout of the house as i remember it comes into play here. So looking at it from the front, we had the colmado in the garage at the right, the back door that leads into the dinning hallway, narrow and long, and in the back the kitchen. To the left of the colmado, the entrance to the house, a little terrace with armchairs, a door to the living room and in it a door to the right of it connecting to the dinning hall and another hallway to the left that goes to 3 bedrooms and a bathroom. Behind the kitchen a stairwell going up to the second floor, where i lived with my mom, the stairs opened up to the master bedroom.

Now here comes the important part, across from these stairs was a door to the backyard of the house, it was a concrete patio where everyone stored everything. You know how in American houses the storage room is always the garage or the basement, well we don’t have attics or basements here but there is always a storage area, in this case it was the patio.

Besides the massive piles of stuff that was there, there was also a table and some chairs, out of sight of everyone because they only went there when looking for something.

I don’t remember when or why we changed from the dinning table to that table in the back for my homework, but we did. I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8.

Here we have the pieces of my movie where I wish I could close my eyes. I still had my uniform on, it was a little navy skirt and white shirt with the school logo. Everything started nice enough, him explaining some math, science or english homework. I remember his hand going up my leg and under that same skirt. And under my underwear. He even sat me in his legs, while explaining.

“Don’t worry, is a game”

He made me feel good and safe, for me it was a fun game, one that gave me pleasure. How can a 7 year old understand this is bad if no one ever taught her that. Besides it was someone she trusted. This kept happening for i don’t know how many years, and it kept escalating. At some time in my teens my mind blocked all this but now that i’ve uncovered all those repressed memories i have some horrible flashbacks of the stuff that happened between us.

Thinking back this was the change that i don’t remember exactly when it happened. My grades dropped, i started isolating myself from my school friends. To this day i don’t have one friend from my school days, still in my life.

I was broken, he broke me.

With this episode of my life i gained my second “What If?”.

What if i was never molested?, this is a big one.

I wish my life would have stayed in the course my mom wanted for me, she worked so hard and sacrificed so much so her children could have a better life than her. I love her and owe her so much.

So instead of wasting my time wondering what if?, i’m going to heal, i’m going to love and i’m going to become a woman my kids can admire.