My mother was born on December 22, 1950, I was born August 16, 1968, that makes her 17 years old when she became pregnant with me. I’m not talking about being 17 in the 1920’s and having a husband, I’m talking about 17 in the 1960’s, and alone and the raising you have had, you did yourself- big difference. In my lifetime I have been told she was “wild”, “trash”, and a few other unmentionable names…

She grew up the oldest child in a household where the father was gone days and weeks at a time as a truck driver and her mother leaving her in charge of her younger siblings. So much that eventually social services came in and removed all the children from the home and they were sent to live with neighbors and others in the community for a few years. Now that I am an adult, I have gone back as far as I can researching this. I have copies of the legal documents, although illegally obtained from the Social Services department of this county that contain all this information. I have found out the father in their household was not her real father, but the result of an affair her mother had. I have found out that my mother had a sibling, born in 1961, that was taken by the State at 10 days old right from the hospital and was placed up for adoption.

I am laying the foundation so that all will know and be reminded of just how old she was when I was born, and the situations that SHE had been through. We are all molded from our situations, right? We are affected by them, by how we are raised. We emulate the adults in our life during crucial times, even if they are wrong. It has been my experience that we either become what we know, or we run as far in the opposite direction from it and rise above it.

I am not trying to paint my mother to be anything that she wasn’t, but I am defending her, because she was 17. She was a child, and she had a rough beginning, a rough middle, and a hard end at 51 years old. She had beautiful olivey smooth skin and dark hair and eyes. She was 5’9 and by the time she was 40 that dark hair had become the loveliest silver gray. She was the life of the party; she had a way of entering a room by sweeping the door open in such a way I knew it was her – by that door sweep alone. When she laughed, her head would lean way back, and she’d be lost in it. She always stood out, being slightly taller, and for that very reason, so does her headstone, slightly taller than the rest…

Because my father got custody of me when I was three years old, I grew up with only seeing my mom every other weekend and sometimes not even that, and sometimes only because my step mother wanted to be rid of me for the day…or event. She was like a great aunt that lived far away, I loved her and was star struck by her. I thought she was so beautiful…but in my heart, my Gam was my mother. She was because my real mother couldn’t be and I do not, nor will I ever blame my mother for that.

Because she had no one to raise her, and she didn’t know how.

Because she was 17…