My Bio

I guess I will start this off with a bit of my grandparents history as that is a part of what makes me who I am. My grandmother was born one of 12 children to a upper class family of english descent. She was diagnosed with extreme scoliosis and dropped out of school in the eighth grade to spend a year in a body cast to try and correct her condition. That of course did not work, and she was left with a horribly twisted back and lifelong scars from pressure sores the cast caused. Her parents were told that she would probably not live to reach her 20th birthday and would certainly never be able to have children.


Her 20th birthday came and went, she survived to the doctors amazement. Around that time she became fasinated with airplanes. I think because of the freedom they gave one. She would go to the airport and hang out around the hangers. The pilots were soon asking for her help when tinkering with their engines. See at that time (the 30's) there were no airplane mechanics really everyone had to learn to fix their own plane. As my grandmother was a tiny woman (about 4' 6" when I was growing up because of her back being twisted partially), her hands were able to get into small places that theirs couldn't. She began hitching rides on the planes and soon they were teaching her to fly.


My grandmother told me that she was the first native Conneticut woman to get her pilots license. Apparently another woman had come over from another state and just beat her out for being the first woman in the state to get a license. But still it was a heck of an accomplishment for the woman who wasn't supposed to live until 20. I remember looking at her pilots license in later years and trying to imagine what it must have been like for her. How exciting it must have been and how freeing for her.


When she was in her early 30's she met and fell in love with my grandfather. He was a much older man, a polish immigrant. Of course her parents didn't think he was right for her, and his children from a previous marriage were not real thrilled with a stepmother their age. But they persevered and were married. There my grandmother dified the doctors again and became pregnant. My mother was born, and 6 years later my uncle was born. The last delivery almost killed her as the doctors had predicted and the doctor at that time told her if she got pregnant again to find another doctor as she had scared him and he cared about her as he was a family friend. It was only a couple of years later that my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer and he died.


My grandmother was convinced by her sister who was living in Utah at that time to move out there. So to get a fresh start she did. A few years after she moved out there she married again. This time it was not a happy marriage, but more one of convience to have a father for her young children. Unfortunately soon after the wedding, he asked her if she could get rid of her children somehow. This was in the mid 50's, divorce was not an option to my grandmother. So when my mother came to her at age 14 1/2 and wanted to get married, she agreed. In later years I believe she realized what a mistake that was, but at the time it seemed to be the best thing to get out of a bad situation.


So my mother and father got married, he was 17 to her 14 1/2. She became pregnant a few months later and I was born 2 months before her 16th birthday. My grandmother would tell me later, how she was watching through the window of the delivery room and saw the doctor toss me negligently onto a table. I was born dead, a blue baby as I have heard them called. Well my grandmother was having none of that and charged into the delivery room and berated the doctor and demanded that he work on me immediately. So my grandmother was my savior, a roll I feel she performed several times in her lifetime.


Shortly after my birth, my mother and father were divorced. Neither one was mature enough to be married. The only memories I have of my father when I was young is of being on his parents farm. First he was milking a cow and I got slapped in the face with the cows tail...not a pleasant experience. lol Then I almost got my fingers cut off in a belt driven cement mixer that was running in the barn. Not the greatest of memories to have.


When I was about 2 1/2 my mother married again. This time she married an alcoholic that used to beat her. My halfbrother was born when I was 3 1/2 and though I have no memory of that stepfather at all I wonder if he ever beat us too. The only memory I have of that time is of a major earthquake in northern Utah. I remember the nicknack's flying off of my mother shelf on the wall. My mother tells me I was in bed asleep and came out and asked who "throwed" me out of bed. lol


For a short time I lived with my grandmother while my mother lived in another town and went to beauty college. These are the first happy memories I have. By this time my grandmother was a widow again having lost her second husband to cancer also. She never remarried and was content to enjoy her grandkids. She lived in a house up on a hill with a rock garden behind the house on a slope. In front of the house was a large lawn with a beatiful big tree. That tree...ahhh I loved that tree. I would climb that tree and be tarzan, leaping from branch to branch, dangling from the limbs. Now of course this gave my grandmother fits, especially as there was a faucet directly beneath the tree. If I wasn't in the tree I was galloping across the lawn whinnying like a horse.


All too soon my mother graduated from beauty college and getting married again. I was about 7 years old at this time. My new stepfather was a small dark man. He told my mother he was a full blooded cherokee indian, though his relatives later denied that. About a year after she was married my little halfsister was born. This husband too was a wifebeater, but my mother stayed with him moving all over Nevada and New Mexico, from job to job. My mother didn't leave him until he decided to grab me by the hair and pound my head against a cement floor, giving me a brain concusion. I was 12 years old at this time. When my mother went to the police to get a restraining order against him, he threatened to kill us all. The judge told her she was a bad wife...ahh the bad old days with no women's rights.


So my grandmother and uncle came down with a uhaul truck and hauled us back up to Utah from New Mexico. I remember having horrible dreams of coming home from school and everyone would be dead. I can remember the vivid red blood in my dreams.


At this point I haven't really mentioned my mother. On purpose I suppose. My mother was a screamer, the only memories I have of her is of her screaming at us kids over everything. Calling us names, snearing and just generally degrading us. I never felt any love from her, it seemed to me that she hated me (now I think she was just taking out misplaced anger on us, me in particular). I never understood where it came from. My grandmother was the sweetest most wonderful person I have ever known. She never had a nasty thing to say about anyone (well ok, rarely ;)). All the neighborhood teenagers hung out at her house and she loved them. She used to say that she would much rather keep their company than the people her age, because they were boring. lol I have to agree, about 90% of my friends are younger than I am also.


One time when I was about 13 or so my mother hit me in the face with a big metal mixing spoon, gashing me right under one eye. I went to the police station and told them what had happened and that I didn't want to live with her any more. They told me to shut up and go home.


The small northern Utah town that we lived in was 90% mormon, because we were not mormon and my mother was a divorced woman working in a truck stop we were treated contemptuously by children and adults alike. I was constantly ridiculed and abused by the other students in the school. I ended up being friends with the mexican children (the migrant workers kids) as we banded together for protection more or less. At first they were leery of this "white" kid that wanted to be friends, but I soon won them over and my best friend until I left that town was a mexican girl named Rafaela.


I was horribly unhappy (in fact the only time I had been happy that I could remember was when I lived with my grandmother), and one day a native american girl that was kind of a friend came to me. She was in an exchange program that the mormon church was running, taking native american children off the reservation and having them live with a mormon family to go to school. She was from the reservation in Arizona (navajo), she was unhappy and wanted to run away from home and go back to the reservation. She wanted me to go with her and because I was so unhappy I agreed. I was 14 at this time. Now up until this point (and for a long time after) I had no interest in boys, all I loved was horses. I had never even so much as kissed a boy, had no interest in it.


So we took off one day from school, stopped by my house and grabbed me some clothes and started hitch hiking. We made it about halfway through the state (going from north to south, heading to arizona from utah), when night came we were picked up by two men in their early 20's I believe. They drove out to a deserted road and then stopped the van (vans were big in the 70's, with beautiful scenes painted on the sides). One of the guys took my friend and went off with her (I think she probably went along with what he wanted voluntarily). The guy who stayed with me turned around in the seat (I was sitting in the back seat, he was the driver) and started touching me. I pushed his hands away and said no. He tried a couple of times and then hit me upside the head a few times, making my head spin. Because of being beaten and mentally abused the whole time I grew up, I gave up at this point and let him do what he wanted as I lay there and cried. I don't really remember much of what happened, just that I was no longer a virgin through no choice of my own. After he was done and my friend had come back with the other guy, they took up back to town and dumped us off on a street corner. We ended up spending the night sleeping on the slanted cellar doors to a church, some small amount of heat radiating through the doors kept us from freezing to death in the March very low night temperatures.


The next day we took off again, I don't really remember what I was thinking at this point. But I did know that my mother would have no sympathy for me, so I kept on going. We got a ride with a young man that next day who took us to his parents house, right away they figured out what was what and promptly drove us to the police station. We were busted. A call to my mother and she and my grandmother were in the car heading to St George Utah (which was about 400 miles from home). the indian girl got her wish and was shipped back home. I still remember my mothers comments when she got there, mad as hell at the inconvenience I had caused her. The rapist had left his calling card on my neck. My mother took one look at me and sneered in her nastiest voice, "I hope you had fun." I think that is when reality hit me and the shock of all that had happened to me slammed home. I turned to my grandmother for comfort(I am so very thankful to her, I think she is the only reason I am realitively sane).


When the story came out, my mother took me to the police department to file a report. At this point I should add that I was one of those early developing girls, wore a bra when I was 10 etc. So at 14 I looked 18, which was not to my advantage. I can still remember the police looking at me and doubting my story, sneering and basically implying that it was my own fault and I deserved it, probably asked for it. They made me take a lie detector test. It was the most humiliating experience I have ever been through. I told my daughter later I would never force her to go through what I had to go thorugh, of course now I guess they are better, this happened in 1972. Of course nothing ever came of it, I doubt they even tried looking for them.


After this I became...how to put it, uncaring about myself. My mother had immediately assumed the worse about me and so did everyone else in that town. So who was I to think differently. The one thing I never did was drugs, though offered. I couldn't stand the thought of messing with my brain that way. lol But as for the rest, it didn't matter, I didn't matter. Shortly after that I found a horse for sale for $100.00. I worked 3 jobs that summer to get the horse some basic supplies and food. I was in love, with a horse. lol I remember going out to the pasture where my horse was and crying against her neck, when things seemed to unbearable.


When I was 16 my mother decided to move to Idaho to live with a truckdriver she had met at the cafe. She agreed to let me live with my grandmother to finish out the school year (also probably to keep me out of sight from her much younger boyfriend I think in retrospect). During the summer I went up to stay with them and shortly after I got there, she found out that he was a pedophile that was trying to mess with my brother who was 11 at the time. We left that day and lived in a stationwagon for about a week, my mother, 3 kids and a collie cross dog. My mother and I worked as motel maids for cash for that week to get enough money to move back to Utah.


My mother got married again during my senior year of high school, to a divorced man with 7 kids (2 married and out of the house, the other 5 still at home). We lived in a 3 bedroom house with 4 kids in each bedroom. Needless to say it was crowded and the one daughter was a year younger than I, knew me vaguely and was horrified to suddenly find me her sister. She was a snob and I was not good enough to be part of her family. I graduated from high school In May when I was 17 1/2 (my birthday is in August). My new stepfather had decided to move to Nevada, this was in july one month before my 18th birthday. Got dragged to Nevada, because as my mother said I had to do what she said until I turned 18.


When I turned 18 I left and went back to Utah to my grandmothers. While there I was driving with a friend and her baby to the next town to go shopping. We had a blowout in the rear luckily. We were on a part of the road with swampy areas on both sides, so there was no real shoulder to pull off on. We did the best we could, and she told me she had never changed a tire. I said I had, so I would change the tire. We got out of the car and the baby was laid on the seat of the car (this was before car seat laws and she didn't have one). We stepped around to the back of the car so she could open the trunk. I was standing next to her, when for some reason I stepped back away from her and further off the road. To this day I don't know why I did that, I was going to get the tire and jack out. I believe a guardian spirit was with me that day, because I had to reason to do what I did. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a car speeding straight at my friend. The next thing I remember is my friend lying crumpled on the ground, she looked dead, I thought she was dead. Her car (which was an automatic and in park) was throw about 100 feet off the road by the impact. The other car was a ways down the road crosswise blocking traffic.


I could hear the baby screaming, so I ran toward the car. She had been thrown to the floor and was covered in the red soda I was drinking (at first glance I thought she was covered in blood, though in hindsight it looked nothing like blood). I picked her up and headed back to the road (I was in shock and not thinking about not moving the baby in case of injuries). As I got to the road my friend (Becky) regained consciousness and because her baby was crying tried to get to her feet. I kept telling her that she had to lie still, that the baby was all right. I will never forget that as long as I live.


The car that hit her, was going an estimated 55 to 60 miles an hour. The driver and his new bride and gotten up extremely early to get married in the mormon temple, he had fallen asleep at the wheel. He never applied any brakes and pinned Becky between the two cars. So when Becky tried to get to her feet, her legs (which were completely crushed) were bending in all the wrong places. That image is one of the most vivid horrifying memory I have of that accident.


By the time the ambulance had arrived, someone took the baby from me as I was obviously in shock. I remember the ambulance guys talking about what a miarcle it was that she was still alive. The baby was checked out, she was bruised and shaken up, but otherwise fine. Becky had both legs crushed, her pelvic bone broken in several different places, burns on her back from the radiator, a broken finger and various other cuts and bruises. At first they talked about amputating her legs, but were able to insert steal rods instead.


Even though I had been untouched physically, I didn't come through unscathed. I was having nightmares again, became really depressed and attempted suicide (half heartedly with a whole bottle of aspirin, that I chickened out halfway through). My grandmother decided that I needed to be out of that town and the memories, so back to Nevada I went.


I was there for about 6 months or so, until I was somewhat stable emotionally again. Then I hitched a ride back to Utah with my college going stepbrother. While there I went on a double date with Becky, her new boyfriend and a friend of his from work.


I suppose I should backtrack a bit at this point and tell you that all during highschool and up until that point, I had never had a boyfriend. I didn't trust men really. I had no reason to trust them.


I had gone out with "Bob" for a week, when we went with Becky and her guy to Idaho to visit some of his relatives. We were there for the weekend. On the way back, Bob suddenly asked them to stop the car, he jumped out and took off across a field. I was confused and thought I had said or done something wrong. His friend went out to talk to him for a bit, then they came back to the car.


Ahh the seventies (end of the hippy era, the ignorence of youth, etc.), well as we were lying in the back seat of the car kissing, he proposed to me (wow how romantic....not lol). I can remember my thoughts at that moment. "Wow someone actually wants me." So I said yes, we didn't know each other at all. About 3 months later we were married in Virginia City, NV at the Silver Queen Saloon. lol


I was pregnant by that time, and shortly after we moved into our first apartment things began to change. I would sit beside him and want to cuddle while we watched TV, he would shove me away. Of course being pregnant, I would cry while he was at work, wondering why he even married me. What I didn't know (but should have guessed, because he had lost his lisence for a dui) was that he was an alcoholic. I soon learned that he was very mentally abusive. He would get mad at me and get in my face like you see drill sergeants in the movies. And then scream at me at the top of his lungs. I can remember standing there with all these words bubbling up inside me and not being able to say them. If I tried to talk back, stick up for myself, whatever I would start to feel sick. I had been taught well by my upbringing.


I was married to him for 23 1/2 years before I became enough of my own person to ask him for a divorce. I met a special person, who was a friend, a confidant. He amazed me by listening to me, for the first time in my life someone other than my grandmother seemed to care what I thought. I started to gain a little confidence. I decided to get a job (up until this point, we lived out in the hills, no running water, etc, only going into town to get groceries, I had no friends to speak of). With the job came more confidence, I eventually got a job where I was making more money than him. For the first time in my life, I was able to take care of myself and felt confident enough to try. I didn't love my husband, probably never did. It is hard to say now what if anything I ever felt for him, I think he killed whatever might have grown between us.


I know myself fairly well, I knew I wanted a divorce. But I knew I would get scared, revert to old bad habits and chicken out. So I tricked myself in a way. I opened a bank account solely in my name. I did this online and requested that the paperwork and complimentary box of checks be sent through the mail. The moment I pushed the enter key, I was committed. But still I said nothing, the days passed until I knew that I couldn't wait any longer. I was at work when I made the decision, that it would be that day. I worked about 3 hours later than my husband and by the time I would get home, he would be drunk. So I went up to my supervisor and told her that I needed to go home early. She asked me if I was sick, and I calmly stated, "No I am going home to ask my husband for a divorce." Well I guess that is about the last thing she expected to hear, the look on her face was funny. Though at that moment I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about doing the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I was there when he walked in. He was surprised to say the least by my being there. I asked him to sit down on the couch, and calmly told him I wanted a divorce. To my amazement he was calm also. I think he knew this was coming, or maybe not. I really don't know. But for the first time in our marriage there was no yelling and screaming. He moved out the following Monday (I asked on a Friday)...and just an fyi for anyone that might be in this situation, do not, I repeat do not give in to any pleas and have pity sex. Oh well live and learn. That earned me the nickname, "cold hearted bitch" when I didn't suddenly relent and ask him to stay.


All during our marriage I used to make excuses for his rude behavior (he was rude and nasty to about everyone, had no friends etc.), I found out later when we went to family counseling because my daughter was having problems, that I was co-dependant. I was always the buffer between him and the world.


It is funny to think about really, but my mother and he hated each others guts. I say funny, because they were so much alike in alot of ways. I actually felt sorry for him at the end of our marriage. The man had no joy or happiness in him at all. My daughter would stop what she was doing and stare in amazement if she saw him laughing. He never smiled either.


And that is basically where I am now, I am single still. I don't know what the future will bring, but I know I can do it. I have been doing it on my own for the last 5+ years now. But I still struggle to speak my mind, wants, desires. It is very hard for me to express myself that way some times. And if someone I loves yells at me, I get very upset. I try not to, but years of conditioning makes it so very hard. All the old feelings rush back in on me, the helpless feeling, the worthless feeling.


I feel so alone at times, especially now that my daughter had moved to Florida (she is an only child) and I am still here in Nevada. I don't know what the future holds, but I just keep going one day at a time and see where this ride called life will take me.

Thank you for reading. :) Julie