Chapter 4 · Another version

There is another version of this story to tell, leading up to this point in my life. A version where I could highlight the pain, confusion, and difficulty I experienced as a child and how it also had a significant effect on me. In this other version, I share all of the same details with the previous version except, in this one there is a little more history, a little more detail and a little more context.

This one starts off with a woman (my mom) and a man (my dad) young, free, and in love in the 70's, having a little baby boy named Mikey and living on a farm in Maine.

It is not important why the relationship did not work, but my parents decided that they were not going to stay married, and when I was around the age of one, they got a divorce. My father stayed in Maine and my mother moved around with family and friends in Massachusetts before settling in Beverly.

I can vaguely remember little snapshots and picture-based memories of my time moving around with my mother. I can remember moments as a child with my dad when he would visit me on the weekends. We would go to the store and I would want to play catch so we would buy these little pink bouncy balls from the store and play catch at the commons in Salem or at a park or field in Beverly. I have many hazy and fractured memories about these years of my life. When I try to recall them, they seem scattered and difficult to see clearly, like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle.

I don't remember much until around eight years old. My mother and I lived on Mulberry street in Beverly and I was happy. I had friends and a routine that I liked. I wanted to be a policeman and loved dogs including Casper, a big white neighborhood dog that I had befriended.

At this point two worlds began to collide as my parents both created lives for themselves and tried to include me in them.

My father had remarried and was starting a family. He had started building a house on a piece of land in Maine, and was going to create a life there in the woods. When I say in the woods, what I mean is that he was intending to build his own home out of materials that he could get from his land, and live off that land. He was very motivated and ultimately spent a better part of my young life building and improving on that property.

This lifestyle was much different than the life I had with my mother. Each time I went to see my father and returned home to my mother It was like their two different worlds were clashing inside of me. This was quite a shock to my system each time I went back and forth, but I wanted to be a part of both and each one had something different to offer me.

I often compared them to each other or used their differences against the other parent. There were many fights and arguments about which one was best for me, how much of one parenting type should be pushed on me, or how much time I should spend in one place or another. I can honestly say that there were times as I got older where I genuinely did not feel like I was part of either one. I felt like I did not really belong.

When I was around nine or ten my mother met someone she wanted to keep around. He was younger than anyone she had dated before and he acted friendlier toward me, kind of like a big brother. He tried harder than most of the other people my mom had been seeing to connect with me.

He tried to spend time with me, talked to me, and even put me to bed. I was afraid of the dark and he told me that if I turned out the lights, then the monsters I was afraid of couldn't see me. He said if I couldn't see them, then they couldn't see me. This was revolutionary thinking and I was sold, no more scared of the dark. It seemed like he wanted to stick around and I was ok with it, so my mom got my approval and they began their journey together.

Eventually he became a permanent part of our life, and he and my mother got married and started a family of their own. I felt at the time that this was a good thing, but it also started to change things in my life and in my mind.

While all of this was happening, I did feel like this was my family. I did not feel lost, out-of-place, or confused about our family system and my place in it. Those feelings didn't happen until much later after my struggles began. I talk about them now as the excuses that they became. Excuses for me to act out and make my family feel guilty or responsible for my actions even though they were not.

Now in this version, where I highlight some minor emotional struggles of my childhood, I know that some of you reading this right now are thinking, that this explains why and where I started to take a turn toward the dark side. That, because of how I did not feel like I fit into either family system, I started to look elsewhere to belong, or that I acted out to get noticed, etc. However, I tell you about these struggles because they are not the factors that led to my desire to use. We will get to that later.