In the beginning

This is an introduction of sorts I guess. I am a woman. I am a fat woman. I live life on the double edged blade of “fuck, that toothpaste smells too spicy for you” and “I don’t give a fuck you pour the gasoline I have the matches.”

The longest relationship I’ve been in is with an asshole named Generalized Anxiety Disorder and it’s going on 25 years strong. It’s a hate/hate situation.. absolutely no love here. It controls me. It says AAA in rapid succession and I say how high. (That’s a terrible gamer joke I apologize, you have to hit A to jump…. oh nevermind it was funny when I thought about it at 3 a.m.) To start this off with complete honesty, I suck at commitment, so uhh regular posts might be sparse. But I’m trying.

Background.. Background.. I’ll share some of my things here, don’t want to pull you into my vortex of suck too much.

I am in my mid thirties. I look like I am pushing my late twenties. It’s really a curse I tell ya. I get carded everywhere. Anyways not the point. I was born and raised in the great state of Texas. Houston to be exact. I have 2 brothers I grew up with and at the age of 27 I found out I had two sisters and a brother from my birth father. (I’ll get to this later in it’s own post).

Bubba (not his real name but a nickname i grew up calling him) is my older brother. 4 years older to be exact. We really didn’t like each other very much until he moved out and got his own place. Then we were thick as thieves. Then we weren’t. Now we are floating somewhere in the inbetween space of I love you and I can’t remember your name sometimes. But that’s ok. I think that’s more on me than on him. I have this tendency to drift away from people.

Toad (again not his real name, could you imagine if it was lol!!) is my younger brother. 8 years younger to be exact. We did everything together growing up. I protected him. I fed him. I occasionally whooped his ass in a smackdown on the living room floor when the parental units weren’t home. Toad and I did that drifting thing too, again it’s more on me. Both him and Bubba know I love them unconditionally.

I was raised by my mom and my dad, who is actually my step dad but he’s been around since I was 2 and that makes him dad. Did you get that? I said dad a lot in that sentence. Keeping it moving. Birth Dad (referred to as BD from now on) and mom’s marriage shit itself in 1984. All the stories have been told, I believe about a third of them. Some of them sound like the plot to a lifetime movie. “When a marriage falls apart from guns, alcohol, illegal car parts, infidelity and kidnapping, the only way out is a 1980 crown victoria with no seatbelts, an overflowing ashtray and half a tail pipe.” I’m sure the truth can be glued together from the less theatrical portions of those stories. Anyways BD came to visit Bubba and I twice after the divorce. I remember him showing up at the door to pick us up and I was crying and throwing a fit because I just wanted to go swimming. He did this weird little hop and crouched down like a quarterback to get on my level, he swung an arm in a “come on old chap” kind of way and said “It’ll be fun I promise”. I remember being put to bed when the sun was still up because despite that car salesman pitch he had given me, there was a severe deficiency of fun that day.

Despite what you are reading, I did not dislike BD. I just didn’t know him. Until facebook happened. Imagine being 27 prime of your life right? Doing you, loving your partner, loving your life, and BAM the reality that there are other people out there that share bloodlines with you and in the case of my youngest sister share pretty much the same face, is displayed in a three sentence facebook message, “Hi I’m Juju. BD is my dad. I think you are my sister.”

There were weird months of feeling like a stranger talking to my sisters and younger brother. I came back to Houston to visit the family I had grown up with and agreed to meet my sisters and brother. Little did I know my older younger sister Tada had set it up to meet at her house so that BD would be there. It was awkward. I felt out of place. What a croc I thought, I get a second family and I still feel like an outsider. (this revelation will come about in another post of it’s own) I didn’t hate the interaction, I just don’t like being confronted with unplanned big life events. It’s like walking into the church on your wedding day and your spouse is missing an arm that was there last night. You still love the spouse but you miss the arm and wish you had been given warning. As I was leaving BD walked me to my car. He tried to shake my hand. HE TRIED TO SHAKE MY HAND. I laughed because I thought it was a joke. I realized at this point that he had no idea what he was doing. I thwarted his hand sword and gave him a hug and the image built in my head was gone when he said it’s nice to meet you. Nice to meet me. I guess he wasn’t wrong. I was a totally different person than the sniffling tear streaked cheeked girl he had dropped off in the parking lot of my apartment complex promising to come back, 24 years prior. But I had this image that he would be overjoyed with seeing me. But he was just as scared as I was standing in that driveway.

BD died in a four wheeler accident at his deer lease on my 30th birthday. Talk about a birthday fail. I went to Houston. I watched people cry over his casket. I did my walk by. I sat with my sisters and brothers (Bubba was there after much internal turmoil for not wanting anything to do with BD and now he was gone.) I couldn’t cry. I tried, I did. I couldn’t find emotion. I still felt like a stranger amongst family. I don’t remember much more about it. I’m sure there was alcohol involved. probably why I can’t remember.

Anyways that’s a little tragedy to start your day off. The next post will start early. I’m just going to carry you guys through my tunnel of suck. this should be therapeutic right?