"I'm Not a Pretty Girl"

I have a chip on my shoulder. I know this. The problem is getting rid of it. I have a hard time admitting that I need help and often accepting it. It didn't used to be that way, though.

I moved out on my own at 17, the summer before senior year in highschool. I needed a lot of help then and I took it when I got the offers. I had been living with the only foster parent that wasn't shocked by my behaviors. She was an amazing lady that grew up rough in her time as well. She was a wayward girl in L.A. growing up, had done drugs in the '70's and had been a groupy that had some fun, i.e. she slept with the Roger Daltrey of 'The Who'. Nothing I did shocked her. She had a VERY nice home complete with rescue animals. She actually had a little room built in the back yard completely enclosed with 5 sided fencing. Inside this room that was completely heated and cooled, was a pack of cats. She had six or seven of them in there, with their own radio and lights she left on all day. She was a truly neat person that I had the privilege of having pass through my life. Nothing fazed her.

A pretty shocking day in our lives was the day that DSHS called a meeting with us and my mom. This wasn't really unusual, we had them periodically. But when we got there they announced that it was time to reconcile our family. Collectively our jaws dropped. Ok. I know that none of us expected it but on top of that I don't think that any of us wanted it. I finally lived in a home, after 16 years of hell, where someone WANTED me to be there, set firm but reasonable boundaries and  loved me even when they drew a hard line and punished me. I know she was disappointed in me when I did wrong but she never made me feel like she was angry with me. And it was a breath of fresh air. To this day when she visits this state she asks for me at Fred Meyer and checks up on how I'm doing. She lets me know that she's proud of me because she knows from my history and her own life experience how hard it is for me to live a structured life.

When I moved home with my mom we clashed, as was normal. She didn't want to let me out of her sight and although I lied and found ways to get out of her house it felt like returning to hell. She didn't know how to deal with me after 3 years of being the mom I visited on occasion and I didn't know how to deal with her after being in a home where I fit so well. We didn't like it, in fact it seemed like a long few months. What eventually happened was that she agreed I could leave home as long as I checked in and as long as I attended school when it started. So I took myself, my bike and the puppy we had the last falling out over and went to Matoon.

I had friends that took their campers there and I thought it would be a good place to sleep.
The first day I was out there I met a couple on the run. She was underage and he was too old to be her boyfriend hence ending up in Ellensburg on the run. They had a tent and they invited me to stay with them. It was fun, they showed me how to clean up in bathrooms, how to steal St. Ides and get drunk. We met a few people along the way. I enjoyed it.

Eventually out there I ran into an older friend that used to own a music store in town living there with his gypsy band. When I say gypsy, I mean that they traveled in his motor home, lived in tents around it and played belly dancing music at fairs for a troupe of belly dancers. There were 3 of them and I lived in a tent with one. I was 17, thought I was wordly and I was willing to do whatever. The man that owned the motor home sold pot to make his living and I helped him with that. There were usually branches hanging around the ceiling of his trailer, drying. The only time I smoked opium was with them, they had picked it in Yellowstone and saved it. I didn't notice that it did much, though.

The motor home man was a grumpy old fucker and he tended to make us all a little miserable. His big problem was that his shitty personality interfered with getting women and he wanted me to recruit them for him. I tried but he sucked as a human being and that made it a mission impossible. So for about a month and a half I lived at the wonderful Matoon. One thing that really stands out to me was one time the girl from that original couple came and found me. She was afraid, her older boyfriend was losing it on her and he was big guy. He was threatening to hurt her. I remember standing up to him, knowing it was the right thing to do, telling him he would have to get through me to get to her. I was 17, skinny from lack of eating and 5'2". I really have no idea what I thought I could do to protect her but it's an instinct I feel like I've always had. I went to the gypsies for help and the response I got was that it was 'their' business. That they didn't want to get involved. I had 3 able bodied adult males and out of us all the only person that wanted to help was me. I still don't understand that.

One day when i had ridden my bike into town to hang out at The Four Winds I ran into my best friend's ex. I didn't care much for him before but this time something clicked. We smoked pot in an alley and he offered to let me stay at his place. It was a good offer. I had been living in the woods with these men long enough, was tired of having rules put on me by someone that also expected me to bring them food. So I went. That first night was amazing. I knew that there was something between us but all that really happened was we slept on a couch together. But as the night of uncomfortable couch sharing wore on, we kissed. It was sometime after the sun started rising, we were half asleep, cuddling from lack of space and we kissed. I fell, immediately.

That summer was incredibly hedonistic. Everything was about sensory fulfillment. We moved so many random people into that house that we hardly knew. It was genuine hippy commune living. A few people I will likely never see again, one woman I keep in touch with on Facebook and adore from a distance, one person is a man that helped me in the worst of my eventual drug use and maintain contact with to this day. One person I met there is dead, murdered by a close friend and remembered as well as celebrated by many people he may not even know he touched that deeply.

In that house I conceived my first child, which I lost shortly after we moved out. I met the first people I ever knew that traded food stamps for weed, fell in what I thought was love for the first time, took showers with multiple other women in a non sexual way.  It  was a very adventurous summer. I spent the bulk of that summer checking in with my mom but refusing to tell her where I lived. I let her know I was still alive and in return she let me have my freedom. When I told her I was pregnant, however, that was another story. She threatened to call the police, threatened to press charges against this 23 year old man. So I lied and said that I had lied. Said I wasn't pregnant, just wanted to see what she would say. Later, when I miscarried I probably needed my mother but I couldn't call her, because I had said it was all a hoax. I was pretty alone when I miscarried. He was relieved and I was devastated. I had named 'her' Elora Anastasia. Elora means "sun ray, shining light" and Anastasia meant "Resurrection". I picked Elora and he had chosen Anastasia. By the time I had miscarried though it had all already fallen apart.


We had been evicted from the low income housing apartment because there were too many of us there. We were living with a woman we had met through a tweeker we knew. They had decided that I was a killjoy (I was) because I was moody. Truth be told I had quit smoking pot as soon as I found out I was pregnant and I resented the lifestyle of those around me for continuing as usual. The day I started to miscarry I remember well. I was in class and felt what seemed like a rubberband snapping in my uterus. It was very noticable and made me nervous immediately. Later that night I had cramps, I knew what was happening. I may have only been seventeen but the horrible feeling I got from it was that of a mother. I knew my child was in danger, knew something was wrong. We went to the ER and they saw nothing during the ultrasound, we had to do a blood test to even confirm I was pregnant. They had me come back the next day to do another blood test for comparison.

That day was a long day. It's hard to explain the immediate bond a woman feels the moment her mind wraps around the fact that she's pregnant. The moment the realization set in I WAS a mother. I began to have dreams for my baby, set out to find a name worthy of this child that I absolutely knew was going to be a girl. I made life changes to make sure she would be healthy. I felt so close to her. And the blood test results came back. My HCG level was dropping. She was gone. They were in fact surprised that I caught the pregnancy in the first place, it was so early. They said it would seem like a normal period and then would be done. but it felt like failure. I felt like I knew this little person, had carried her in my young body and tried so hard to do the best for her. And I had failed. I think that every woman that miscarries feels this way, feels like she hurt her baby, caused it to die. The 'what ifs' run rampant. We find every angle we can to hold ourselves explicitly responsible. But the truth is that in his family there are mental retardation s.  Many of these children are never born as a natural defense against defects. This was possibly a case of that. But I took it hard.