My Mixed Up, Loveable Family

My Mixed Up, Loveable Family
I have tried many times to write a biography. I always get stuck. It just seems that there is too much to say, and too much explaining to do. Many times, when I have tried to explain my family history, the response has been simple confusion. And I can’t explain who I am, without explaining my family history. You see, I’m from a large, rather complicated family. I will start at the beginning and try once again to explain my origins.

I was the third daughter of Bud and Mary. My oldest sister, Kaye, was just two months shy of being three years old, and my other sister, Cheryl, was just a little over a year and a half old when I was born. My mother died nine weeks after I was born, on Kaye’s 3’rd birthday. My dad was left with three baby girls. So where was he to turn for help? He did the only thing any well raised son would do. He turned to his mother.

His mother was already, at this time, mother to eleven children (she had another son about two years later, to make an even dozen). My dad was the oldest. Her youngest at this time was David. He was about 5 years old. But, she was a wonderful grandmother, and she loved us very much. She was my Granny, and she gladly added us three girls to her family. Then my dad remarried and this is where things get a little complicated.

The woman that my dad married, Ann, was my mother’s first cousin. Ann’s father and Mary’s mother (my maternal grandmother) were brother and sister. Now if that doesn’t complicate things enough, my dad and his mother had a major battle at this time. You see, my sisters and I may have been Daddy’s little girls, but Granny wasn’t about to let go of us. She was prepared to do whatever it took to keep us, and was willing to go as far as to take her son to court for us. It didn’t have to go that far, though, thank God. They finally made an agreement. It wasn’t perfect, but it was workable.

This is the basic agreement, as I understand it, although I only found out about these details when I was in my thirties. My dad and his mother agreed that while he would take my two older sisters to live with him and his new wife, Granny would keep the baby, me, with her and her family. Dad would only agree to this if Granny promised to never move very far away. And so that’s the way it was. I had two families. I called my dad, Dad, and I called my grandfather Dad. Granny was Mommy to me and Ann was Mommy to my sisters. Are you still with me? It gets just slightly more complicated because, of course, more children were born.

Dad and Ann had their first child, Harvey, a year after they were married, in July. Granny had her last child, Dad’s youngest brother, Gary, two months later. Gary and Harvey were about two years younger than me. Gary was my uncle and Harvey was my half-brother. Growing up with this, I just kept it all simple and called them both my brothers. We were all together most of the time anyway. My dad and Ann had five more children, making a total of nine for my dad, counting me. Everyone was my brother and sister. All eleven of my dad’s siblings plus the other eight of his children. Once, when I was about ten years old, a girl asked how many brothers and sisters I had. I didn’t want to go into the whole story so I tried to quickly add them together. It wasn’t very good math, but it was a quick estimate, I answered eighteen. The girl then asked me if I was Catholic, I had no idea what that had to do with it, but I told her no. Okay, you say, enough is enough. I’m getting stuck again with the explaining.

I’ll just go through this, and I know it sounds a little like the “I’m my own grandpa” thing, but if you’ve gotten this far, you can probably figure it out. Remember I said that Ann was my mother’s first cousin. That means my grandmother on my mother’s side was my half-sister’s and brother’s great aunt. And, likewise, their grandmother on their mother’s side was my great aunt. Me and my two older sisters called my grandmother, Grandma. My younger half-sisters and brothers called her Aunt Kitty. Follow? Oh well, I was probably fourteen before I really understood it.The main thing is I grew up with a lot of love surrounding me, and it was great, as long as I didn’t have to explain it to anybody. And, anyway, its given me a lot of stories that I need to write, but maybe I should stick with fiction. It’s so much easier to explain.