Happy Birthday to ME!!!!!!!!

Today is my 37th birthday.

In honor of the day, today's post is going to be all about ME.

I am born and raised mid-westerner, 50% Slovak and the other 50% a crazy-curious, mixed-melting-pot American, raised half-Catholic and half-alcoholic as a lower-middle or maybe its upper-lower class small town girl.

I was born 37 years ago today, in Gary Indiana. Then it was a gritty,steel-mill, unashamedly blue-collar town. My maternal grandfather worked in the steel-mills (I think) and my paternal grandfather was a Teamster, a truck driver. My mother was fired from her job as a bank-teller when her employer discovered she was pregnant with me. My father was a......hmmmm....I don't know what he did back then.

My parents moved to the small town I grew up in and still reside in when I was a year old. I think my dad had a job as a parole officer. He joined the police force and went away to the Academy when I was 3 or 4. I think he went to Florida. I remember him coming back. My mother stayed home with my sister and I until I was 5, then she went back to work.

I am a mother,wife,friend,lover.
I love things,people and places.
I love them wholly,completely,deeply and forever.
I have been asleep.
I have been awake.
Sometimes I feel suspended between two extremes.

I love to write.
But am I a writer?
I certainly am no author.
I long to be heard.
I fear being heard.
For being heard means
being misunderstood,
judged,
punished.

I fear death.
I fear that feeling that awakens
me in the middle of the night
with my own screams.