Oh, To Be a Child Again

Barb wanted to hear about some of my childhood memories. I was actually really excited to sit down and start writing this because I have so many.

My parents divorced when I was young and my mom remarried shortly afterwards to a man that had three kids of his own. All boys. So we were pretty much the Brady Bunch. My mom brought three daughters into the relationship, he brought three sons. We were all pretty close in age, too. But then there were two middle children. If you haven’t heard, middle children are pretty terrible. I know. I am one. My step brother and I would seriously cause complete chaos. We were bad. We constantly picked on our younger siblings. We would steal cigarettes and beer and run into the woods and smoke and drink (yeah, we were like twelve). There were always so many people at the house though; no one really noticed that we were gone. We got away with a lot. And since we were the meanest of the bunch, our other siblings usually listened to us and did what we told them to. Which meant they got in a lot of trouble, too. Sounds like Holy terror, right? It was. My poor mother.

We weren’t always mean, and often times we would end up mad at each other and I would go play with my sisters while he went with his brothers. When we all did get along, it was fantastic. We already had six people, so we could play football, tag, hide and seek, etc., without really having to enlist more players. All the neighborhood kids, though, would come to our house and play because, well we were awesome. We would actually go to the corn field across the street in the dark and play flashlight tag. In a huge corn field. At night. Only one child armed with a flash light. We were stupid carefree. As an adult, I’m afraid of the dark. And corn fields.

Usually for the last few weeks of the summers and sometimes during Thanksgiving, my mom would ship us girls off to our dad’s house, wherever he may have been at the time. Remember, he was in the military. Every summer was a new place, a new adventure. By the time I was 13, I had been to just about every state on the East Coast and to three countries. I’d been to Niagara Falls, Disney, Universal Studios and just about every Six Flags on the coast. Summers with dad were amazing. Since he only got to see us about once a year, he really saved up and made the trip something spectacular. My dad spoiled (ok, still does) us with money but is an awesome dad, too. I can call upon him for ANYTHING and he’d be there in a flash. He didn’t try to buy our love, because he didn’t need to, he already had it. He just wanted us to have a life he never really got to.

My mother could never afford the luxuries that my dad could, so when we got to go with Dad; it was like living an entirely different life. Just something as simple as going to a movie theater was unheard of at home. My mom couldn’t exactly pack up six kids and take them to a movie. She just didn’t have the means to do so.

So my childhood was mostly spent it two different worlds. At home, I was a barefoot kid running around in the yard with her brothers and sisters playing tag until it was too dark to see. Camping, fishing and making forts in the woods. Again, as an adult, I won’t go into the woods, because I’m afraid of what’s in there, but when I was a kid, I’d spend hours in the forest. Isn’t that strange?

When I was with dad, I was exploring cities and staying in fancy hotel rooms with room service and cable TV. I sat in the passenger seat and told him how to get us across many states with an actual map. (Yeah, I don’t know how I ever did it. Thank God for GPS.) I was watching airplanes do tricks at air shows on the Air Force base, lying in the grass in the middle of the runway while they flew directly over our heads and took off right beside us. I was swimming in heated pools and lounging in hot tubs. I was getting my hair braided on beach boardwalks while eating funnel cakes.

Two totally different adventures. Both made me who I am today and both held the greatest times of my life.