E! True Hollywood Story

I feel the need to preface this by saying that I am not writing this to hurt anyone. My mother is not and was not a bad person. She has just made some bad choices, as we all have. It has been years in the making, but my mother and I finally have a decent relationship. This story I write, is only my account of my life. It is in no way intended to hurt anyone. With that being said. Here's part 2.

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My great-grandmother had lived with us in the house on Montgomery. Her room always smelled. You know the smell, that “old lady” smell. The combination of her geriatric perfume and the food she has hidden in every nook and cranny in her bedroom. As if we rationed her food or something. I loved her room though. I would go in there for hours and listen to her stories. She told the best stories.

I remember the house on Montgomery feeling big. It only had three bedrooms and my sister and I shared a room. We had a cool room. My mom let us paint it black with pink spatters. She painted the walls black and then we stood in the middle of the room with hot pink paint on our paint brushes and we twirled in circles, covering the walls with pink swirls and splatters. I was around 8 years old; nothing could have been cooler at the time. I have several great childhood memories. My memories are sporadic though, only remembering certain things here and there. I have often wondered if everyone’s were or if it were just mine.

The house had a huge living area and a good sized kitchen and eating area. Off from the eating area was a sliding glass door out to the large backyard. Just inside the living area was 20 lb fish tank that sat on a table, just big enough to hold the tank. We always had lots of pets. We had dogs, cats, fish, and birds. I think we had a rabbit or a guinea pig at one time as well.

I have two vivid and separate memories of my mother punching her fist through both the fish tank and the sliding glass door. Because not only was my mom a lesbian, but she was also an angry drunk.

It would be years before I could separate the two.

Me.

I know I don't talk much about anything really on this blog. Mostly I just post pictures and every now and again if it strikes me, I may post something in text about my life. A blog is a funny thing. I've always been a journaler and have always kept a written account of what was going on in my life and my feelings. At least I did until a few years ago and then I stopped for the most part, I write maybe twice a year in my journal now. So this blog, this online journal. It's tricky because part of me wants to write very deep and personal things. Many times I have comprised posts of deep thoughts and feelings, only to delete them. I've debated on whether or not I wanted the world to know that much about me. And by the world, I mean the handful of you that take time to stroll over to the foshe family blog every now and again.

I've come to this conclusion: I want to tell you about my life. I have long said I was going to write a book someday. I actually started it 3 years ago. I didn't get very far, but there is a folder on my computer named "book" and in it is one document titled "Chapter 1." It's not even a complete "chapter" but I do have things started in my head at least. So now, I will use this blog as a draft for my someday "book."

So here it is, the 1st installment of my life's story.

I don’t remember the day, the month, or even the year that I realized my mother was a lesbian. Who wakes up and says, “Oh, I have heterosexual parents.” Nobody I knew and the same was true for me. I never woke up and said, “Oh, I have homosexual parents.” It’s just something you know, something that you somehow automatically without any discussion or education, just understand. What you don’t understand automatically is that it is not something that you should disclose to just anybody, this you learn only from experience.

I was saved when I was nine years old at Vacation Bible School. We lived on Montgomery Street, near, at the time, the only airport in our region. Tucked away in a corner, the old brick, three bedroom house sat at the end of the dead end street. A 1950’s something White Chevy pickup in the carport, next to the Honda Shadow motorcycle. In the back yard was the most beautiful oak tree you’d ever seen and around the bottom of it was a huge sand box, where my sister and I frequently spent our afternoons. There were times when you’d look back at that old tree and see one or two little girls’ bicycles hanging from some of the tallest branches. My sister and I frequently got our bikes taken away from us for various discipline problems. My mother’s way of reminding us of our misfortune was to hang the bikes just out of our reach in our back yard where we would see them every day until our time of punishment was over.

It is in this house that most of my childhood memories originate from. We moved around a lot and I tend to correlate a memory with wherever we lived at the time. Most of my memories correspond to this house. The house on Montgomery....