When ever I tell stories of my life, people who have lead a normal life are always fascinated and wonder why I don’t write a book. Well this is my answer to that.
This journey of mine spans almost seventy years and will take me along time to put into words. Please if you are interested and this resonates at all, please bear with me as this will take a long time to tell. Check in periodically to see what is new.
There are so many different facets of my life, living conditions, mental conditions, personal awareness, trust issues, personal hygiene. All these issues were handled internally and prioritized at different times differently. And still affect me in my seventies.
In order survive and I need to say that I see myself as a survivor, not a victim. In order to survive each phase in my life and move on to the next “adventure”, the previous phase was all but forgotten. In saying this I don’t remember the names of most of the people I lived with and or interacted with. There are a few though that did stick with me.
In this rendition I will try to put the memories of my adventures and feelings in perspective.
My hope with this story is to lead you on a life’s journey by entertaining you and somehow showing how the mind of a troubled child works. All without boring you to death.
This story will start in an orphanage at four years old, take you through what I remember of my adoption and subsequent life as a toddler. Look at the different farms and houses we lived in and my first years of schooling.
The next part of this journey will be the up routing of my next older brother and I, from Milford New Hampshire to Baltimore Maryland at the age of eight. Due to the divorce of my adoptive parents.
Then we will explore the few places we lived in the outskirts of Washington DC. How much schooling was missed due to not having permanent living arrangements with a single parent, hard for women today, let alone in the 1950’s, with no social programs to fall back on.
I will try to describe the many trips taken back and forth from Maryland to Massachusetts. By train, bus, plane and car. Sometimes with my brother and sometimes alone.
Then I suppose the next area we will deal with is my being put out to farm so to speak [ sent away from home for summers and to school in different states]. Before high school I went to school in four different states.
Then we will explore my troubled mind during my teen years, my stint in juvenile detention , and release to my second orphanage.
I will try to describe my three and a half years in this orphanage, and journey through high school. This was the longest I ever stayed in one place my entire youth.
I will try to explain my reasons for running away from this orphanage after high school and describe my journey, hitch hiking from Baltimore Maryland to the Lowell area of Massachusetts as a seventeen year old in 1965.