For this blog, I'm going to stretch the rules a little bit and give you two of my heroes, one fictional and one real.
My hero from the world of fiction is the wonderful professional wizard, Mr. Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. If you haven't read the Dresden Files yet and plan to in the future - which you should - be aware that this may contain spoilers of some kind.
My real life hero is my mother. For this one I have to give a lot of background context, so I will. In the beginning, God said the light was good. Then a lot of stuff happened, and my mother got married to my father. Turns out my father was a prick and a shithead of the highest order. He was a severe alcoholic, the kind who filled up one of those huge 44oz Texaco coffee jugs full of beer and call that one drink. And then finish most of my mom's beers and not count those as drinks. She told me one story of when she brought him home from the bar and he was so drunk he couldn't get himself out of her car. She had a Dodge Daytona sports car and he threw up all over it. And he asked her the next day why the car was all a mess.
And it didn't end there. My dad was extremely abusive verbally and psychologically to her. He tried to control what she could do, who she could talk with, where she should go. He'd often yell at her over things that didn't even make sense, like simple talking to my godparents. The worst part of all this, though, was that he would rape her.
My mom had given up pursuing her college degree at this point in order to marry my dad and raise me and my brother and 2 sisters. My mom's a hero because she had the courage to divorce my father, not knowing how he would react, not knowing what she would do for money, because she knew that me and brother and sisters would eventually be the target of our dad's anger. I was about 4 years old at this time, and my brother and sisters were 1, 2, and 5.
She divorced my dad having no job, no degree, and four children under the age of 5. She managed to get a full scholarship to go to the University of Central Arkansas, and used student loans to pay for food and other expenses while she got her degree. My mom graduated cum laude while earning a Bachelor's in both Health Science and Chemistry while putting all of us through private Catholic school.
She got a job as a teacher at the school we were going to in Arkansas, giving up her dream of medical school in order to stay close to us and pay to keep us going to that school, which we all loved. And during all this time, we were seeing our dad every other weekend, and sometimes during the week. She had to face him every time we had visitation. And he while he was usually not too bad, that wasn't always the case. He actually shoved her hard at one point.
Eventually though, money got too tight, so we had to move up to Virginia where my grandparents lived to live with them. My mother kept getting jobs at the schools we went to so she could stay close and make our lives easier by not commuting all over the place. However, my grandparents are also a part of this little insane family. My mother was beaten my grandmother a lot when she was a kid, and my grandfather did nothing to stop it. My mother told my grandfather about my dad, and he not only didn't sympathize with her, he still shook my dad's hand after he knew what he did. My dad got cozy with my grandparents over a couple of years while we there and they ended up evicting us.
You'd think the story would end there, but it doesn't. During the whole time we were in Virginia, my dad had moved to Texas, and refused to pay for airfare for our visitation during our school vacations. My mom couldn't afford plane tickets, so she drove us down to Tennessee past Nashville at the designate meet-up place. There was one summer where my dad refused to meet us there and she drove all the way down to Texas to drop us off. And the whole time we were at my dad's house he was trying to convince us that we should come to live with him down in Texas. Now I should say that my mom wasn't dirt poor, but my dad's house and stuff was a lot nicer. My mom didn't have cable or video games at all until we were almost in high school. My dad on the other hand, had at least three giant TVs and several different video game systems that me and my siblings all liked to play. And he offered to pay for some of the stuff that we really wanted to do, like camps and hobbies and stuff.
So while my older sister and I were't taken by his offers, my younger sister really was. She got into fights a lot with my mom because she challenged her and held her to certain standards, and worked with her on her mental issues. My dad didn't do any of that, so my sister often equated that with love. But because all of us siblings were so close to each other, it was gonna be an all or nothing sort of deal. And with me and my older sister there, my dad and my stepmother really couldn't tempt the two younger ones.
But in my sophomore year of high school, I got an internship through the American Chemical Society to work with a professor and his grad students at George Mason. But my dad insisted on having me going down there to have summer visitation. He said he wanted to discuss it with me, but when I tried to bring it up to him, he blew me off. So I threw as mature a fit as I could and ended up getting sent to my room. They wouldn't let me out til I apologized to them. I snuck into my sister's room and told my mom what was going down, so she said to call the police. But they took away my phone, so I asked my sister to do it for me. The cops said they couldn't do anything about it. I don't remember if I actually apologized, but they let me out of my room after a few days and I told him I didn't want to see him anymore.
So after that, they sent me and my older sister back early. But after that summer, my sister and little brother "decided" they wanted to stay down with my dad. I add the quotation marks because I later learned that they had literally bought my sister a pony to bribe her. My mom had to go to court and get told that they were taking away my brother and sister. But she didn't give up on them or hate them for choosing my dad. She spent every last nickel and dime she had, and some of me and my sister's, on getting them back, and eventually they wised up and came back, my little brother first and my sister about a year after.
This is where an ending would usually go, but we still have some story to go. As a result of all this chaos, we all developed some psychological issues of one sort or another. We've all developed depression in different degrees. My older sister got it pretty bad - she's cut herself before and had real serious thoughts about suicide. But my mother has constantly worked with her on it and gotten her to a better place. I went to college in a bad mindset and flamed out after a few years, but she got me back up on my feet at a community college and on my way towards a degree at ODU. My sister and little brother are still battling to get their depression under control, but rest assured she's helping them too.
My mother's the closest thing I've ever seen to a living saint. She still hasn't given up on med school, and actually plans to go in the near future, once she gets the child support and alimony that my dad's been holding back all these years. If I'm half the person my mom is, I'll be the best person you'll probably know.
@rambo @missy
