Posted by:
GayLayAle
(
)
Date: January 21, 2011 01:02PM
I, Mikey, having been born of goodly parents in the Year of Our Lord 1980 AD…
I always wanted to begin my story this way. Hey, if Joe, I mean, Nephi did it, why the hell can’t I?
Really though, I WAS born to great parents. I grew up in what was then a small suburb, now a very large affluent suburb, of Salt Lake City, Utah. I was born in the covenant and my folks were your typical young, Mormon, middle middle class couple. My sister was born two years before me, so by the time I came along, they had already begun their little family. My parents were fantastic. They loved each other and they loved me and my sister more than anything. My dad was a self-taught architect and making damn good money for the time. My parents met while receiving their degrees at Brigham Young University; my mom’s degree in Fashion Merchandising, my dad’s in Business Management.
I want to break here and give some background on my parents.
My mom, Virginia, was born in Utah in May of 1953 to Mark and Orpha Ward. She was the fifth of six children; she had three older sisters and an older brother. She spent most of her formative years living in the Seattle, Washington area. My mom didn’t have the most ideal childhood. She was born nearly three months premature, which in the 1950’s was usually considered a death sentence, obviously due to the lack of medical technology at that time, relatively speaking. I remember her telling us frequently that when she was born, she was able to be cradled in one of her father’s hands, and could have been put in a mayonnaise jar and still had room to move.
She spent almost the first year of her life in the neo-natal ICU at Holy Cross hospital in Salt Lake City. The doctors were cautious but hopeful about her prognosis, but also couldn’t make any promises as to whether or not my mom would live. At that time, most of the nurses at Holy Cross were nuns. Throughout her life, she always held a special place in her heart for nuns, as they had cared for her as lovingly as a mother would her own child.
Not long after my mother was finally released from the hospital and allowed to go home, her parents packed the family up and moved to Bellevue, Washington, which is a suburb of Seattle, east across Lake Washington. They moved into a modest, but beautiful home in the neighborhood of Clyde Hill. Much like the suburb I grew up in, Bellevue is one of the most affluent and highly-priced places to live in the Seattle area. Today, the median home price ranges from $350,000 to $400,000.
Because of her very premature birth, my mom was a sickly child. She had chronic asthma (which stuck with her throughout her life), and was a frail, tiny little girl. The children she grew up with and her brothers and sisters nicknamed her “Skinny Ginny”, because of her small stature. This nickname grew on itself as she got older and lost her baby teeth. “Skinny Ginny” became “Skinny Ginny the Toothless Ninny”. Over the years the nickname stuck, but was always used very affectionately.
When she began kindergarten at age five, she was still too frail and ill to leave the house. A two-way communication system was set up at home and in the classroom, so my mom was still able to learn. I always like to think of this as a 1950’s version of online classes. She attended school this way for a couple years, and by then her health had improved enough that she was able to start attending regular classes at the school. Because of her sweet-natured and outgoing personality, despite her health problems, my mom was a very well-liked little girl. She made friends quickly and was always fiercely loyal to those she loved and cared about.
My biological grandfather, Mark Ward, was a violent, hot-tempered, unfaithful, emotionally and physically abusive alcoholic, though as I’m told, he hadn’t always been that way. Outwardly, he was a very charismatic, charming man, who had the looks and the suave of a young Clark Gable. He made his living as a salesman, and because of his charm and charisma, was able to provide a very comfortable life for his family. As time moved on, however, most of the money he made was funneled into booze and other women. He began belittling and emotionally abusing his children, especially his two youngest- my mom and her little brother, Joe. He would constantly say to my mom that he wished she had never been born, and that she had been nothing but a burden from the beginning.
Tutu, my maternal grandmother, was as beautiful as a movie star. She was a wonderful mother, a loving wife and had solid relationships with each of her children. Despite the rapid decline of her marriage, she always remained positive, kind and fiercely protective of her children. They were the most important thing in her life.
When my mom was about nine years old, her father abandoned the family to be with another woman, leaving my grandmother with very little income and six children to raise. My grandmother (we called her Tutu, which is Hawaiian for ‘grandma’- to this day I’m not sure where the nickname came from), was forced to take on two additional full-time jobs to support her family. The job she loved the most and had been working at the longest was at a real estate firm. There, she met Eric Pearson, a successful real estate developer who owned properties all over the Pacific Northwest. Eric had also been married before and had children, although his first marriage had not ended amicably, and he didn’t have much of a relationship with his children. After Mark left, Tutu and Eric began dating and eventually married. Eric was the man that I knew my entire life as Grandpa; I never did meet my biological grandfather, Mark.
Tutu and Grandpa Eric’s relationship was something out of a 1940’s Hollywood movie. They were, as the old expression goes, “madly” in love. He courted her and treated her like a queen. He always used to refer to her as “my darling”. He embraced the entire family as if he had been a part of it since the beginning. Although most of my mom’s siblings were either in their late teens or early twenties when Grandpa Eric came into the picture, he thought of them as his own children, and all of them came to know him as Dad. Grandpa Eric was everything that Mark had not been. He was kind, loving and unconditionally supportive of his new family.
As the years went by, and my mom blossomed into a young woman, she became increasingly beautiful, and closely resembled her mother. She was still “Skinny Ginny”, but no longer frail and sickly. She was trim, pretty and confident.
Although both her mother and biological father were Mormon, they were never consistently active in the LDS church. As my mom grew up, however, she began to attend church on a regular basis, going with a good friend.
After she graduated from high school, my mom decided she wanted to move back to Utah and attend BYU. She said goodbye to her family and headed south.
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2011 03:42PM by GayLayAle.