From Fall to Fall

Foundations

· The first time I realized that my life wasn't meant to be something memorable was when I was informed about the circumstances of my birth. I was born in the fall of 1998 (September 27, 1998 at some time around 6:30am) to a 28-year-old mother high off cocaine. I was born addicted to cocaine and as a result suffered from failure to thrive and withdrawal. It's a rough start to anyone's life but something that a person can overcome if in the right situation.

o I was given to a foster home with a woman whose name is too far in the past for my memory. I remember nothing and can only recollect what I've been told about the situation. I'm unsure if this woman had me has a baby, all I know of this time is what my adoptive parents have told me and unfortunately the first three years of my life are unknown. But what isn't unknown is that the first three years of someone's life can fundamentally change, and mold them as a person. My favorite doll was filled with bugs. As I'm told by my adoptive mother. When she brought us home she had to barraging buying a new doll with me for which I had to throw away the old one. My oldest maternal brother fell in a toilet, I was three and he is a year and a few weeks behind me. He was also born addicted and premature. He got pneumonia as a child of 2 from the incident. I was also with my younger sister Destiny – she would have been an infant. An infant left in a bouncer seat so often that the muscles of her legs atrophied and when held she would go limp because she was so unfamiliar with the sensation. When my then prospective adoptive mother can to see us, she told me she was horrified and refused to leave without us. Through my entire life my adoptive mother has told me I am an old soul, and I believe it was rooted in this moment. She told me that once she and my adoptive father had approval she walked up to me and held out a hand and asked if I was ready to leave. I looked up at her and for some reason that my memory isn't privy to I took her hand and walked out with her. This was the first moment in my life that reflected the resiliency that is in my soul. And so we left, my siblings and I, in the care of our new adoptive parents.

· I don't remember much from those years afterward. It's a blur of a small yellow house, Christmas trees, visiting relatives and friends whose faces have been blurred with time, walks through sunlight dappled woods, and a feeling of happiness.

o I have two poignant moments from that little yellow house, pardon me I have three. The first is a memory from what must be Halloween – what I insist to most of my friends is that I saw the Ku Klux Klan walking down my driveway from my bedroom window. In all reality it was likely kids dressed as ghost but it's what my memory insists. Three marching people clad in white gowns coming down the hill towards my house. The most poignant memory I have of the house is not of the house but of the forest behind it and a massive hill. When I think back to that moment all I see is sunlight dappling through trees, a dirt path, and holding my mother's hand. In the beginning of this I wanted to refer to as my adoptive mother to help keep people straight, but this woman is so much more than my adoptive mother. She is my strength, my faith, my love, my wisdom, my love for books, and she is my mother. A mother is more than just giving birth to a child. A mother is nurturing, warmth, safety, a healthy dose of fear, awe, reverence, and pain. Jennifer Holland is the name of my mother regardless of whatever my original birth certificate says. She is the person that I long for the most when away at college, the person I want when I'm afraid, and she is the person in the world I most want to be proud of me. Nothing matters more than knowing that I have made her proud. That is what a mother is. She is warmth, and fury, and power, and strength beyond anything else. She is the strongest woman I know – she saved me. She held my hand while walking down that sunlight dappled dirt path through a forest that no longer exists.

· We moved. Once my adoptive parents adopted my younger brother Timothy. The little yellow house was too little. We moved into the house that I will forever know and hold as home in my heart. According to Zillow it sits on 0.97 acres, but I was always told by my adoptive father that we had an acre of land. It's 3,092 sq. ft and built in 1989 – ten years before I was born. It was 4 bedrooms which we originally split into the girl's room, the boy's room, my adoptive father's office, and my parent's bedroom. It has 2.5 bathrooms one of which was the kid's bathroom (since then has become Destiny's bathroom) which is painted in a stucco fashion in purple paints, the other is the master bedroom's bathroom with a beautiful beige orange in the stucco fashion, and the final .5 bathroom is the downstairs with a shower and color I can't remember. The downstairs consists of a living room, a dining room, the kitchen, the foyer, and the family room. My mother wants to sell the house soon, the kids are grown up and it holds too many memories, but her decision still makes me sorrowful. The yard is beautiful. Soft grass and there used to be our childhood playground in the middle which has since gone to a young family whose children will appreciate it more than the grown up Valaike children. It was sold on Craigslist along with my childhood bedset and numerous other odds and ends that my mother sold to support us after our father.

o I have innumerable memories from that house and much too many to recount here. It was where I grew up for the majority of my life. I will never be able to forget that house, the smell, the comfort, the familiarity, I could find my way around that house blindfolded.

o I remembered when my adoptive father accidentally, well now knowing what I know I'm not so sure it was an accident, mowing over my set of plastic toys from the Scooby Doo cartoon. And my stuffed dog Cooper from the Fox and the Hound. That's the first memory I have of it.

o Actually, that's false, the first memory I can remember of that house is the cold foggy morning air surrounded our miniature Japanese Maple tree. I must have wandered out when my adoptive father went for work and my mother went to drop off my oldest adoptive sister Katrina to kindergarten. My mother's friend Sue watched us in those early days. When I say us I'm referring to my five siblings: my older sister Katrina who was the child of my adoptive parents (they never had any other biological children, pregnancy was too hard on my mother's body), my younger half-brother Christopher, my younger half-sister Destiny, my younger half-brother Timothy, and my younger half-brother Samuel who everyone just calls Sammy. Seeing this you must think my adoptive parents were saints and it's true – for my mother at least. My biological mother's name is Angela Taylor and my biological father's name is Marc Giles but they're a later part of the story.

o I remember brief glimpses of my younger years in that house and I'll start with the happiest ones. Pancake Sundays are what immediately come to mind. We were a Catholic family my siblings and I attended Sunday school, a catholic preschool, and a private catholic school from kindergarten to fourth grade in my case. So we had Pancake Sundays and my adoptive father would make breakfast. I always believed in my interest in politics stemmed from him, I remember him leaning against a counter flipping a coin and talking about politics or economics. He also smelled like Irish Soap. My mother still has a few bars in the master bedroom bathroom closet. Another happy memory I have of that house is one Christmas, or some cold month. My siblings and I all received body pillows and I am the sole siblings that still has theirs. We piled them up on our green couch and bounced on them while watching Caillou and my parent's talked with Sue and her husband in the next room.

o We always played with jump ropes tying them onto our bike handles to ride them like horses and show off our skill. I remember the day my younger brother Sammy fell off his on the big hill on the opposite side of the horseshoe that our neighborhood was shaped like and skinned up his body. My brother Sammy was injured the most during our childhood. I used to line up all of our bikes and act like they were horses and feeding them "hay" which in reality was mowed grass I raked up. All of my sister used to share a room until our oldest adoptive sister Katrina wanted her own room and my adoptive father surrendered his office. So the girls room eventually just became mine and destiny's although Katie often wandered in – lonely. When it became just my room and Destiny's we shared a wall with the boy's room and every night would bang a pattern on it and they would replicate it. Those we're simpler times. Speaking of simpler times when I was probably six or seven Katie and I would have a show in the evening and would tie a blanket over mine and Destiny's bunkbed and would pull back the curtain to reveal "Chipmunk Cheek Destiny" – she's always had big cheeks. There's a picture floating around my house of Destiny chewing on a flashlight. We teased her relentlessly which eventually lead my sister to struggle with a lifetime of self-esteem issues – I regret nothing more than causing her problems. I once cut my youngest adoptive brother Sammy's face with a toenail while watching the Goonies which is something my family will never let me forget. I remember when my adoptive father's sister visited, and all of my ten cousins came to visit. His family believed in having large families. Throughout my entire life I have been surrounded with people – maybe it's the reason I'm so lonely now.

o The moral of this story is I have a lot of good memories in this house and fuck I'm drunk so I don't' feel like running over all them but. I grew up playing in a massive yard and running to the neighbor's house to play and climbing on snowbanks, and screaming while I jumped off a swing in our backyard, and playing Pocahontas, and I was fucking happy.