For as long as I can remember there was a part of me that wanted to be just like my mother. I wanted to be the pretty party girl that men fell all over themselves for. I wanted to be the one who had a date every night and never seemed to slow down long enough to get old.

Then there was the other part that wanted to be just the opposite. I wanted to be a mother, have 6 kids, live in the quintessential little pink house with the little picked fence. I wanted a husband, just one, that would take care of me and kids and be just like my grandfather. I didn't want my kids to have to take orders from anyone who wasn't their father or change their names three or four times or be ridiculed for their mother's live choices. I wanted to be my grandmother.

There was a time when I was in the third grade that one of my friend's parents didn't want me spending the night with her because my mother had been married and divorced twice! They were Catholic. I was a heathen.

My mother never showed up for anything, not school plays, not concerts, not teacher's conferences, not nothing. Everything I did, I did on my own without an ounce of support from her. I guess I did it in spite of her. Honor roll, cheer leading, or sports, it didn't matter. She never had anything good to say about anything. The only thing she ever showed up for was my first wedding and she wore black. She never came to the hospital when I was in labor or when I had any surgeries, only after the fact and then only once. I never quite understood how a mother could do that, but then we're talking about Alberta, the beauty queen, the most important person in her life.

We lived in an elegant hotel in the middle of the city but all around it there was poverty. On the outskirts there was "nigger town" where the one room shacks sat on concrete blocks and you could see the dim lights through the cracks in the walls at night. There was nothing but sand and dirt all around them, no grass, no flowers.

As a child walking home from school in the first grade I remember adult black men getting down off the sidewalk so I could pass. The movie theater had white bathrooms and black bathrooms. They weren't allowed to sit anywhere but the balcony and they had their own entrance and exit. It was segregation at every level.

The first sit in happened at the Walgreen's Drug Store in St. Augusting in 1960 I believe, maybe 59. We had already left for NH but it was big news everywhere.

I remember with a smile the first time I saw nuns in long black habits. We were crossing the street to the Post Office and I was maybe 5 years old. There was 3 nuns coming toward me. The wind was blowing and the black cloth swirling around them made them look like witches. I cried and cried, sure I would be taken away, never to return. The scariest threat my grandmother could make to me was "if you don't do good in school, I'm sending you to the Catholic school!"

I remember a drive-in restaurant called The Pig. It was the first place we would go every time we got back to St. A. They had the best french fries and I would take the katsup bottle with the pointed top and draw a line of katsup down each one individually as I ate them. It used to drive my mother crazy. Maybe that's why I did it.

There was Starvin' Marvin's seafood restaurant. Marvin used to date my mother. He took care of my grandmother's Schnauzer one time when we went back to NH. He swore the dog got away. She swore he sold it.
My mother had him take care of a horse I had gotten for Xmas several years later. He did sell the horse. She told him to after we left.

I remember hiding under the covered deck at the Indian graveyard at the Fountain of Youth and making ghost noises while tourists got the big BS story from the guide. We got kicked out a lot.

I especially remember following the horse drawn carts around town, learning each horses name and the old black drivers too. They shuttled tourist from one historic location to another all around town. They were always so nice to me. I would bring carrots for the horses and sit and talk with them.

My mother's favorite bars were the Tradewinds, the Ship and the Zanzibar. The Ship and "Zanzi's" are gone now but the Tradewinds is still in business.

I went to the Orange St. School. The principal was Ms. Palethorp, a small dark haired, steel eyed woman and the vice principal was Ms. Crookshank, a taller, prettier, but just as cold woman. Both women always wore black dresses. I was terrified of both.

One of my most embarrassing moments occurred while I was in the third grade. The nurse's office was right next to the Principal's office and it was time for everyone to get weighed and measured. Each class lined up and went to the nurse's office where the scales were located in the hall by her door. As each child got on the scales, Ms. Crookshank would read off the weight and height and the nurse would write it down.

The scales had the weights for the 50 lb. increments 50, 100, 150 etc.
Being the chubby child that I was, when I got up to the scale, the kids gathered around me. Ms. Crookshank pushed the marker further and further and still the balance beam didn't drop. Then she put down the 100 lb weight. There were loud "WOW"s all around. I weighed in at 108.

No on likes a chubby girl, especially not the one with pipe curls dressed in plaid dresses and saddle shoes.

I could never do anything good enough for my mother. If I got A's (and I always did) than I should have gotten A+'s. If I picked out something to wear, it wasn't right but it would do. If I curled my hair, it wasn't as good as she could it.

My grandmother taught me to iron and I actually loved to do it. I would go to the trailer neighbors when we lived in KY and volunteer to iron for them. Whenever I would do the ironing for my mother, she would always pull down a shirt or a blouse, throw it back on the ironing board and complain that she would have to do them all over again because I left a wrinkle somewhere.

One day she was out and I decided I would wash the kitchen and living room floors for her. I was very proud of myself and sure this would make her happy. When she got home, I was beaming "I washed the floors for you!" She looked around and said, "I bet you didn't wash under the couch" and walked away. No thanks. That was it.

I don't think she loved me and I'm not sure I ever wanted or expected her to. There were, however, plenty of times I just wanted her to like me. I went from being the chubby little girl she rarely acknowledged to the thin cute girl she somehow saw as a threat. After all, she was a beauty queen. She had banked her life around her looks.

Many, many years later a friend of mine said she thought my mother was jealous of me. Me? Why? It never occurred to me.

When we went back to NH in the summer of 1961, I got a job at the stables at the Mt. Washington Hotel, working for George Chamberlain. His wife, Carolyn, a boy my age named Marcus Moore and I were the summer crew.

Carolyn was a plain woman with dark hair and glasses. She had the "hard life" look. She and George had 5 children. She had been pregnant with triplets when he beat her and threw her across the kitchen. She lost them all. The two girls, Mary Ann and Kathy were beautiful. David, Danny and Paul were all good kids. George favored Kathy and David and the others suffered for it. He was hard but handsome with those "Wilson eyes". He had a gay brother named Carlton who was so nice and his mother, Grammy Chamberlain, still lived in the farm house in Springvale, Maine with all the family.

Marcus and I fell in lust immediately. He was cute as a bug, blonde, blue eyes and with a terrific sense of humor for a kid. He loved horses as much as I did and we just had a blast that summer. I went from 140 lbs. down to 119.

My mother worked nights of course. I would tell my grandmother that I was going to the movies with Carolyn. I would take my mother's '53 Chevy and Marcus and I would go to the drive-in move in Twin Mountain, 7 miles away. She always left the keys in the car and never knew that I took it, ever. One night at the movie, we were making out like fools and the windows were fogged up when a knock startled us. It was Bruce Beaulieu, a local boy, who couldn't wait to ask "does your mother know you've got her car?" We never did it again.

However, I would get Teasy to take us to the drive-in. That was totally acceptable. I had sex for the first time in the backseat of her car with Marcus at the Twin Mountain drive-in. From then on, it was a fuck-a-thon until I got pregnant at 16. After all, the most important thing I had learned from my mother was that no man would want a fat girl, but they sure wanted a thin one.

Around August, Carolyn got wind of what was going on with Marcus and I. She told George who immediately took him out of there and I only saw him once after that. I was heartbroken. I threatened to tell George that Carolyn had been sleeping with one of the cooks at the hotel but changed my mind when I realized he'd beat the hell out of her if he found out.

At the end of the season, I rode with them in the van when we transported the horses back to Maine. It took 2 or 3 trips. It was late when we were riding back one night. I sat between George and Caroline and fell asleep. I woke up to find George's hand down my shirt playing with my breast. I pretended I was still asleep because I didn't want Carolyn to get mad at me.

When we got back to the stables, we slept in the stalls with hay in them. George crawled into my stall and started kissing me and groping me. I was trying to fight him off as he pulled down my jeans. He knew that I had sex with Marcus so I guess he figured I was fair game. All of a sudden Carolyn was there, grabbing my jeans and pulling them down screaming, "GO AHEAD, FUCK HER IF YOU WANT TO!" He matter of factly told her to "calm down" and took her back to their stall and he didn't come back.

I never told anyone. George told me that if I did, he would tell my grandmother that I was lying and actually having sex with Marcus.

Years later I found that he had divorced Carolyn and got custody of all the kids. I bought horses from him when I was older. He always looked at me "that way". I'm sure he was molesting his daughter, Mary Ann. As soon as she got out of school she moved far away. There were stories of him pawing girls at the summer riding camp he operated too.
Nothing ever happened to him. I hope he's dead now.

While we lived in KY, I became interested in boys among other things. There was a really cute boy at Pembroke High School named Billy Scott. He had a car. I was 12. It was Kentucky after all. He asked me if I wanted a ride home from school one day, a 15 mile ride. I accepted although my heart was beating out of my chest.

I was nervous and shy and excited until he pulled off the road. I didn't have a clue what was going on until he grabbed me and started kissing me. Then he tried to put his hands up my dress and I struggled. I fought hard enough so that he gave up and took me home. I never told anyone, again, my fault for accepting the ride instead of coming home on the bus.

Besides, no one wants a chubby girl.