So at this point my parents are getting divorced. My dad is living in the house they'd bought since it was his parents who paid the down payment for it.
My dad and mom tried attending church together (with the christian friends who saved my life). At first it was an effort to reconcile, but that didn't end well. While at church they met a woman with a couple kids looking for a way to keep her kids out of daycare. Now enters Marlee to the scene as the baby sitter who came with her kids, Cody and Jillian, to our house to watch Aspen and me.
I can't say for sure when it happened, but some where along the line during/after my dad and mom were divorced, Dad and Marlee became romantically involved.
A year or so later and couple weeks after I turned 4, Dad and Marlee were married. Cody was 8, Aspen was 6, Jillian was 5.
At this point, when I was 4ish, I'd been struggling with chronic ear infections for a year or so. Although my parents took me to the doctor and would put me on antibiotics, it wasn't working. Follow up visits would show improvement, but it wasn't actually taking care of all of the infection. Two years later I started kindergarten when I was 5, to turn 6 in september. It was then at the Hearing/Sight screening that they realized something was wrong. Very wrong. I was completely deaf in my right ear.
Years of raging infection had cause abnormal cell growth in my middle ear which had destroyed my 3 hearing bones (hammer, anvil, and stirrup) For those of you unfamiliar, it's these bones vibrating against part of the cochlea that transmit sound waves to the brain. So basically the missing bones are like having a section of telephone wire missing along the line. The line had been disconnected.
I'm sure you all know that your ears do more than just hear, it also helps with balance. So this also explained why I was never able to do cart-wheels, learn to ride a bike, and for the most part, walk through a door with out bumping into the frame.
Right away I was scheduled for surgery. This initial one was just to clean out the infection. They waited a year to make sure it didn't recur and then I had another surgery where I was given a bone transplant (well, technically 3 bone transplants).
The surgery was a wonderful success. Without getting too technical, let's just say that your ability to hear isn't rated in terms of volume, but in which frequencies you're able to detect. Although I wasn't able to detect all that a normal ear could, I could detect nearly 90% of them. This was enough for me to learn to ride a bike, learn some basic gymnastics, and basically learn to walk without running into stuff.
It's important to note that during this period of my life when the infection was still active, I was like every other kid with an ear infection. Whiny, irritable, dizzy, unhappy, in pain, had loss of balance, and couldn't detect a lot of low or soft sounds (which, as i mentioned turned into complete deafness eventually) I was taught by my step-mom not to complain about any of these things. Kids have a hard enough time expressing their feelings, and since it had been going on so long, it was hard for me to tell what was 'normal'. My step mom liked to let me know that if I didn't stop crying she'd really give me something to cry about. Yeah, Queen of Compassion.
I was yelled at and spanked a lot, especially since I couldn't hear anyone if they talked in a low or soft voice. I was always in trouble, had a hard enough time fitting in, and being the youngest, was the scape goat for everyone else as well. If you ask my step mom even now she'll tell you that I was a whiny, naughty brat as a little kid. I say I got a crap shoot. You spend 3 years sick at see if you act like an angel.
Of course I can't leave out the fact that I was pretty rambunctious on my own at times. I was for the most part a silly little girl, liked to play, run around, sing and play with my siblings (and I loved having 2 new one), even if I did take the fall for them a lot of the time.
Moving quickly through the rest of this part (not that any of this is less significant), my mom had re-married when I was 6ish. She married a man named John, who also had 2 kids, a daughter, Camille, and son, Johnny, both older than Aspen and me. The marriage only lasted a little over a year.
It was at this time in my life that my half sister Kate was born to my dad and Marlee. I was a little over 7 and my dad and Marlee had been married for 3 years. This prompted a move since our house was only 3 bedrooms, and they weren't willing to make 4 girls share a room. When they decided to move to Panama, a town 20ish miles from Lincoln, this marked the end of joint custody that my parents had enjoyed since they'd separated nearly 6 years earlier.
It was an ugly battle. Basically my mom was dragged through the mud to such a degree as to make politicians look like saints, and needless to say, my dad was awarded full custody. Most people know that this outcome is rare, mothers are almost always awarded custody. This meant that from that point on we'd live only with him and just see Mom every other weekend.
This ushered in the era of Marlee's relentless attacks on Aspen's and my self-esteem and her reign as the disney-esque style Step-mom. Even sadder to say is that she didn't spare her own kids during this time. She was an equal-opportunity abuser.
There are at least a million stories I could tell about this time in my life, funny things that happened to us, and silly games we'd play, a whole slew of bad, sad, terrible ones too, but I'll leave those for another blog.
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