Author: Momo Ray

I am wife, and mother of an unconventionally family. Working, for a living and co piloting threw mental illness and dusting ourselves off to have another go at building our future trying to get through what today has brought us as well as what is to come. Hopefully for the better, but ready for the unexpected.

Monica Trinidad Salazar-Ray

Where did your name come from?

My name actually came from out of nowhere. My mother had stillborn twins right before I was born. And this caused my father and mother to scramble for a name. You see they didn’t realize that I was even in her womb. I was in a separate embryonic sack.

My mother actually decided on Monica it was one of her best friends in high school’s first name. But it was also her younger sister’s name who died as an infant.

My middle name was originally supposed to be Beatrice. It’s my mother’s grandmother’s name. However my father got a hold of the birth certificate first and chose to give me his mother’s name Trinidad. As soon as my grandmother found out that he named me after her she was so upset because she hated her name her entire life. I actually am honored to carry her name. She was an amazing person and I love her so much.

Monica Trinidad is my name and I am proud of where it came from

Showing a Child how to think independently

What makes a teacher great?

A teacher is a person that can actually put their own opinions to the side and state the facts to come to an objective conclusion. Everyone has their own opinion, however to be a great teacher you must teach the person to actually look at the facts in order to not only come to their own opinion, but to be able to see both sides in order to come to the truth. They say that history is written by the victor, which means that both sides at one point thought themselves to be on the right side of history. Someone has to be incorrect in order for a story to be told. However this is not always the case. To believe in something you should at least get the chance to  understand both stories. No matter what side you want to take.

Fear

What fears have you overcome and how?

I am a small person. Meaning that in almost everything that I do or attempt I have to get over the fact that some things are easy for some people, but not for me. I am constantly afraid that I will be left behind because I don’t get something or comprehend what is happening around me. I am an empath  and in order to not let just anyone through my boundries of emotional and physical pertection I have to tune out important things that I should be aware of. I am afraid of so many things that make no sense to people.

I have abandoment issues from being left behind. It started with my father. Even though my Mother left him, he choose to not be involved in my developmental years. He choose to only be my father when it suited his situation. My grandmother, at no fault of her own, Died when I was about to turn six years old. She was my bestfriend at the time. She was my world. Here one day gone the next. No warning, No Goodbye. A young girl I connected with as a child. Swallowed a ballon by accident. Causing me to be afraid of something more then a father who could walk away, or death taking a love one away. Now I know that children are not safe from a world of suffering and pain. A simple piece of rubber can snuff out a life before it has time to begin. If I had a fear that maybe I am working on overcoming it would be to learn to be able to be alone. I worry so much about being left behind that I forget that we all come into this world alone, we have to learn things on our own, and eventually we are dying alone. The abandonment I have allowed to control me is not who I am and most importantly I don’t want my daughter to learn this to be normal either. I look back and I have come a long way from my fear, but looking a head I know I have a way to go.

What Stage Fright?

Have you ever performed on stage or given a speech?

First of all you’re talking to a person who comes from a family of performers. In High School I was, in theater arts for two years, having an actual role in three plays. Grease, Annie, The Match Maker. I was also in choir for three years, auditioning and being selected for Select Choir and varsity Choir, I received my lettermen’s jacket in Choir. I also earned a letter for speech and debate. I was a researcher on the debate team. I have never been afraid to speak my mind in front of a crowd. I can make an announcement on a PA system without being nervous. It’s a gift I guess.

Romantic?????

What’s your definition of romantic?

I’m not really sure what romantic is. I was raised by a single mother who really didn’t have time to try to romantically involved with anything. My husband was raised by two people who hurt each other more then tried to be loving to each other. When Wesley Makes the effort to be romantic I am afraid more times than not the sediment is often wasted on me. I have a hard time reading signals and realizing that romances in the air. Makes me feel like I’m not a complete person. Something that most women are longing for is something that I sometimes take for granted. I guess my idea of romance is just being able to count on each other, it’s randomly getting a bouquet of Sunflowers, remember to grab a pack of cigarettes just because I am not sure he has any. Staying awake to talk to each other even when we are dog ass tired. Running through our day but still stopping to have coffee, and surprise lunches just to talk about our upcoming week. Just considering each other. Looking at each other more than just being Mom and Dad. Being able to remember each other and our individual quirks.

Maybe to me romantic is overly romanticized. Because I think that love marriage and family are more than what people visualize when they decide to get married. Too many times people feel like if their marriage doesn’t work they could always get divorced instead of working on the actual situation. Recognizing that it takes work and it’s hard.

Daniel Wayne

When I was a teenager I fell in love. It wasn’t with an individual which they all are individual but I fell in love with a family. I grew up in a single parent home with my mom taking care of everything. So male encounters or male example was not completely clear. It’s not that I was raised to be a man hater or to distrust men but I was raised to be on alert when men were involved. This family lived in the apartment complex that I grew up in and like I said before it felt like all of us were raised by single mothers, however this boy I met when I was in 6th grade approximately 13 years old was not raised by his mother he was raised by his father and his grandmother. His grandmother came to be known in my life as granny Pierce. That’s what her grandsons called her so that was what I called her. Now the first Pierce Boy I met was Roy. To this day Roy remains one of my best friends, he has done so many things for not only my family but for me as well. Roy’s father was a mechanic he worked for eagle transmission and he had an older son named Raymond Vernon making him a junior and a daughter named Melissa. It seemed like this family never ran out of stories they always had something to talk about. I was so entranced with the way that their family dynamic was put together. Their father RV worked all the time sometime when I first met this family Raymond ended up going to prison and Melissa well I can’t really say what happened with her because I don’t have permission to really talk about her so let’s just say that her life spiraled out of control. Yet all I wanted to do was be around this family. Through the years our friendship became more than friendship. Roy always wanted me to experience things with him before anybody else. This included drinking, our drug use, I’m just about everything. We hardly ever kept secrets from one another and he would explain things to me that I was not aware of because I had no male influence in my life. After a few years I started meeting other members of his family. His cousin Josh came to live with Granny Pierce who had her own apartment on the other side of the complex and he and I became friends. Well one week he told me that his brother was going to come and stay the week with granny and him. Now my mom working overnights kind of opened a window for us to have get togethers parties I guess House parties on one of these nights a teenage boy and walked in my apartment with just about everything he owned strapped to his back. His name was Daniel wayne. Pierce. Almost right away the magic that grabbed me when I first met the Pierce family just made meeting Daniel just as exciting. I don’t remember a lot of what happened that night but I do remember sitting on the ground next to my couch while other people were sitting on it Daniel grab my hand and held it. He never tried to force himself on me, he never tried to convince me that we should go into a room or do anything that teenagers probably shouldn’t be doing when their parents are not home. He just sat there talking to me and holding my hand I noticed that he had a wart on one of his fingers and I asked him about it and he joked around saying that he must have been playing with a gigantic toad or frog. But all I could think was that at that moment he was the most interesting person I had ever met. Anytime that Daniel Wayne came to town I wanted to be around him I wanted to hang out with him I wanted him to notice me. But I am certain that him noticing me was never going to be a problem. Because since the day I met Daniel Wayne he is been an enormous part of my life. You would think that he and I dated each other that he was the love of my life that we had this beautiful amazing romantic relationship but that’s not at all what happened. Instead he became what the rest of the Pierce family was to me they were my family. Their grandmother was racist to boot but she always wanted to tell me stories and of course just about every story that she would tell me started with I’m not talking about you but which meant that she was about to tell me a story that had something negative to do with Hispanic people or African American people because that was primarily what my family ethnicity was. She was an old lady who was set in her ways and grew up in a time period that was completely different from the one I grew up in and in a different environment than the one I grew up in. Roy and Raymond and Melissa their mother was from Spain. So even though everyone thought that she was Mexican the boys would be real quick to correct. Their father RV was also had been on the racist side but they always treated me with respect they never talked down to me or my family they were not comfortable with other ethnicities yet there I was in the middle of all that. Later down the road I lost my virginity to one of the Pierce boys not going to say which one, I thought for a moment that I was going to end up with Daniel Wayne, I also thought for a moment I was going to end up with Josh and in the end I ended up marrying Raymond even though our relationship did not stand the test of time at all we just did not work out in it anyway I’m not blaming anyone I’m not putting fault on anyone because it’s really not my place to do all of that. I just take shared blame that we didn’t work out we just do not need to be friends we don’t need to be lovers and certainly we had no business trying to be married as I said before I still have relationships with the Pierce family their dad has since passed away as granny has as well but I couldn’t imagine my life without them. This being said over the years Daniel has gotten into some trouble he’s spent nearly half of his life behind bars in prison and even though some of the transgressions that he was a part of are not that favorable I still to this day do not hold any judgment toward him or resentment which he doesn’t owe me anything but he feels like he does because I have always had his back. He is now out of prison and he and I had one time that we got angry with one another. For most of the time that he has been incarcerated I have done my best to write him letters reminding him that there’s people that still care about him as well as sending him money to be able to buy things while he was in prison and one day I was going to try to help him to get out of the town that he began getting in trouble in to start out and I was not able to jump at his beck and call and he yelled at me and tried to say I wasn’t helping him and that I screwed him over which I answered back by refusing to accept any of his phone calls. But that too has passed and I have evaluated what the reasoning was behind us being friends to begin with I accept him for all of his shortcomings and I encourage him to do better he has started A New path a new life and new beginning and for him to succeed in the things that he is not used to having on the outside we all have to support him and help him. Now by no means at all am I saying that enabling him is the right way. I have worked my entire life to make people understand that I will stand behind you even if I don’t agree with you. But be certain that if I don’t agree with you I’m going to tell you why I’m not just going to agree with everything you say and act like what you’re doing is correct. I don’t have to agree with my friends my family to be supportive. I’m pretty sure that is probably one of the reasons why I have family that doesn’t want to tell me things, and why I have family that know if they ask me a question they’re going to get the truth out of me and not what they want to hear. So on that note I just wanted to say that last weekend Daniel left a rehab center and came to my house we got to get to know each other my husband finally got to meet him and he decided to go to a sober living facility and try to pick his life back up. I am extremely proud of him for making this decision on his own and now that he’s home and not behind bars I’m hoping that our relationship can become better than anything else that we could have ever imagined. I hope that we can build each other up and remind each other where we came from and where we’re headed. I just want what’s best for him and I want him to see that just because you made mistakes when you were younger doesn’t mean that you spend the rest of your life paying for them. But also he needs to remind himself that any direction that he’s headed in right now is better than the direction he could have continued to go down I just wanted to talk about Daniel Wayne and I hope that even though he’s in a sober living facility that he still has an amazing holiday and that he sits back and remembers to remind himself how lucky he is. How lucky we all are that we have each other we’ve lost so many people over the past few years, that hanging on to our loved ones is becoming harder and harder. But all we have to do is reach out and remind people that were here for them. That we care about them they’re not alone.