Have you ever had a day when no matter what you do, it feels like you are never good enough. Some Days I think I have no idea how to get through the day without pissing off the world.

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.

So these last few months I’ve kind of been on a hiatus I haven’t been writing as much as I really would like to and I’ve been working on projects that have taken up a lot more time than I thought would. First off I found a friend that I’ve had since I was like 12 years old we grew up in the same apartment complex as children. I sent him a friend request on Facebook and a message asking how he was doing and a few months later I got a response. At first I just figured he was busy with his life you know how it is you see people from your past and you friend them and every now and then you drop them a line but for the most part time has changed everyone.

When you finally responded to my message I was surprised to find out that he’s been through a lot of the same things that I’ve been through over the past years he’s suffered through drug addiction, raising a family trying to be a positive role model, and trying to be a better person. My best friend Athena and him, had in the past been roommates. And she put him in a very difficult situation between her old man and him. Knowing that we all have been old friends for so long she can find a lot of things in him and he did the same yet the things that she asked him to keep private or things that were against her relationship with the father of her child. He was holding secrets for her about her issues with controlled substances as well as her having affairs. She’s confined the same things with me as well and I know that all of us are human we do very human things and sometimes the things that we do are not always accepted by other people. What I do know is I’ve known her for 3 decades and no matter what she does or what choices she makes they’re her choices, she has to live with them in the end and nobody has a right to judge her life. I love her with all my heart and I support her and things that she does and her accomplishments and I’m there for her when she falls, because when I was at my lowest she never judged me. She never tried to rationalize what I do and what I have done in my life and has never made me feel like I was less. I think that’s what true friendship really is about not that you enable your friends to do the things that they want to do and let them hurt themselves, because I spent a very big part of my life while we were teenagers and young adults trying to protect her. When really I should have just let her make decisions make her own mistakes and learn from them. She was a few years younger than me and Jamie were so it seemed like it was only fitting for us to be her protectors. Into adulthood I’ve found that she really didn’t need that at all she really can make her own choices and her own decisions and even when she falls and feels like she’s hit rock bottom it’s good for her I don’t step into her relationships I don’t try to give her advice about things I just let her tell me what she wants to tell me when she wants to tell it to me without judgment. I think that when we were younger I pushed her away a lot doing that because she was afraid to tell me things because she didn’t want to disappoint me and I’m nobody I mean I’m somebody in my life but in her life she is the center of it she should never have felt the need to make me happy because her happiness is what counts in her life. We’re adults now we have families we have responsibilities and she has a full-time job she’s buying her own vehicle she’s not depending on anyone else to take care of her she is independently on her own now. Now our friend who I will not mention his name at the moment because I haven’t got permission to use him in my blogs yet he is now trying to reach out to us in order to find normalcy back into his life. He and I have been corresponding for the last couple months and kind of let each other into each other’s lives but we have not got together in person yet. Today he possibly will be showing up at our house and even though I’m really excited I am also extremely nervous because it has been a lot of years since we’ve all seen each other. He has never met my husband he someone knows his situation but doesn’t know him personally so I’m hoping everything goes well and I’m hoping that we can all stay in each other’s lives a little more than we have been because I think right now in this time where people are becoming very socially distant from each other then maybe what we really need is the people who knew us from the beginning. So I hope everything goes well and I hope we can all get along with each other and have a new relationship that’s starting from our past.

So readers let me know your situations have you ever had a friend that you reconnected with that you wanted to meet them and we’re really excited to see them again. If so how did introducing them to your family to your spouse to your children affect if in any way to the dynamic of your life. I’m just curious to know if anybody else has ever been in this situation if anyone else has ever had to introduce your family to someone from your past that they’ve never met before that when you were younger meant so much. But now after decades you have no idea what they’ve been up to and they have no idea what you’ve been up to except for what you decide to tell them.

So quick update I have received the permission to use my friend’s name in my blog. His name is Thomas but ever since we were kids I’ve always called him TJ. He gave me permission to use his name and said I can tell everyone all his embarrassing exploits from childhood till present day. We actually spent a few hours at my mother’s house hanging out with each other. He brought my husband a comic book because I told him a story about me actually opening a limited edition comic book of my husband’s and reading it and realizing that my husband really does love me otherwise he would have strangled me. So we all just kind of hung out and talked about our past I realized that he and my husband have quite a bit in common they both are handyman Jacks of all trades masters of none. And they both have a very Hands-On parenting relationship raising daughters. Even though TJ refers to his daughters as dicks and we call ours bitches. In the most loving way possible. Both are children have no filters they say what’s on their mind and they do not hold back. Lying is not in their forte. Even though it was a very short visit, TJ and I still send occasional messages to each other check up and see how each other are doing. I actually am looking forward to the next time we can all get together. One of the questions he did ask was was my mom still mean and absolutely she is mean as the day is long. But I remember his mom being just one of the sweetest women that have ever met. We discussed the other day how our mom’s kind of like let us have open range of our teenage and adolescent lives. And we all probably did some stuff that we probably wouldn’t have been able to do if we would have come from a nuclear family. But I wouldn’t change or trade my childhood for the world. We had an inside joke in the apartments that we live in that we all must have had the same father because they’re really couldn’t be that many deadly fathers in the world. All of us were raised by single mothers. Aaron Kiendl, Andrea Douglas, Jamie Byrd, Missy Morris, Whitney Riddle, Andy Olsen, Patricia Wolfswinkle and her sisters, TJ and his sister Candy, Stephanie and Richard Contreras, David Gonzales, Roy, and Josh Pierce ( part raised by their grandmother) The Smith Kids (Christina boys and Diana’s girls) The Osborne’s, The Jones girls, Daniel Simmons, and us. All raised by Single mothers busting their asses to provide for their kids sacrificing quality time for financial security. We all ended up working at extremely young ages to help our family’s or just to have something more. Not to mention that we all ended up doing things that maybe would have gotten lots of kids in trouble. We had a lot of responsibilities and we also had a lot of maybe misdirected trust because we were not always doing the things we were supposed to be doing.

That being said it was almost as if we didn’t skip a beat like no time was lost in between us like we just were able to have normal conversations as if we had always been in contact. Every now and then we talk about things that transpired between the two of us, we talk about how we impacted each other’s lives and how we still are impacting each other’s lives. I guess what I really wanted to say is I’m glad that our paths have ran back into each other and y’all know I don’t believe in coincidences so there is a reason that we found each other again at this point in our lives. Having some kind of normalcy or I guess having someone who knows me for who I am, who I started out being, who helped me develop into the person that I am really means a lot to me and I hope that we continue to have that kind of relationship. Where we can talk about whatever is on our minds whatever is happening in our lives and know that we knew each other before we went down this path called life. I wouldn’t say that we know each other better than anyone else but I would say that we know each other differently than others know us. If that makes sense. Just know that reconnecting with people from your past is reconnecting to who you are. When those people understand you because they were learning to understand themselves it’s actually a pretty amazing feeling. Glad that we found each other TJ.

So I’m coming up on my 43rd birthday. 43 43 I just want to keep saying it 43. 3 years from where I am right now my grandmother died. At 46 she didn’t have time she didn’t have everything that grandmother was supposed to have she didn’t have what a lot of people take for granted. My mother lost her mother when she was in her twenties. My grandmother only got to know two of her grandchildren one of them she was raising and basically was snatched out of her hands when his mother was ready to take her son back. My grandmother was my best friend I was a 6 year old child with a grown up for a best friend my cousin Erica lived next door but she spoke a lot of Spanish and I just wasn’t able to communicate with her very much. I remember my mom’s cousin’s children more I mean she’s my mom’s cousin’s child also but I remember them more than I remembered her. So my grandmother became my best friend. And I think she really in a lot of ways she way mother’s too.

Sometimes I think about her. when she died she was alone. She was getting ready for work she was a nurse but she had a diabetic seizure and basically bounced from one side of the hall to the other side. When I was younger I would climb in the bathtub and speak to her. The bathtub is probably the last place that she had coherent thought. It was probably the last place she had control of herself. So I feel extremely close to her in the bathtub it doesn’t have to have water in it I could be taking a shower in it. I feel comfortable there.

My birthday has always been extremely important to my mother. She has always celebrated and reminded me how important I’ve been to her. But now as a years of going by she’s starting to forget things. She’s dismissing things they were important to her before. And even though I have had so many more years with my mother then she got to have with hers, it seems like we’re spending more and more time arguing with each other. I don’t want the past years but I have with my mother to be us angry I also don’t want her last years with each other to be where we don’t understand each other. I want to be able to be able to appreciate what we have. My mom spent a lot of her life being the rock that held us all together she was someone that we could always count on. She tried to teach us what the world was really about without sugar coating it without making it a fantasy. Yet she tried really hard to make sure that our childhood was not tumultuous and had as little drama as possible. With each passing year I feel like our entire family has been blessed to be able to together. But sometimes being together reminds us how different we are and how far apart our mindsets are.

So people may be thinking that I’m wrong and that’s okay. The world is built on different opinions and different ideas. If we all thought the same what a boring world this would be. That being said so many different opinions are swirling around about what exactly happened. In my opinion people will do whatever they’re going to do it doesn’t really take much to insight people to decide to form a mob mentality. I do believe in peaceful protest, but I also believe that sometimes you have to take action to be heard. In my opinion I do not believe that this is what happened last week.

I grew up interracially mixed world. My genealogy, ancestry, ethnicity came from a lot of different places. To cut and dry say that I am of one ethnicity is seriously not giving credit to a lot of my ancestors. My family for the most part does not see different ethnicity or different race in the same light that a lot of people do. During my early childhood I grew up around African American kids, native American Kids, Anglo, and Hispanic kids. Racism was not an issue. But one day it became important. But why??? We just started hating on a level I had never thought would happen. It’s scary for me to imagine how the. Color of our skin is still an issue. The quality of our character is what matters.

My favorite comedian hands down is John Leguizamo. I like him because he is not afraid to express how unconventional his life is. He Comes from a Latin family who similar to my family is gigantic, I have more cousins and uncle’s and aunt’s then most people do. He makes fun of how different his family is from the average American family which gives him plenty of material to use. Thing is American family yes come from all over the world yet they don’t share the same culture as some other families do. So he has to basically take the Listener on a verbal voyage through the Dynamics of his family in order to help them understand where he’s coming from. And where he has come from he talks about his parents his relationship with his brother his relationship with his uncle. How his father’s infidelity was handled in their family. How his family life was different than his friends.

I think I related to him because I realized as I was growing up I somehow realized how different my life was growing up then some of my friends. My mother was a single mother, however I did have a relationship with my father. It wasn’t a very healthy relationship a lot of times I had to realize that I was not the number one person in my father’s life. Where my mother sacrificed a lot of things for us growing up my father’s sacrificed nothing. But I do realize that the relationship I do have with my father is valid because my brothers don’t have that relationship with him. I was at least a part of his life even if it was just a picture in his wallet.

This brings me to the point I was trying to make. My father’s family have made it completely normal to make fun of themselves and make jokes out of situations that are actually not very funny but in retrospect what do you do. You got to laugh at it. They are storytellers from the beginning. Either ya laugh, or get upset either way you’re right with what you are feeling, and inevitably take you become part of their story.