Day 18 of 100

My earliest memory is me at the age of 2 peeing off a balcony.

I was born in a small town outside of Fort Collins, CO called La Porte. It has a wikipedia page which I guess makes it real. My parents had turned on, tuned in, and dropped out in the 1960s and at the time of my birth my dad worked on a goat farm delivering milk, and I’m not really sure what my mom did.

It wasn’t that they were forced into this lifestyle instead they chose it, as many people in the early 20s did at that time as a way to connect more completely with the universe and be agents for goodness and change.

Of course, with the 1960s came drugs, and neither of my parents were strangers to what was available. I think my father was more deeply acquainted with that world than my mom, who has often told me that she stopped doing all drugs and alcohol once she found out she was pregnant with me.

For years, I used to blame my mood swings, depression, and anxiety on the fact that my father’s sperm didn’t swim too straight, but truthfully, they were both well meaning parents who wanted me to live in a better, more open minded world than they grew up in.

I remember years later, (I was probably in my thirties) watching a documentary on the 1960s with my mom and hearing her quietly crying.

“We wanted so badly to do good,” she said. “We meant so well.”

I feel it’s not right for me to tell my biological father’s story, as it’s his to tell, and all I have is my memories and the stories told to me by him and others. Plus, by the time I was two years old, my parents were on the path to divorce, and my mom and I were headed to California.

We lived in East Palo Alto in the standard California apartment buildings with the units above the car port. According to my mom, she dated, but I really only remember the man who became my dad—the person who confirmed to me that nurture was a much more powerful force than nature—and his Oscar Meyer baloney sandwiches without the rind.

It was generally a happy time for me. I ran around pretty wild, but my mom was in her very early 20s and I was a professional pain in the ass. I do remember a time when she was sitting on the couch crying, and I climbed into her lap, wiped away her tears and promised her that everything would be ok.

When I look back on my life, the good and the bad, and of the life led by my mom, I realize that we lived up to that promise. She is older now, and is battling a cancer that I don’t know much about. But she grew up into the person she always wanted to be, a matriarch of a family of good people that truly enjoy each other’s company. And she might not know it, but she has been the center of my life since I was born, and I couldn’t ask for a better parent.