Oooh! My turn, my turn!
I actually don't know a lot about each side of my family. All of my father's family lives in Germany, so I really don't see them much, and not a lot of my mother's family still talks to her, so I don't know a lot about them either. But I do know the story of how my parents got together, and it's my favorite story I've ever heard in my life, so here we go:
(Please note that this story was told to me by my parents, both of which have a tendency to blow things out of proportions, so even I'm not sure how much of this is real and how much of it is exaggerated, but it makes a good story either way.)
My mom, Theresa Jaylene, - she's always gone by her middle name because my grandmother had a lisp and couldn't pronounce Theresa that well - lived in the bayous of Louisiana. She lived in a really small, secluded town really deep in the Southern part of Louisiana, and she honestly did not know English all that fluently until I was about ten or eleven. Up until then, she spoke very crude French and lived with her mother, Margot, who was French as well. Her father was Algonquin Indian, and she never met him until she was in her thirties. I never got the full story of what happened there - all I know is that Margot was kind of looked down upon in this small town for dating and becoming impregnated by this man before they got married, and then he left her before my mom was born.
My dad, Henri, was born and grew up in Munich to a moderately wealthy family. I honestly do not remember what his father invented to become so wealthy, but it was something to do with DLR, which is like Germany's NASA. Anyway, my dad had just graduated college with his degree in Philosophy as was about to start graduate school when one of his friends came back from this vacation he had taken to America - to Louisiana - and told him all about how much fun he had there and how my dad had to go. So my father dropped everything and moved to Louisiana without a job, house, anything lined up. He just dropped everything and left. He's an interesting guy like that.
So Louisiana has these Miss. Lousiana pageants every year - like every other state does, - but they also have their own little pageants that are specifically for young women who live in the bayous and don't get out into the city. My mother, who was either sixteen or seventeen at the time, had just won one of these pageants and her picture was in the paper because of it. My father gets to Louisiana, seeings the paper, and quote from my father:
Quote:"I saw her face and it was like a lightening bolt that started from the bottom of my spine and traveled up to my brain. I knew I had to meet her because I knew that she was the love of my life."
Oh, don't worry, people. This story gets more cheesy.
So the next day, he went to the town that the paper said my mother was from. He actually had to walk there from Baton Rouge, which was a pretty long walk through mosquito and water snake infested roads and cities. Anyway, he gets to this town, shows my mother's picture around to people, and it doesn't take very long before he's in front of my mother and Margot's house. He knocks on the door, my mother opens it, and my father goes on a rambling fit. He tells her who is he, where he's from, why he's there, everything... And my mother doesn't understand a word of it. She doesn't speak English, and my father was speaking broken English at best.
Dejected, my father walks away and goes back into the heart of this town, looking for a job. He goes into this deli and asks if they're willing to hire him, and the owner of the store can see that my father is looking really down, so he asks him what's wrong. After my father explains everything that's just happened to him, the owner of this shop makes a deal with him: My father can live in this small apartment in the back of the shop - rent free - and he can eat the food that the deli makes for meals, but he has to work in the shop without getting paid. And in exchange for that, once a week, this deli owner would teach my dad French so he could talk to my mother. Of course, what the deli owner didn't tell my father was that this apartment was two very very very small room, one of which was just a small mattress on the floor and a lamp, and the other was a bathroom with a toilet that only flushed half of the time, and a shower that had very low water pressure. But he made due, and every week he would get a French lesson from this deli owner, and then he would go to my mother's house and try to converse with her in the French that he had just learned. After about four and a half months, my dad could speak French fluently, and had already stolen my mother's heart with his story, so they planned to get married. But Margot was completely against it and kicked my mother out of her house, so my both my mother and my father lived in the tiny apartment of this deli. But my father had stopped getting French lessons and was now actually getting paid, so eventually they made enough money to buy a really really small house and pop six kids out - four boys and two girls. They never got married.
As cute and adorable as this whole story is, they actually broke up when I was eight or nine, and then my mom moved me and all of my siblings to Boston while my dad moved to Los Angeles. My mother has always thought that she had "power" and used those to make a living for herself as a medium/psychic. Yeah, this is the woman I lived with for eighteen years. I should also mention that my mother has severe schizophrenia that she has never been medicated for, and will often times truly believe that she is Edith Piaf, and will not answer us unless we addressed her that way. It was a pretty hectic childhood. When I was eleven, my father came to Massachusetts for work (when he moved to Los Angeles, he ended up getting his doctorate and teaching Philosophy at the University of Southern California, but found a love for photography and quit his job to pursue that. When I was eleven, he was still pretty freelance, but now he's one of the major photographers that the Suicide Girls base in California uses, as well as the one in Portland, Las Vegas, and New Mexico. He travels. A lot.). He stayed in Boston for three weeks, and we he left, my mother was pregnant with my little brother. This happened again when I was thirteen, so that's how I have two little brothers - both of them my father's, even though my parents had split up.
My whole childhood was really kind of messed up and hectic and rough - which I'm sure is completely expected with eight children, no constantly present father figure, and a clinically insane mother (who I love, by the way. I know it sounds like I'm bad mouthing her, but I love my mother so much. She's my best friend in the world. End of story), so during the summers, I would go to Los Angeles with my father and that's where I used to get into a lot of trouble, until one summer I got into a little too much trouble and came back to Massachusetts pregnant, and that was the biggest thing to ever happen to me in my life. So if you ever hear me talking about Nonny, that's my daughter. Her name is Rhiannon Noelle, and I love her to pieces and she's so perfect.
My daughter is the type of kid that likes The Andrews Sisters and The Ink Spots and Billie Holiday, and thinks that music now-a-days sucks. She's so young, yet she has the biggest opinions about
everything. She cracks me up on a daily basis with some of the things she says that I've never heard anybody else her age say, and she thinks about things that I never thought about until I was much much older.
Also, I was married for, like, two months at one point, right after I turned nineteen. He was way too old for me, but I thought that I was in love, so I married him, and then found out that he had been cheating on me the entire time. And then he picked up and left one day without a word, and now I'm a twenty year old divorcee. Yep. That's my family. Hahahahaha, I love them.
