Post by nikadawson on Jan 23, 2007 22:26:22 GMT -5
Chapter One:
My name is Nicole Renee Dawson. I have never in all my eighteen years of life liked the name Nicole. I was called Nicky for the first few years of my existence, but when I was around three my brother accidentally misspelled my name on his back to school paper. The one that every teacher makes you do telling them about their students, that they probably never read past the name. But anyway, he ended up spelling it Nika. He called me that jokingly when he got home that day, and I liked the name so much it stuck.
I was born into a seemingly average life. I had a mother, and a father. I had an older brother, and an older sister that I couldn't stand. My brother Tommy, was an intelligent, slightly goofy boy. He loved me the second my mom said she was pregnant with me. My whole life he was the overprotective, sensitive older brother. The one who bandaged my cuts, and cheered me up when I was sad, or bailed me out of something stupid I did. My sister, what can I say about her. I think she was switched at birth with my mother's real baby, and my biological older sister is somewhere in Africa, getting chased around by lions as a bush woman. Or some other crazy stuff like that I made up when I was little and use to visualize Nessi getting sold to the circus as a flying monkey.
For the first years of my life we lived in Nottingham, England. My mother was not British by birth, she was in fact an Italian American. My father's mother was British, his father a Native American. My mother, Lexi, was fifteen when she met my father, and disobeying her own papa ran off to live with him. We all do stupid things as a teenager. I would say my mother should have listened to her papa, but I can't. Because if she had, I wouldn't be here, and no one would be telling you my story.
My mother married my father shortly after my brother was born, in July of 1983, when she was 16. It wasn't a real wedding, it was a courtroom in Vegas, with my father still dressed in a beaten up leather jacket and my mom in overalls. There's only one picture of the ‘wedding', that now my mom likes to flip off when she's drunk. At the time though, my mother had thought it romantic, and my father her Prince Charming to sweep her off her feet.
They moved to England about a month or two after Tommy was born. They were both high school dropouts, but my father had been offered a job by a friend of his mother's as a part time mechanic. It didn't pay much, but it paid enough. My mother hadn't talked to her papa since she had walked out, and she didn't know how he would take the fact that she was a mother a sixteen. My paternal grandmother was just happy to have a grandchild to spoil, and she happily helped take care of Tommy. Oh, how things change. Money was tight, and since my father was taking night classes to get his GED as well, my mother got a job as a waitress at a local café near where they lived.
Not even two years later and my mother was pregnant again, with Nessi, or as I like to think, the child that lives somewhere else and is not Nessi. My mother was already depressed with her life, not that she didn't love my brother, she did, but she couldn't handle the pressure it put her through. Nessi was born in Feb. of 1985, and though my father seemed happy he was hardly ever there, now working part time, and going to classes at the local university. My mother felt that life was passing her by, and my grandmother was taking care of two kids, one who was, shall I put it nicely, a screaming banshee/hyena.
A few months after Nessi was born my parents got a lucky break. My father got promoted, to assistant manager of the garage, so he was making more money, and my mom could cut back on the hours she was a waitress. She became happier, and started to pay more attention to her two children.
My father was in his junior year of college when I was born in May of 1988. My brother and sister had both been born normally, in a hospital, with my mom screaming in pain and being sedated by doctors. I wasn't. I had to be born in a way that you only see on TV shows, or some crappy b-list movie. I was born in the car, in the middle of the woods. My family had been camping when my mother started having contractions and her water broke. Before her water broke she thought she was going into false labor, so she didn't say anything to my father. When he finally did find out he rushed them all into the car, but it was two hours off before they even got out of the woods into the city. My father's best friend, Greg, was with them. Greg worked in the ER so he was in the back helping my mother with her breathing when the gas ran out of the car near the edge of the woods. They had no choice but to have me in the car, with Greg delivering me, my father panicking, and my siblings sleeping in the front seat. I was very insistent on coming into this world, and I came in, a red screaming baby in the middle of the woods.
‘You've always been dramatic,' my mother would day to me after a few drinks, ‘You were dramatic from the minute you came into this world.' I started talking at nine months old, they called me a chatterbox. To my brother I was firecracker, to my sister freak. I started walking when I was 13 months, and from the on I was a little bundle of energy. You could always see me outside running after butterflies with my brother watching me from the porch of our house. My sister kept to herself, or was off with whatever new minion she had met in school. She didn't have friends, she had minions, people that followed her every command, and that's the way she liked it.
By the time I was two, I was searching all over the house for any kind of children's book I could find. My parents thought all I did was look at the pictures, which at first I did. But soon Tommy, who was five years older than me, and seven at the time, was reading to me as best he could, and I was soon teaching myself to read. I loved books, and never watched TV.
‘She's not normal,' my sister would scream, ‘All she does is read those stupid books, not anything somebody normal would.'
I was three when the twins came. They were born in a normal hospital. Officially named Willow and Wilhelmina, they were mischievous troublemakers from day one. We all called them Wills and Mina. Around December of that year was when my mom finally noticed my father was coming home less and less. He was never around much, and I was never Daddy's little princess when he was around. That title was reserved for Nessi. He barely paid any attention to the twins, and my grandmother, who had always been a loving, kind woman was starting to look at my mom with suspicion and distrust. Since my father was never around, instead of reacting like a normal woman would, with thoughts of cheating, my mother clung to my father more. It went on this way for three years.
My mother had never planned on having any more children after the twins, but she felt that maybe my father wouldn't leave her if she gave him something to hold on to. My father had been growing more and more restless with his life, he was getting a degree in law, and didn't want to be tied down by a wife and kids. Mom getting pregnant with my little brother Drew just seemed to alienate him more. Drew was about 14 months old when my mother discovered that my father had been cheating on her with various women from his classes for three years. If it had been me, I would have been pissed. My mother wasn't, she got depressed. She started to ignore all of us, and when my father left us in June of 1994, claiming that he didn't love her and he needed a life of his own, it broke her. Shortly after she started drinking.
After he left, my family had lost the income that he had provided for us and we had to move from a modestly nice cottage in the country of England, to a run down flat in Nottingham, with two bedrooms. The only income was my mother's waitress pay. In the flat she slept on the couch, me and my sisters in one bedroom, and Drew and Tommy in the other. Drew was only a year old, and Tommy only eleven, but it seemed me at six and Tommy at eleven we were taking care of everyone. Nessi was no help at all. My mother was either always working, passed out on the couch, or drinking her depression away. I didn't have very good grades my first year school because of this, but I barely managed to pass.
About seven months after we moved into the flat social services started to come around, talking about how they were going to take us away from my mother. That seemed to startle my mother out of her drunken stupor, and she managed to swallow her pride. After eleven years of not talking she called her father. The whole night she talked to him on the phone, and me and Tommy stayed up through half of the conversation sitting in the hall eavesdropping. The next morning at breakfast my mother announced we were moving.
Two weeks later we had packed up our meager possessions and were on our way to the United States. I was excited to meet my grandfather, to be on a plane, to see a whole new country. Nessi was complaining about leaving her loyal minions, though she called them friends. Tommy was anxious, and my little siblings didn't care at all. My mom seemed to be alternating that whole plane ride between wanting to bolt, wanting a drink, or being excited. I know she was nervous about seeing her father again. The second the plane touched down in New York, I had hope that life would get better.
My name is Nicole Renee Dawson. I have never in all my eighteen years of life liked the name Nicole. I was called Nicky for the first few years of my existence, but when I was around three my brother accidentally misspelled my name on his back to school paper. The one that every teacher makes you do telling them about their students, that they probably never read past the name. But anyway, he ended up spelling it Nika. He called me that jokingly when he got home that day, and I liked the name so much it stuck.
I was born into a seemingly average life. I had a mother, and a father. I had an older brother, and an older sister that I couldn't stand. My brother Tommy, was an intelligent, slightly goofy boy. He loved me the second my mom said she was pregnant with me. My whole life he was the overprotective, sensitive older brother. The one who bandaged my cuts, and cheered me up when I was sad, or bailed me out of something stupid I did. My sister, what can I say about her. I think she was switched at birth with my mother's real baby, and my biological older sister is somewhere in Africa, getting chased around by lions as a bush woman. Or some other crazy stuff like that I made up when I was little and use to visualize Nessi getting sold to the circus as a flying monkey.
For the first years of my life we lived in Nottingham, England. My mother was not British by birth, she was in fact an Italian American. My father's mother was British, his father a Native American. My mother, Lexi, was fifteen when she met my father, and disobeying her own papa ran off to live with him. We all do stupid things as a teenager. I would say my mother should have listened to her papa, but I can't. Because if she had, I wouldn't be here, and no one would be telling you my story.
My mother married my father shortly after my brother was born, in July of 1983, when she was 16. It wasn't a real wedding, it was a courtroom in Vegas, with my father still dressed in a beaten up leather jacket and my mom in overalls. There's only one picture of the ‘wedding', that now my mom likes to flip off when she's drunk. At the time though, my mother had thought it romantic, and my father her Prince Charming to sweep her off her feet.
They moved to England about a month or two after Tommy was born. They were both high school dropouts, but my father had been offered a job by a friend of his mother's as a part time mechanic. It didn't pay much, but it paid enough. My mother hadn't talked to her papa since she had walked out, and she didn't know how he would take the fact that she was a mother a sixteen. My paternal grandmother was just happy to have a grandchild to spoil, and she happily helped take care of Tommy. Oh, how things change. Money was tight, and since my father was taking night classes to get his GED as well, my mother got a job as a waitress at a local café near where they lived.
Not even two years later and my mother was pregnant again, with Nessi, or as I like to think, the child that lives somewhere else and is not Nessi. My mother was already depressed with her life, not that she didn't love my brother, she did, but she couldn't handle the pressure it put her through. Nessi was born in Feb. of 1985, and though my father seemed happy he was hardly ever there, now working part time, and going to classes at the local university. My mother felt that life was passing her by, and my grandmother was taking care of two kids, one who was, shall I put it nicely, a screaming banshee/hyena.
A few months after Nessi was born my parents got a lucky break. My father got promoted, to assistant manager of the garage, so he was making more money, and my mom could cut back on the hours she was a waitress. She became happier, and started to pay more attention to her two children.
My father was in his junior year of college when I was born in May of 1988. My brother and sister had both been born normally, in a hospital, with my mom screaming in pain and being sedated by doctors. I wasn't. I had to be born in a way that you only see on TV shows, or some crappy b-list movie. I was born in the car, in the middle of the woods. My family had been camping when my mother started having contractions and her water broke. Before her water broke she thought she was going into false labor, so she didn't say anything to my father. When he finally did find out he rushed them all into the car, but it was two hours off before they even got out of the woods into the city. My father's best friend, Greg, was with them. Greg worked in the ER so he was in the back helping my mother with her breathing when the gas ran out of the car near the edge of the woods. They had no choice but to have me in the car, with Greg delivering me, my father panicking, and my siblings sleeping in the front seat. I was very insistent on coming into this world, and I came in, a red screaming baby in the middle of the woods.
‘You've always been dramatic,' my mother would day to me after a few drinks, ‘You were dramatic from the minute you came into this world.' I started talking at nine months old, they called me a chatterbox. To my brother I was firecracker, to my sister freak. I started walking when I was 13 months, and from the on I was a little bundle of energy. You could always see me outside running after butterflies with my brother watching me from the porch of our house. My sister kept to herself, or was off with whatever new minion she had met in school. She didn't have friends, she had minions, people that followed her every command, and that's the way she liked it.
By the time I was two, I was searching all over the house for any kind of children's book I could find. My parents thought all I did was look at the pictures, which at first I did. But soon Tommy, who was five years older than me, and seven at the time, was reading to me as best he could, and I was soon teaching myself to read. I loved books, and never watched TV.
‘She's not normal,' my sister would scream, ‘All she does is read those stupid books, not anything somebody normal would.'
I was three when the twins came. They were born in a normal hospital. Officially named Willow and Wilhelmina, they were mischievous troublemakers from day one. We all called them Wills and Mina. Around December of that year was when my mom finally noticed my father was coming home less and less. He was never around much, and I was never Daddy's little princess when he was around. That title was reserved for Nessi. He barely paid any attention to the twins, and my grandmother, who had always been a loving, kind woman was starting to look at my mom with suspicion and distrust. Since my father was never around, instead of reacting like a normal woman would, with thoughts of cheating, my mother clung to my father more. It went on this way for three years.
My mother had never planned on having any more children after the twins, but she felt that maybe my father wouldn't leave her if she gave him something to hold on to. My father had been growing more and more restless with his life, he was getting a degree in law, and didn't want to be tied down by a wife and kids. Mom getting pregnant with my little brother Drew just seemed to alienate him more. Drew was about 14 months old when my mother discovered that my father had been cheating on her with various women from his classes for three years. If it had been me, I would have been pissed. My mother wasn't, she got depressed. She started to ignore all of us, and when my father left us in June of 1994, claiming that he didn't love her and he needed a life of his own, it broke her. Shortly after she started drinking.
After he left, my family had lost the income that he had provided for us and we had to move from a modestly nice cottage in the country of England, to a run down flat in Nottingham, with two bedrooms. The only income was my mother's waitress pay. In the flat she slept on the couch, me and my sisters in one bedroom, and Drew and Tommy in the other. Drew was only a year old, and Tommy only eleven, but it seemed me at six and Tommy at eleven we were taking care of everyone. Nessi was no help at all. My mother was either always working, passed out on the couch, or drinking her depression away. I didn't have very good grades my first year school because of this, but I barely managed to pass.
About seven months after we moved into the flat social services started to come around, talking about how they were going to take us away from my mother. That seemed to startle my mother out of her drunken stupor, and she managed to swallow her pride. After eleven years of not talking she called her father. The whole night she talked to him on the phone, and me and Tommy stayed up through half of the conversation sitting in the hall eavesdropping. The next morning at breakfast my mother announced we were moving.
Two weeks later we had packed up our meager possessions and were on our way to the United States. I was excited to meet my grandfather, to be on a plane, to see a whole new country. Nessi was complaining about leaving her loyal minions, though she called them friends. Tommy was anxious, and my little siblings didn't care at all. My mom seemed to be alternating that whole plane ride between wanting to bolt, wanting a drink, or being excited. I know she was nervous about seeing her father again. The second the plane touched down in New York, I had hope that life would get better.
