Life is hard for me to track. I have a way of filing things in my head where I can't seem to relocate them. Somethings come back to me with time and others are just gone it appears. It makes it hard to get things in sequence.

I know this blog has been all sweetness and light and I would love to keep it that way but life is not like that. Mine wasn't, anyway, it was vivid and turbulent and out of the norm for kids I grew up with. I thought so at the time, I may be wrong. I think lives are filled with turmoil for teens but we don't know how to talk about it so we don't know everyone is dealing with it. Freeing teens up to talk is something I do that I like about me. They know I am straight and that I actually lived through something like they are dealing with now. It gives them hope of survival.

My parents were not all sweetness and light, they were humans with five off spring and worked to support them. That left me, as the oldest, in charge of the kids and the house a lot. It also grew me up a little more mature than some kids my age. One of the lures of the boyfriend was that he was also an oldest child of five and we understood that there were times we just needed to be kids, not in charge of anyone, not responsible for anything and free to romp.

During this transition time from 13 to 15 a lot got crammed into my life that I can't put in sequence. School was worse and worse for me. Classes were easy but boring. Other kids, except for five or six friends, were mysteries to me as to behaviour and tastes in entertainment. I was never happy being where I was and doing what I was doing. It seemed like I always wanted to be doing something else.

Dad went from being a drunk mechanic and musican on weekends to being saved by Jesus and starting a teen hotline for kids with some others from the church. There was a lot of church in our lives normally, as far as we were concerned. Now there was even more. Mom was thrilled and they were getting along better than ever.

Because of political boundary changes my boyfriend went to another school after eighth grade. That meant I had to work to see him and visa-versa. There was school skipping and hitchhiking included in that phrase. I was lucky in that I had study hall and lunch back to back so I had a two hour time frame to run over to his town, visit while he was on lunch and make it back without missing classes.

Now it gets rocky. We broke up around my birthday one year. I remember it as the week following because I learned he had taken another girl tobogganing on my bday. When I confronted him all hell broke loose. What a fight! We stomped and screamed our way around the lake and through the fields and I threw his ring into the weeds. It was a real tear jerker.

I was devastated and he was shocked. The guys were ribbing him for being pussy whipped and egged him into taking the other girl, a known easy lay, out to get some. We had not gotten to that point yet and it was all important to him to be seen as a man. For me it was a trust issue. I was betrayed by him. I could not see his need to conform with the guys being more important than us. It was a whopper of a hurt for both of us.

Mom set me up with a kid from the church for a date. He was very nice but it didn't work. I went out with a dark haired boy and had to beat him off with a large stick all night. I got home intact from that one by being meaner than he was horny. I started hanging in the next town over - away from the the other next town over where the boyfriend hung out. I met a girl and we got to be friends.

The boyfriend and I got back together for awhile. I made the decision to go all the way with him because he was who I loved to have touch me and he was who I loved and I believed he loved me. We had to work some pretty fancy cons to get to be alone together again. Both families were watching us like hawks now.

Life is not predictable. If I have learned nothing else I know that "Go for it!" should be our most used phrase to encourage each other with. Do it now, don't wait. If you love it, do it. I'll be back soon. I need to get this little project wound up.