Of Monsters and Mice: the mostly true story of my life

You know how the saying goes: “Whatever can go wrong… will go wrong.”

It's an apt slogan for my existence thus far.

But perhaps that oversimplifies the thing. The phrase shouldn’t end there. A more accurate descriptor might go something like this: “Whatever can go wrong…will go wrong…. except when it doesn’t and goes bafflingly, marvelously right in the most awkward way humanly possible.”

Yes, that’s a better way to surmise my life thus far, because as I sit here and clatter away at the keys, I’m aware that calling my life a failure is a falsehood. I’ve got some pretty great things going on. I’ve got cute kids, a dedicated husband, a home, and a day-to-day existence so sickeningly sweet it’d give your neighborhood pessimist cavities. Alas, you’re not here to read about that part– that part is boring. The things that go right usually are. And hey, I’m here to tell ya that boring isn’t always a bad thing. Boring leaves some space for peace. If you’ve found that (peace, I mean), please let me know– ’cause I’m still searching. So, let’s dive in, why don’t we? I suppose we should start where all good stories do…

At the beginning.

It began before I can remember. It began with a woman much stronger than I, a woman who overcame, a woman who inspires me to be the best version of myself every single day (It’s my mom, duh). Yes, my mother. She is a rare woman. She is the strongest person I know, but not in that harsh, horrible kind of way. She is strength in her gentleness, in her caring spirit, in her meticulous cleanliness, in her arms that encircle with warmest embrace. She is the reason I’m writing this. I hear her soft alto whispering in the back of my mind even now, “You have got to write a book about your life, Pearl– No one would believe it!” But before there was me, there was her. There was him.

He was handsome. He was tall, and lanky but well-muscled with darkly tanned skin and striking blue eyes. His teeth were a little crooked, but he couldn’t help that. He was meticulously well-groomed, almost as if he were trying to make up for something…and, well… he was. His childhood reeked with the hallmarks of parents still caught in the lingering strife of the great depression. Everything you’ve ever heard about the worst-case scenario of growing up poor? It was true for him. He wore it wonderfully well. He drove fast cars and rode motorbikes and blared rock and roll from his custom record setup. He womanized and fist-fought and was recently divorced– twice over. He was a man on a mission. He was a man with something to prove. He wanted so desperately to be what the world had always told him he never would be: a success. A family man. And so, when he saw mama from across the roller skating rink, her auburn locks glittering in the light of the disco ball- so beautiful, so alone... and wrangling three small boys, he just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. He’d tried to start a family with his first two wives, and had one kid by each before the relationships ended, but here was a woman with kids in tow, and boys nonetheless. Instant family. And he could be the hero. They were married less than a year later.

Mama says he showed his true colors for the very first time on the night of their honeymoon. She’d thought she’d found her knight in shining armor, but instead, she’d leapt headfirst into her worst nightmare. When they got married, there were already five kids between the two of them. Mama’s first marriage had ended in divorce, too, and she liked to think of her family with her new husband (my dad, if you hadn’t caught on) as their own little Brady Bunch...But with a darker bent that mama happily swept under the rug, along with the rest of her baggage. The abuse escalated with each day of the marriage, and I think Mama might’ve fooled herself into believing that giving him another baby would fix it. Along came my brother, and she saw a different side of the man with striking blue eyes. She saw him love with reckless abandon.

He loved my brother more than anything he’d ever seen, more than any of his other children, certainly more than my mother or me. But the abuse didn’t stop. Instead, it escalated. Now she wasn’t just doing things wrong with the house, and her clothes, and her hair… Now she was tainting his precious son. She did what she must– she got pregnant again because he didn’t hurt her so badly when she was pregnant. And thus, I came screaming into the world with a tuft of violently red hair upon my brow, more bruises on my infantile body than seemed humanly possible, and a fire in my soul that smoldered, but didn’t burn. And of course, the undeniable truth that guaranteed a torturous existence: I was female, and my monsters equated that to being less than dirt. So begins our story.