Sometimes I wonder what I’d be like if I’d never had the pain. I try to imagine a time before the pain, but there isn’t one.

My very genesis was a combination of indiscriminate indiscretion and hurt multiplied. No doubt my mother’s mother was disappointed to find the last of her three girls pregnant in high school — a hat trick of teen moms under one roof. My father’s mother took it the hardest. A brimstone Baptist raised in the shadow of uncompromising women, she cast her only child out rather than accept his lapse in judgement and the country girl who’s scarlet shame grew in her belly. My grandfather used every minute of those nine months to cool the fire, or at least admit that she didn’t want to not know her first grandchild.

So from my first breath there was pain and anger and the bitterness of dreams…