The Beginning

On November 25, 1964 my mother gave birth to a little girl she named Julie Ann. I was the first of four children she gave birth too. The doctor who delivered me was named Dr. Julian. My deduction this many years later is that my mom had the hots for her doctor. Never asked her so I could be wrong.

My father was an airplane mechanic and did several tours in Vietnam.

My parents didn't stay married but this information doesn't really matter now does it.....lets fast forward some years later....In fact about 11 1/2.

I had left home to be married as soon as I graduated from High School. I was 17 1/2 and I felt I knew everything and could do anything I set my mind too. I left home angry at my father. I felt he should have provided for us better than he did. After retiring from the military he did this job and that job but never settled into anything for the long term. At the time I thought he should have been an airline mechanic like he had been in the military and so I blamed him for all the things I felt he should have gotten for me. He wasn't home enough, was too controlling and drank to much. And I was a not so grown up teenager.

I was blessed (although at the time I didn't think so) with a step-mom named Kathryn who filled in for the huge hole left in my life when my father took us after divorcing my mom and left the state. I still think of her as my real mom even though I do have a relationship with my real mother. Of course it took leaving home for me to really appreciate her.

I divorced my first husband after about 11 years and remarried in the same year. God saw fit to align my current husband (just going through a divorce too) and I at a self-help christian divorce single meeting one evening. We married in 1993. I had never gone back to my hometown of Owensboro, Kentucky after I left it. And to this day never have. My father was always there though.

Not too long after we married I received word my father was in the hospital with a stoke. This was when he learned he had diabetes as well as was in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's/Dementia. He never really got to go back home. My step-mom and he had seperated some 10 years or so earlier and it was determined he could not go back to the home he had been in safely. That's when his children entered the picture. He has several. Some step, adopted and blood children. Six in all. By entered the picture, I mean thats when we had to step in and take some control.