Dear brothers and sisters,
I will continue my story. My mother had just lost her partner and now we are moving in with her friend that has the Doberman who bit me while camping. The neighborhood we moved into was primarily African American in North Portland as this was the late 60’s and although segregation was ending, attitudes remained. I spent that year in fight or flight mode. My brother and I were at one school whilst my sister was at another. I can remember having to run home every day because if I were caught, I would be in a fight. The teachers were no better. They made it noticeably clear that my kind (White) was not welcome. There were some good things too. My brother, age 8, was able to sweep up a business around the corner each day for a little money and all the unflavored corn puffs we could want. There was a park within walking distance, and not only did it have a pool, but it had equipment you could check out to use while in the park. But I was still dealing with living with the dog that had bitten me. That and mom's new friend was mean to all of us kids. I now call her my "Aunt N" as she remained friends with my mom even after we moved away from her years later. They remained close up until my mothers passing and I still try to call her weekly.
I realize up to now this story does not sound too miraculous other than I am still here and have learned many things throughout my life. But there are miracles coming. I would say that the male voice telling me to leave the house when I was six, so I did not get shot, was a miracle though. I need to back track just a little to living in the first house with my mom's friend “Aunt.” While we were living there, we were still visiting my dad regularly. He lived on a farm and had a few horses. For some reason he thought it was appropriate for us to watch the pony try to mate with the horse. I have very few memories of being around my father up to this point. The memories I have are of disappointment. Christmases and birthdays with not even a card. But then my sister accused him of molesting her, and we were no longer allowed to see him. My mother even had us start using her maiden name and tried to hide us from him when we moved to the new house. After that, my mother forgot we were children and subjected us to hate speech and tried to convince us of how evil he was.
One day during the summer before I turned 7 was playing in the pool at the park and having fun. My sister started chasing me and I tried to climb out of the pool. She grabbed my ankles pulling me back in, but I landed my teeth on the concrete side of the pool breaking my two front teeth off at sharp angles. Mom took me to the dentist and they put these metal baskets on them This has been a sore point for me all my life and why I do not like to show my teeth when I smile. Probably the grossest part of this incident was when we went back to the pool a few days later my teeth were still floating in the gutter of the pool. We only had to live in that neighborhood for less than a year before my “Aunt” bought a house in a different area.
My mom was sick a lot throughout her life, so I spent a fair amount of time at my real Aunts or my Grandparents house. When I was 7, I was staying with my Aunt J, and she took me to her friends, and I was in their pool on a floatation device because although I spent a lot of time at the pool I had still not learned to swim. I fell off it and I was drowning. My Aunt J had to jump in and save me.
I loved the area we moved into right up until I started school. I had hoped I would have more friends now that we moved but I only found one person (LM) that would hang out with me and play. As I said earlier, we were extremely poor, we were on welfare. Mom was depressed as anyone would be after watching their partner unalive themselves. My “Aunt N” was paranoid about everything. Neither of them knew how to nurture the three of us kids. Laundry did not get done very often and so I smelled. So, I became the picked-on girl in my grade which led to even my one friend not spending time together with me very often.
Mom brought home a stray dog and her litter of puppies, and she became my constant companion. She was with me until I became an adult. She also came forward in a mediation to meet my guides and identified as being my joy guide. Her name is Trish.
Lots of things happened in this house we moved into. We had a pair of horse statues that would keep changing legs. This really scared my “Aunt N” so there was a lot of spiritual cleansing and burying of those horses. But the activity continued. We also had a lot of animals, 2 monkeys, a peacock, chickens, cats, dogs, fish. At age 8 I had a stranger come up to me at the school and asked me to keep lookout for him while he masturbated on the school door, something I should not have seen at age 8, but he paid me $5.00 so I did.
Life in our new house was not too bad as far as that goes. I was not in fight or flight all the time anymore. I hated going to school not because I did not like to study but because of being picked on all the time. But the neighborhood was good, and we had a lot of freedom as my mother would go up to the local restaurant for hours having coffee and we pretty much did what we wanted. We just had to be home by dark. We lived much closer to one of my mother's sisters (Aunt J) so occasionally we would get home and be in trouble because our aunt had seen us out doing something she did not think we should and would tell our mother. I had my dog Trish, and she would follow me everywhere. She was a beautiful white Shepard with golden tips. She would climb up the stairs to the slide and slide down behind me and climb the ladder up to the roof and bark at people as they passed by. She brought me much joy. The other animals were fun too, I was in the Rainbow girls club and when we went out to sell candy we would take the monkey, I sold so much candy and they did not even take the candy most of the time, they just wanted to see the monkey.
As I mentioned before, we were extremely poor. When I was Nine, my brother had talked the local drug store into letting him do a few chores for a little extra money. I kept going with him and so they let me dust the shelves for a little money too. My first “job.” At ten I started babysitting. I did that for a few years. Meanwhile my brother started mowing people's lawns and I would also go with him eventually taking over his lawn business after he taught me how to do it. He also found a local carpenter that was teaching him some woodworking skills. So, the two of us have always been industrious and found ways to make money. We both had paper routes and collected bottles for money.
Mom also picked up some under the table money at a local sewing shop and we got to go there with her. They also packaged pantyhose, and I was taught how to do this and made a little money from that. But it closed and for a little while it became a YMCA type of place we could go to and hang out. I learned to play pool there and we did things like paper drives. One of the counselors there asked me a question I will never forget though. He thought my flirtatious nature was me wanting that kind of attention and he propositioned me. I was eleven, I said it was not an invitation, and he dropped it. I do not know why but I never told anyone about it to make sure he did not hurt anyone in the future.
School was okay, I got good grades, unfortunately that made me a further target of being called the teacher's pet. I was not good at sports and dreaded having to do physical education. At one point we were learning to play softball and of course I was always picked last. So, the teacher tried to show me how to swing the bat and ended up smacking me in the forehead with it causing me a concussion.
When I was 10, I woke up during the night and my stomach hurt so bad, I could not sleep, but I was afraid to go wake up my mom, so I laid there all night. In the morning, I told my mom I did not feel well and had a really bad stomachache. But I never wanted to go to school and said I was sick a lot, so she made me go to school. At school all I could do was lay my head on the desk and cry. When it was time for recess the teacher came over and asked why I had not gone out to play and I told her I felt sick. So, she sent me to the nurse's office, and I had a fever of 103.8F°. She spent the next 3 hours trying to find my mother to get me. Mind you my mother did not work at the time. So, mom finally picks me up and takes me to the doctors where they determine I have acute appendicitis and need surgery. So, she drove me to the hospital. I go in for surgery and the doctor starts giving me the medicine telling me it will make me sleepy, About 10 minutes later he gives me a little more as I am still wide awake, a few minutes later the doctor doing the surgery looks at him and asks why I am still awake, he says he's already given me more than I should have needed but agrees to give me a little more. I still have not gone to sleep. She he gives me a little more than tells me to just listen to them talk while I count backwards, I distinctly remember thinking well that is going to be boring, I am just going to go to sleep then. My next memory is of floating above my body watching my appendix burst as they pull it out of me and a bunch of commotion. Then I am in the hall above my mother, and she is crying hysterically. I am conscious of not wanting to hurt her and fighting my way back to my body. However, after my mother passed, I had an incredible experience I will tell later but my memory expanded to a part that had been hidden from me all those years. I went into the light and met a Christlike being. He told me it was not my time but that because I had come into the light, he had a job for me later. I was to help lost spirits cross over. Then I was back in by body. Children are so cruel though. When I went back to school some of the boys started calling me fat because my belly was still bloated. I was very thin at that age. But from then on, I thought I was fat because of what they said and have had self-image issues ever since.
During the time between 3rd grade and 5th grade we were still living with moms’ friend the “Aunt N.” There were a lot of control issues and a lot of emotional abuse and neglect. At the same time my brother and I became entrepreneurs, not only working at the local drug store, mowing lawns, and babysitting but also running a Kool-Aid/lemonade stand in the summers.
It was also a period where my anger was out of control. I once broke my mother’s sewing scissors in one hand (that got me in a lot of trouble). After that I was told to take my anger out on the unwanted bamboo grove in the yard. I don’t know if you have ever tried to pull bamboo up, but they are nearly impossible to pull out. I was nine years old…. there is no bamboo left in that yard. I was quite strong for my age, easily carrying 50-pound bags of concrete by age 10. It is also my first attempt at leaving this planet taking a knife to my wrist. My sister happened to walk in and stop me. I felt so alone and different from everyone even in my own family. I was close with my brother but that was because our mom made him responsible for looking out for me.
Another memory about this time frame just surfaced. My mom started letting older kids hang out at or house to “foster” them, but it was unofficially. One of these teenage boys wanted to teach me how to give a massage and I seemed to have a natural talent for helping relieve people’s pain. At first it was innocent enough, but one time no one else was around and he asked me to do things I knew I should not do. He took my no answer, but it made me very uncomfortable. I told my mom, and she made all these kids go back to their homes. But at the same time she made me feel like it was my fault for letting him teach me how to give a massage as I “made myself available” to him. At this time in my life looking back at all these times when I received inappropriate attention from males, and I can only wonder if the light I was born with draws attention to me not only from spirits but from the living as well. I don’t know if that is the answer or not, but it would make sense. Especially during the darker periods when I was lost and denied any of it happened at all.
In fifth grade, mom decided she had had enough of living with our “Aunt N" and we moved out. I was really excited at first as we moved into a different school district. So, I am thinking I will get a fresh start. No one will know me, and I will not be getting picked on all the time. No such luck, it was not long before someone who knew someone heard about my nickname, and it started all over again. Then we moved again, and I was back at my old school again. We moved four times that year, but I only changed schools twice.
I was still going to my grandparents for the summers and in my tenth year we were at the fair like we did every year, and I was on a spinning ride, and I hit puberty while I was wearing white pants. I went to my grandma as no one told me I was going to have a mess to deal with when puberty hit, and she thought it was funny but got me what I needed, which was a bit mortifying as it was the way it was dealt with in the old days. Not the store-bought version. One of my favorite parts of the summers at grandma and grandpa's was going to the Tillamook County Fair in August. At about 11 or 12 they started letting us work in the game booths so I was able to earn a little fair money. My mom even worked for them one year and we followed the fair from Tillamook to Canby.
Well, this is a good stopping place for today. More to come.
Blessings of light, love, peace, happiness, health, and abundance to my brothers and sisters.
Sheri
.jpg)
