Childhood

John's story started like many others… John was born of an accidental pregnancy in Eastern Kentucky. At first his parents were afraid, they were not ready to be parents and of course John was their first child. John's Dad was a mechanic and found his work in the coal fields working on the large equipment that was used to strip mountains down to harvest the coal. John's Mom was still trying to decide what to do with life, she found work in hospitals as front staff receptionist and the sort. When John was born a lot of his time was spent with his grandmother and grandfather, Anna and Danny. 

John's parents were very busy trying to make money to provide for John so he spent a lot of his childhood being babysitted. John soon began to form an attachment to his grandparents, especially Danny. Unfortunately, this is where our story begins to turn. Danny had discovered he had cancer, at first it was not terminal. The cancer quickly began to mutate and spread. Danny was fairly wealthy as he had his own contracting and construction company so he went to many ecologists and got multiple opinions and treatments. Nothing was working, the cancer was spreading like the wildfires spread in Australia. John was too young to fully understand what was happening, Danny was like a father to him at this point as Dad was always working and John hardly got to spend time with him.

This cancer spread all throughout Danny’s body, including his brain. Danny was not Dad’s father, he married Anna and acted as a father to Dad and the best grandfather John could ever ask for. When the cancer spread to his brain Danny and Anna were in the process of a divorce. John did not fully understand what this meant but Danny had left Anna for his ex-wife, Kathy. Kathy was someone John had only heard about from A, so you can imagine how John's opinion was of Kathy. As the cancer progressed and Danny began to quickly lose his mind he reconnected with Kathy. The last time that John saw Danny he was in Kathy’s house on what everyone had assumed would be his deathbed. John gave Danny a watch he had won from a claw machine while in this bed.

Danny ended up recovering from this brief lapse of life and had another good week but John never saw him during that week. Danny died shortly after that week passed, this was all close to the Dadhristmas season. John was only nine years old at the time, just old enough to understand that he had lost a part of him forever. John could not help but to remember the times he spent with Danny, from fishing, cooking, and just watching TV. This moment tore John in half, but he tried his best to hide it, you see John learned to create a box in his mind to hold traumatic events like this. You should be able to imagine how bad of a structure that is, a person should never create such an area because this type of an area in a person’s mind is like a dam with a small crack that no one has noticed; eventually it will bust.

John spent the next six years attempting to keep the lid locked on the box. This was seemingly working very well until the crack formed, and John did not notice it. John got into his first serious relationship with a girl that he met at church, this was his “first love”. John had never felt this emotion before and it overwhelmed him. John began to become controlling, jealous, and paranoid. John saw every other boy as a threat and expressed this jealousy in ways that were not good. John did not realize that these acts were really his box about to spring open. The girl wised up and went back to her old boyfriend and left John. This moment crushed John and turned the crack in the box into a giant gap that let the emotions he once had boxed away to come out all at once. This was the first time John contemplated suicide.

Luckily, John did not go through with the contemplation. John had a serious talk with his parents. He discovered that Mom struggled with depression and anxiety and had seeked help for it and it worked. John asked Mom to schedule an appointment with a doctor and began to treat the emotions. This helped John a lot and he went throughout the rest of his highschool life as normal as any other teenage boy. This story takes another turn when John graduates.

When John graduated his father put a lot of pressure on him to find a job, Dad just wanted his son to learn the value of a dollar and be able to have money in John's pocket. John took this as his father wanting to get rid of him so John naturally applied anywhere he could. John received a call from a big-box retail store, Mart. Mart paid well for the time and John had no bills so he began to save a good amount of money. John began talking to his grandmother, A, and decided it was time to move out. This was less than a year after his graduation, John was enrolled in college and began a transfer from the community college he was attending to a university early to have an excuse to move out. Anna lived very close to the University and there was also a Mart location very close as well. John talked to his manager and began a transfer to the Mart where Anna lived. John informed his parents of this plan only two weeks before he was to move, his parents were surprised and maybe even a little hurt. 

Continued in John & Mary…