Greatest gift for Christmas is that My Life is what it is

 

Last night I dreamed that I ran into Jamie’s father, Mike Murdock.  We spent some time catching up and both in the dream and when I awoke, I had the greatest sense of gratitude that I did not stay married to the abusive mechanic, despite the fact that my religion dictated that I do just that.

 

I thought about what my life might have turned out like if I had stayed married.  We would be poor.  Mike never did anything more than work as a mechanic and he drank himself to death in his early sixties.  His abuse toward me would have only made me more bitter and angry and even less loving to the child that came of that awful era.

 

Jamie probably would have ended up doing drugs and drinking, because I would not have had the money to bribe her to not smoke, drink, do drugs nor get pregnant.  I would not have been able to afford her implants and later her tubal ligation, so who knows how many snot nosed kids she might have had and how miserable her life would have been with the kind of low life that would be attracted to our dirt poor family.  Jamie is so smart and creative, but without the money to make the best of those talents I fear she would have been mired in self pity for her lot in life.

 

For that matter, I wouldn’t have been able to afford my own tubal ligation, circa 1984, and who knows how many of my own kids I could have brought into existence to deal with this dying planet as their inheritance.  

 

I might have been able to keep up the furniture sales from the back of a truck, as I was doing the day before delivering Jamie, but that was never going to make us rich.  I can’t imagine that I could have carried on that back breaking work into my fifties now.  I can barely lift 40 lbs, much less the book cases and desks that I had to carry up onto and off the truck every day as I set up on street corners to sell.

 

My parents would have lost all of my mother’s investments in the stock market crashes that depleted her pension from Gulf Controls.  My Dad gave up his furniture store in 1996, and would have been un employable had he not come work for me.  No one would have been able to deal with his orneriness.  That means they wouldn’t have had insurance to give him the extra years he got from the triple bypass heart surgery.

 

My brother wouldn’t have his own home, because my parents would not have been able to afford it, nor would he nor his three kids have new houses, new cars, college educations, trips to vacation sites, or any of the many things they enjoy.  There wouldn’t be big family dinners every couple of weeks because my parents would be barely scraping by on social security.

 

I would have missed out on meeting Howie and that would have been a horrible loss.  To never know kindness at the hand of a man or to never have someone I could really admire and trust as a mate, would have been so sad.

 

There have been a lot of awful things in my life, but I am so glad that every single step happened just as it did so that we have this blessed life we have today.

 

Hi, I’m Carole Baskin and I’ve been writing my story since I was able to write, but when the media goes to share it, they only choose the parts that fit their idea of what will generate views.  If I'm going to share my story, it should be the whole story.  The titles are the dates things happened. If you have any interest in who I really am please start at the beginning of this playlist: http://savethecats.org/

 

I know there will be people who take things out of context and try to use them to validate their own misconception, but you have access to the whole story.  My hope is that others will recognize themselves in my words and have the strength to do what is right for themselves and our shared planet.  

 

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