JimDiamond

I was an illegitimate child and raised in the house of my grandmother and grandfather. I grew up in extreme poverty in a sharecropper’s tar paper shack. Physically abused from an early age. I almost thought it was normal to see my mother beaten and kicked trying to prevent a mean drunk from beating me and my brother. Then sexually abused by a family “friend” from the age of seven until about the end of the fourth grade. Ran off from home at gun point when I was fifteen, because I refused one last beating.
Homeless, I had learned to cope for myself, sleeping in culverts and sometimes in people’s sheds and tractor barns. Washed dishes for food and 50 cents an hour at a “Beer Joint”. Finally getting different kinds of work in the fields and able to pay room and board to a friend’s family. I chopped cotton, picked cotton, cleared land, and drove mules dragging cypress logs out of a swamp among other things. All short-term jobs. After buying a car I drove a “whiskey car” delivering illegal alcohol. That last was the best paying job I had during that time – I made twenty dollars a run plus a fill-up of my car’s gas tank.
Oddly enough during that time after paying for my keep, I would return “home” and give most of my money to Mama to help support the family. I was recently asked by my grandson what kind of allowance I received when I was a child. My answer was “I was allowed to live there mostly. I was allowed to eat most of the time. I was allowed to work from ten years old and give my pay to support the family. That was MY allowance!” Life changed dramatically when I turned seventeen and I was able to enter the military with my mother’s signature. But I was still “allowed” to send home part of my pay.
Close to the time I was to be released from active duty I was returned to a stateside deployment as a holder with a regular Naval Air Squadron. Late one night after drinking and sobering up (mostly)I sat in the dark thinking about life. Thinking of all the shame attached to my life in the past. And how would it continue? Even at twenty years of age, many, many terrible things had been done to me in my life, and honestly, I had done a few terrible things. I was actually contemplating that Shakespearean dilemma of “To Be or Not To Be” for me. That maybe I should just check out. As I reviewed things, I decided that much of what had happened to me, and that I was the most shamed for, really was not my fault, and I had had no real power to change. And most of the bad things I had done really were not either, they were done because I was in a situation of war and really had no control over either.
Then in reviewing that life and WHO and what I was I had what I would later call my “Come to Jesus” moment. I found that no matter what had happened I was still a good person. Someone who always attempted to take care of others. Suddenly, I realized that I actually loved me and was not any longer ashamed of ME at all. That if me and Jesus loved me, I really did not give a shit what anyone else thought of me. That I would never again hide what I had been so ashamed of before. Funny, I had been a prisoner of that shame. The keys to that, which unlocked those shackles, was as simple as truthfully saying, “I just do not give a shit what anyone thinks!”
For that reason, since that time I have never been bothered to say yes, I am a Bastard, but it is by birth, not persuasion. unlike some others. And yes, I was sexually abused in most ways someone can think of, but I had no real power to change that. I had been very homophobic before that, but after freeing myself, for some reason that also went away when I realized that my abuser was not a homosexual, he was a sexual predator.
In the last few months I was in the military I participated in a research project by people from Cornell University I believe. They were looking at people who had done well on the “Iowa” test while in school but whose grades in public school did not reflect that academic success. AND what impact the military experience had on them. I apparently, to the surprise of myself and some others, placed in the top 10 percent of college graduates in “Academic Achievement”, and scored 156 on an accompanying IQ test. I am sure that occurred because I was a voracious reader.
So I went to college, (working my way as a fighter, expediter and trainer). Later I became a University Professor. Raised a family, became a businessman, a "Consultant", then a writer. Died one night in a hospital from something as simple as a common cold virus of the pericardium, but was brought back. I felt reborn and new in 1994. So now I am just me. an old scared and supposedly "Disabled Vet" who loves life. Death can be a real life-changing event. :-)