Creativity Crushed

So I'm going to bounce around a little bit as memories come back to me.

Christmas day 1985 is a day that will stick with me forever. As I mentioned in an earlier post. Mom had leveraged our home to buy a restaurant and do her own business. Well as fate with mom would have it, the restaurant failed. If you know anything about leveraging a business with your home, well if you lose the business, you often times lose the home. That was the case for us.

Now I don't know if they actually evicted us on Christmas day or if it was just something mom made up and told us in some sick twisted fantasy of hers. If there's one thing mom thrived on, it was sob stories and the remarkable events she had overcome in her life. Many of those I believe were self-created and self-inflicted. Having untreated mental health issues can do funny things with your mind and your motives if left untreated.

So there we were, on all accounts to our knowledge, we were getting evicted from our home and had to move out Christmas day. I'm not going to lie, swearing has always been something I picked up on quickly as a kid, and that day was a shitty day. I believe most everything was packed in the days before Christmas except for our presents.

Days before that, I remember saying goodbye to all of my school friends. That was definitely the saddest part for me.

I loved being at school and my friends were the main reason I showed up. There were a lot of good memories in that little school and now they were going to be just memories.

I woke up still excited Christmas morning and I remember rushing downstairs to open presents. The excitement wasn't quite what it normally was. There was an ominous looming sadness along with a little bit of excitement to move to a new place in the air. I most clearly remember the sadness of opening presents and then immediately having to load them up into the moving truck to head to St. George, Utah. I don't know if this was the case or just how it played out in my mind, but I had a big brown teddy bear that I recall being tied to the back of the moving truck. There he was in all his glory staring back at me in the chase vehicle. He looked so sad and lonely and I was afraid he was going to fall off on the drive. Whether that's how it really happened or not, I'll never really know, that's just the way I remember it.

The trip to St. George was long and slow. We kept busy singing road trip songs and fighting like we always did. I remember getting to the new house and something in me had left. It wasn't like a chapter closing, it was like someone had shut the whole book on my life. I was sad and a piece of me was still in Colorado. I felt like that Christmas, my body had moved, but my heart had stayed behind.