Easter

Ghosts from an otherwise insignificant holiday.

So I'm sitting here contemplating Easter.

Growing up, Easter wasn’t a major holiday for me. I mean loved the candy and the stuffed bunnies the Easter Bunny, i.e. my whiskey-drunk father, left out for me to wake up to the next day, and I was giddy over Easter egg hunts. It wasn't until years of Sunday School that my parents sent me to so they’d have an hour of peace on Sunday mornings while they recovered from their Saturday night did I even know there was “biblical” meaning to it all. And even then…well, still not a big deal because I wasn’t really a biblical kid. And as I’d find out later, I was also a Jew, but hey, details . . .

Once I had my daughter at the ripe old age of sixteen, I began doing up Easter baskets for her, buying all the goodies with my paycheck from Dairy Queen, my mother filling out the balance because she still really enjoyed the pageantry of a basket full of pastel adorned candy and stuffed rabbits.

By the time my daughter was four years old, her father, my high school boyfriend, and I had been broken up for a year or two. We’d split time with our daughter: She mainly resided with me, but she would spend time with her dad over at his parents’ house regularly. There was no ‘court order’ to layout a parenting plan or visitation, we just kind of always just figured it out.

Not to say there wasn’t tension. Our high school relationship started out as “normal teen stuff,” other than the fact that his parents fucking hated me for being “poor white trash” (literally the first time I heard that term was from his mother) and not nearly good enough for their son. You see, they lived in an alternate reality than I, and if you weren’t part of the country club and all that jazz, you were trash. Good times.

Once they found out we were sexually active, it was clear to them that 15-year-old me had seduced and pressured 18-year-old him (lol no) into this wanton affair.

Once I became pregnant, all hell broke loose. 

First of all, his parents were actually his grandparents. When their daughter had become pregnant (and that’s a whole ‘nother V.C. Andrews-esque story), they sent her out of state, and then they “adopted this baby who totally wasn’t their grandchild” and expected everyone in the town to go along with that charade, which they did, and you know what, whatever. When you live in a small town and you own half the town because you have more money than god, apparently the sky in your world is a different color from everyone else's. But they were used to doing whatever they wanted, and they were used to everyone agreeing with it.

During my pregnancy, the parent/grandparents decided that, once I gave birth, they would take my baby and give it over to their daughter who’s baby *they* had taken, and it would be some sort of consolation prize? I guess?  

No one was asking me what my opinion on this was, but I digress. One day, I was taken against my will out of town to an open adoption agency under the guise of a quick trip to the store by one of the mother/grandmother’s friends which was a terrifying adventure. 

Kidnapping you say? Yeah, me, too, but hey . . . rich people + connections = no consequences.