The day I saved a child's life, had a catastrophic injury, and became loathsome to my in-laws.
I have a story to tell. It's my story --told from my perspective, of course -- about events that happened before and after November 25, 1994.
At this writing, I don't know if I will be brave enough to actually post this story or if I'll edit it so that no one will be offended by the truth of it. I guess time will tell.
It's been twenty years now. It's time to tell the story.
I'll start with how it started for me.
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I met a man when I was 27 years old. We were friends for more than a year before it became something more, something better. I lived in Venice Beach, California at the time and he lived in Studio City for a while before moving in with a friend in Sylmar. We lived through the LA Riots together. We lived through the earthquake, the fires, the floods, and a terrible employer.
He refused to tell his family about me.
I couldn't understand this. My family with its rampant insanity, addiction, and schizophrenia knew all about him. What could be the problem?
As the years went by, the fact that his family didn't know about me became more and more weird. One year went by, and then another. We were happy. We were a "thing". We talked about a future. But he refused to tell his family about me.
Finally, after we'd been dating for three years, he told his parents that we were dating.
We took a trip to New Mexico, we stopped by his parents house to meet them.
They seemed nice, sane, and friendly. This is how most people see them.
They are church-going evangelicals who believe the rapture is coming and that Jesus was as judgmental as they are. They raised their children in this belief so much so that any burning fire reminds them of the "fires of hell" that await them (should they not be taken in the rapture, of course).
I was raised with a loving God, the new Testament Jesus who spoke of loving and accepting your neighbor, and in a particularly intellectual Presbyterian church. My parents were raised Catholic , so we had more than a smattering of Catholic traditions. (Most people say I "seem" Catholic.) My Sunday School teachers spent their week translating the Dead Sea Scrolls at the School of Theology at Claremont. In my world, the book of Revelations was written nearly a hundred years after Christ by the "prophet" John of Patmos driven insane by end stage Syphilis. I had no idea that anyone took the book literally.
I want to repeat this -- I had no idea --none, zero, zip -- that anyone took the chapter literally, let alone based their lives around it as "prophecy". In almost thirty years of life, I'd never met anyone (outside of the mental institution) who believed syphilitic John of Patmos was accurate in predicting the future. Since that time, my schizophrenic sister and the youngest sister have both converted to this kind of evangelical Christianity. But at that time, I'd never met anyone who believed what my father called as "crap."
You can see that my relationship with my in-laws was doomed from the start.
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