As my paternal white-trash proletarians and maternal blue-blood ancestors rejoiced and lamented, respectively, U.S. Army soldier Arthur and Bell Telephone operator Barbara got married at St. John's Catholic church in Seattle after a Christmas war-time courtship. Years later I found out that the priests at St. John's warned my mother not to marry into my father's family, because they had "bad blood" -- that is, my father and his seven brothers (David, Edward, Richard, Theodore, Bob, Don, George) were known to be mentally deficient in weird ways. If only she had listened and heeded their wise counsel, then there would never have been this unholy union of Irish, Polish, German and Bohemian bloodlines, and very truly yours would not have suffered a lifetime of rejection and husky hollowness.
Yes, my father always rejected the first child, Larry, for whatever reasons, and my birth-mother throughout my childhood said unto me, "Teddy, you were supposed to be a girl." There was no ultra-sound back then, and my BM had her heart set on a girl. It was ultra-hot that summer in pre-air-conditioner Texas where my father was in medical school, so they say I cried all the time. As an unwanted baby boy, I was like God's curse on my mother for marrying into a family of white trash. Years later I found out from my oldest cousin on the white-trash side that my birth-mother left my father in Augusta Georgia when I was two years old and returned to her parents' home in Seattle, only to be forced to return to my father because her pregnancy with a fourth, post-girl child put her in need of the U.S. Army pre-natal care that was provided for her as an army wife -- if she stayed with my abusive father.
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