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It made more sense that he was in the witness protection program. Right.
And more outlandish was the fantasy I had that he was the prince of a European country and wanted to see what it was like to be a commoner, so he disguised himself as a camp counselor. He didn’t count on falling in love with my mom because he was already betrothed. It broke his heart to leave my mom and me, but his family would have disowned him if he didn’t.
I came up with this farfetched dream after my mom let it slip that my dad had told her if he ever had a daughter, he wanted her to be named Ariana. That was a pretty royal sounding name to me at the time. I was never sure why Mom honored his wish or gave me his last name. I’d asked, but all she would ever say was it was meant to be my name.
But as I aged, I realized I wasn’t going to be a princess, and that Dr. Stanton was really a selfish jerk who impregnated a young woman and didn’t want to take responsibility for it. The way Grandma told it, my mom came home from Camp Alpine that year saying she had met the man of her dreams, a premed student from Chicago, and they were planning on getting married when he graduated with his undergrad. She forgot to mention she was pregnant. Or maybe she didn’t know right away.
A month later, though, according to Grandma, my mom went crazy after a long-distance phone call to Chicago. Grandma never knew what happened on that call, but she said her Joanie was never the same. It wasn’t long after that, Mom left with some guy named Jeff, who I’m sure was a loser because all her men were. Grandma thinks she turned to her wild, free-loving ways to try and fill the void Roger Stanton left.
Little did Roger know he’d created a hole in me too. Not only by ignoring me for my entire life, but by the impact his actions had on my mom.
My life could be broken into two time periods, BC and AD. I wasn’t talking about Before Christ and Anno Domini; I was referring to much more recent and personal eras, Before Carl and After Dynamite.
My first fifteen years of life were Before Carl. During that time, my mom was married four times and had two live-in boyfriends as she tried to fill the crater-sized hole in her heart created by her first love, maybe her only love.
My mom’s first husband, Doug, I couldn’t remember, but she referred to him as a deadbeat. In my opinion, they all fell under that category. Then came Isaac, he was the first stepfather I remembered. He was one of those people who believed children should be seen but not heard. Unfortunately, at the time, I liked to be heard. I was punished plenty for it. Everything from spankings to going without dinner. We lived in Tahoe with him, and the only decent thing he ever did was teach me how to ride a bike.
After Isaac came Tom. Tom was a truck driver and he moved us to North Dakota. Mom “needed to stay warm” in the winter, and with Tom being gone most days of the week, she sought out companionship with Weston. He was the first live-in boyfriend. They were both gone by spring.
After Weston left, we moved back to Pine Falls for a brief stint to live with Grandma and Grandpa. I wanted to stay and begged my grandparents to let me, but Mom wouldn’t hear of it. I think it about killed Grandma and Grandpa when Mom married Hank and he took us to South Carolina. It wasn’t bad living near the beach, and Hank was probably the nicest of all the men I was subjected to. Which meant he pretty much ignored me.
Unfortunately, Mom was looking for love in all the wrong places. She should have loved herself first. There was no way to calculate the heartache, hers and mine, that could have been avoided if only she had.
After Hank—or during Hank, I should say—came Ed, live-in boyfriend number two. Ed moved us to Texas out in the middle of nowhere. We lived in a trailer with a dust bowl for a front yard. Ed drank too much, so there was a lot of yelling. Mom sought the comfort of Ed’s brother, Carl, who she had crowned as her knight in shining armor. She declared she had finally found true love in Carl, the self-proclaimed West Texas King of Karaoke, so he became husband number five. The balding sleaze ball sold lies to Mom like he was Amazon.com on a bender. She bought them like she had a credit card with an unlimited line of credit. Even at fifteen I knew what a liar he was. I mean, come on, no way was he getting hired every night to do a different karaoke party. We lived in a town with one stoplight, and the median income was at poverty level.
