It is a long story but I’ll start with my son Michael…the most beautiful little boy you could ever want to see. He had ringlets of hair and his skin was soft and had a olive tone. The old women at the Christine Science Church loved to hold him. Zella my good friend would bring me there. I was Catholic but the Catholic church wanted nothing to do with me because I was a single parent. They were embarrassed of me as my family was. I was an outcast years ago back in the 70s. I asked for their help but was told by a priest that the Catholic church doesn’t get involved with such things.

Let me get back to Michael the most beautiful little boy. He was my pride and joy and my daughter Kathryn my beautiful little girl. My sister Cathy use to braid her hair and sing to her “Old Stew-ball” a folk song she played on guitar. She visited me quite often as a single parent as my step mother was mean and wicked. My father told me he had made a mistake marrying her but still he had married and I respected that, yet she was so indifferent towards me and would not let my children visit the house I grew up in.  It was OK and my dad visited me instead. I loved my dad very much. My mother died on my 19th birthday from breast cancer. I think of my parents often.

After my husband left me when the children were quite young I got bitten by a wasp on my right hand. My hand swelled quite badly and I remember as if it were yesterday when the wasp bit my right hand which was my writing hand. I was going to nursing school at the time and I needed my hand to write with. We didn’t use computers back then and handwriting was a necessity. So I went to school with a very swollen hand. I learned quickly to write with my left and the professors made me have my hand looked at in the emergency room. The most handsome doctor looked at my hand and I thought I was in love with him at the time. Our eyes use to meet many times but my dreams collapsed when I heard he had just about slept with every nurse in the hospital.

I was a beautiful young woman. I had modeled for artists and my portrait hands in my living room that a good friend painted of me. She is long gone as cancer took her away from me years ago. But life moves on and the clock ticks. I am now a grandmother of a beautiful little girl who I never get to see but love. Her name is Kara.  She is my Haley Rose. She is a beautiful creature sent by God.

As for single parenting I passed nursing school and became a registered nurse. I have been at the bedside for many who would have died along and died in my arms. Many sick did I tend to and wiped many tears. Sometimes little gratitude is given to the nurse because the nurse takes the brunt of everything. A good nurse usually doesn’t last forever at a job because she burns out sooner or later as a brilliant flame that has lost his glow.

There have been many a times things have occurred which have broken my heart but time ticks on and we get old and I am getting older.