The question is, who am I? It's something that I've considered many a time. my sense of place in this world has changed gradually throughout the years, and my perspective looking outwards has changed as well. I guess you could say that my early childhood was a sign of how things would turn out. Wrought with turmoil, my childhood was frenetic with constant change, flying emotions and flying words.
I was born in Denver, Colorado on December 3rd, 1986 at 10:32 in the morning. I was born with a full head of dark hair, my face was pinched like any newborn and given the name Arbor Winter Barrow. I don't know exactly when my parents chose my name, or even if they knew that I was a girl before I was born. But they tell me that I was named after a woman by the name of Arbor Winter. According to them, she designed fur coats for women, and was at one point a good friend of theirs. I don't know the extent of their friendship, I don't even think that I have met the woman from whom I received my first two names. My parents liked the name and I was brought into the wide world with a name that I think defined me personally more than my parents expected it would.
My parents hadn't been married long before my birth, they were married not even a year earlier on February 28th, 1986. They had met some three months before that while working at the same Realtor company in Denver and had dated for only those three months before being married. They were married up in Anchorage, Alaska where my paternal grandfather--a pentecostal Assembly of God minister/missionary by trade--was in the hospital for lung cancer. In a hospital room where my grandfather spoke to them their vows with an oxygen take pumping fresh air into his battered lungs they were joined in matrimony, for better or worse. The unusual state of their marriage was even enough to get them on the nightly news cast in Anchorage.
I think that they were an odd couple, for sure. My mom once told me about their horoscopes and how Sagittarius (Dad) quite often didn't get along with Capricorns (Mom). They were an uneven match, even by the standards of the stars. Looking at my parents as they are now, I'm honestly surprised that they've stayed together as long as they have.
My father is a free spirit. He fights The Man in every shape or form that he takes, but he constantly seeks some sort of truth in the people around him. He is insanely talented at writing, speaking, playing the piano, working on cars, building things, gardening, cooking and so on. He likes to debate with people. He has his own set of spiritual beliefs that cannot be easily defined.
My mother likes routine, she like's things to stay the same. She believes in God with all her heart and frequently studies the Bible and prays. She's talented with words and finds pleasure in singing. She doesn't normally like conflict, loves to cook and loves to manage her home. She likes to work, and aspires to write a great screenplay one day.
My parents have defined me. Here I will try to define them.
My father was born November 30th, 1943 around a year and half before the end of World War II in Astoria, Oregon. He spent much of his early life
fighting. He and his brother fought quite a bit, and even now, out of their childhood their relationship remains cordial but distant.
Early on, my father had a philosophical split from his family. Missionaries to Alaska when it was still a territory of the United States they built churches in the hopes of spreading the word of the Christian God occasionally returning to the main states to raise money for more buildings.
"I was raised with a Bible in one hand and a hammer in the other," my dad likes to say sometimes.
But, at some point in his childhood, something didn't fit. He spent much of his youth a white minority in a majorly Alaskan Native territory, and was more than likely surrounded by the mysticism of the Alaskan peoples. As a young child, my father liked to walk. There's an old grainy photo of my dad as a little thing standing on the docks of some Alaskan seashore near Point Barrow, when my dad showed it to me he told me a story of his youth, he would walk those docks with his hands clasped behind his back and think. They liked to call him the "Little Philosopher."
Who knows what his young mind was thinking, but as time passed that penchant for deep thought brought out more than just a philosopher but a man seeking real truth. He didn't believe as his mother, father and brother did. Instead he found other avenues of faith and belief. But before he could move to that point he must have felt the need to get away.
At 16 my father ran away from home and hitchhiked out of Alaska. At 17 he was living with an aunt in Wisconsin finishing up high-school and living apart from his family in Alaska. He was, if not before, now set on a course that became the make up of his life. Transient, never staying in one place for very long, working for some worldly understanding that only he really knows the content of which, my father was a physical, intellectual and spiritual nomad.
I can't say what happened right after that, if I remember correctly my dad briefly returned to Alaska, but returned to the contiguous United States to go to college. Unfortunately, that was not to last long. My father was arrested for
armed robbery in Minnesota in the sixties when he was around 20 and then escaped prison and lived as an escaped convict. I first learned about this a little over a month ago in early May. My dad said that he kept it from my brother and I because he didn't want us to gain any pride from the fact that he had tried to rob someone at gunpoint.
I don't blame my dad for that, it's actually rather enlightening and insightful. It adds some context to my father's dislike of guns, even toy guns. A clear memory I have is of my dad throwing out a bubblegum pink toy gun that my brother and I had been squabbling over. "You shouldn't have this thing anyway." He had said. My brother and I had cried over the loss of our toy, and I couldn't understand why he did it.But now that memory, which was a clear point of confusion in my childhood, has a framework that I can understand.
Sometime after my dad escaped prison he changed his name. You see nowadays my dad goes by the name Paul William Barrow. But it's not a legal name. It's about as legal as a penname. His real, legal name, Howard Frederick Capener was a label of a life that I think my dad really wanted to leave behind. A name that held no meaning for him except a connection to a highly religious family that looked down on his spiritual explorations. His new name, gave him the freedom of a new identity.
My father moved on to live a new life. He got married to a woman named Sandy, he was working to gain some ground as a normal human being distant from a life of guns and robbery. I don't know if he ever resolved his fugitive status with the law, that's part of another conversation I have yet to have with my father.
My dad's life has never been short on terrible things, and his escape and marriage didn't end it. Sandy, his wife, was killed in a car accident. A car that he himself had picked out for her. I think he never quite got over that. He said that her kids, children from a previous marriage, blamed him for her death.
Never one to stay in one place, my father moved on. He worked in construction, realty and other such things, eventually moving to Colorado where in late '85 he met my mother and they married three months later.
Unfortunately, in one of the aspects of my life that I truly regret the most, is that I do not know as much about my mother as I do my father. In late 2001 my mother was stricken with a bout of psychosis that led her to believe that she was talking to people who didn't exist beyond the veils of her eyelids. At fourteen I didn't understand what was going on, it didn't mesh with the mother I had grown up with. This new woman was distant, angry at phantoms created by her mind, lost in a world where everyone seemed to be against her. My old mother was kind, gentle, happy, she sang to my brother and I as children and during spring cleaning she would dance around our apartment as if cloud 9 had landed in our home. In her moments of lucidity my mother would return, but very quickly the other mother would return with anger and sadness in her eyes.
It was because of this, that I gained an unusual hatred. I was already an aggressive young thing, I was raised around boys my whole life and didn't really have a feminine way of acting. I thought I was one of the boys. When, in 2001 that my mother began whispering in the night to invisible demons of her mind, I hated that I didn't understand and I hated that she couldn't come out of it.
Due to the fact that much of my period of questioning my father about his life came up when my mother wasn't with us, I never got the chance to ask her many things. Later when I did have the mind to ask her things, she didn't talk much about her past. So my mother still holds much of her past locked away in her heart where I can't yet get to it.
But...
My mother was born December 28th, 1956 In Denver, Colorado. She was one of twelve children who lived in a house build by my maternal grandfather and grandmother. Unlike my father, she followed the scriptures set in front of her by her parents. She, like them, was a devout Christian. Church every Sunday and so on. I don't think they were too strict, but I can't claim to know what else they did in their religious time. But my mother's thing wasn't religion as it was for my father, instead her thing was race. My mother clearly looks Hispanic, slightly lighter skinned than what you might consider typical Hispanic, but still her ethnic origins are clear in her features.
I think she must have been at the business end of much discrimination. She said to me at one point that when she was about to graduate high-school she was talking to school counselor who advised her to enlist in the army instead of going to college. I can't imagine what must have gone through her mind at that point, my mom is not a stupid person. She's very intelligent, and probably had very high grades in school. For some reason her appearance and her last name, Ortiz defined her as a minority of low class and she must have felt it.
My mother enlisted in the army as suggested and joined the nursing track of the military. She ended up working at Walter Reed hospital in Washington, D.C. where she tried her best to do what was required of her. They didn't appreciate her work, she was enlisted after all. The grunts, the dredge, the bottom feeders of the military. My mother wasn't treated as kindly as she deserved.
I remember a story my mother told my one time.
"An older lady staying at the hospital had been left some of her belongings including a pretty necklace."
My mother had dressed up the older lady with her pretty necklace and took her around the hospital for a walk. Apparently this wasn't as appreciated by her supervisor and my mother was chastised.
Another incident occurred when a doctor requested a massage from her and it got back to the supervisors. Again, chastised. My mother had an unfortunate problem of being taken advantage of. She was a beautiful woman, with longish hair and crystalline features. At some point, I don't know exactly when, my mother was even taken advantage of in the worst way. She was raped by a coworker after what should have been a friendly game of tennis. The story of her rape, she told to me and my brother when I was very young. I couldn't have been more than 8 or 9 at the time. But what I remember most is that my mother said that she had gotten pregnant. I recall asking what happened to the baby and Mom had said that she had exercised a lot to get it to go away. I know now that was just a cover for saying she had basically gotten an abortion.
And finally, during a routine removal of her wisdom teeth, they overdosed her on morphine setting off a series of problems that would plague my mother for the rest of her life. Including heart problems, something happened to her mind. Something that wouldn't rear its ugly head for years. My mother's family already has a history of bi-polar disorder. Two of my aunts have it, one has the exact same thing as my mother: schizophrenia. I don't have very many memories of knowing this fact, other than a simple instance where we were visiting my aunt at a hospital. She took me to the hospital kitchen where they had a refrigerator stocked with cups of chocolate pudding. It had started to rain and she took me outside to a courtyard where she twirled around in the rain singing and eating chocolate pudding. My early memories and experience with the disease were simplistic and almost joyful. The state of mind that my aunt lived in while off her meds was one of enjoyment in simple things. In 2001 when my mother first started showing signs of psychosis I didn't immediately remember my aunt's condition. That state seemed so far away from what I was seeing in front of me. My mother whispered under her breath and at times didn't seem like she even recognized us.
My mother now goes in and out of the state of psychosis. We started calling them her "trips." She would go somewhere else. Somewhere out of reach for us. When she came out of them, she hardly ever talked about what she said or thought while in it, in fact there were times when she seemed like she couldn't remember what happened.
To my mother, everything bad that happened to her while she was in the military happened because 1) she was enlisted and 2) because she was Hispanic. The accidental overdose led her to having constant problems and she had to move on.
After she left the military she entered college, going to the University of Denver with a major in Mass Communications where she worked with television production. I don't know much about her college life, other than a brief word of advice before I came to college, "when you have roommates never eat the last of a shared food. My roommates got mad with me after I did that."
After college she ended up working for a Realtor where she met my father. Again, this point in her life is sketchy for me. I don't recall any stories from this time, other than what I've already told you of my parent's meeting.
However, what I understand now, is that my mother really wanted kids. she dearly wanted a child. At the same time that she met my father, she was dating a wealthy doctor by the name of Khalid. He was originally from Qatar in the Middle East. For some reason, despite my mother's desire for a nice house, a nice income and a cushy lifestyle, my father stuck out to her more and she ended up with my father instead of Khalid. According to my mother, her family hadn't been happy with that arrangement at all. I guess they saw my father as a lowly bum. My mom was going for a pauper instead of a prince in the eyes of her parents.
I guess in some way, the life that my mother envisioned with my dad was better than what she could see with Khalid.
I know that my father loved my mother. The first time I ever saw him cry was when he was describing my mother's condition to a pastor at a church we were visiting. I can't imagine the hurt he must have been feeling at the time. I remember he once described my mother as being happy all the time when he first met her. She laughed and smiled and seemed so full of joy at the time of their meeting.
I don't know if the love is the same however. Many times my parents have discussed divorce. I think something just doesn't connect with them anymore. At least, not when my mom is having one of her trips. When she is free of her demons she seems to show more love for my father.
But whatever brought them together has kept them together for over twenty-three years. They started their life a happy couple. I don't know if I was planned, or a happy accident, but I know I was dearly loved. My mother's wish for a child and my father's desire for a normal life were enough let them have another child. My brother was born 16 months to the day that I was born on April 3rd, 1988 in Hollywood, California where my father was working as a contractor for rich Hollywood men and women. We lived in a hotel in Santa Monica and paid rent on a weekly basis.
With the two children that she wanted my mother should have been happy, but she wasn't. And so began the start of our family turmoil...
