Introduction

Well, I'll have to warn you that this post is definitely going to be long... But if you hang in there, you might learn a bit about who I am.

To be fair to you, I guess most of my posts will be rather long because I tend to rant. Hence the name of the blog. But oh well, hope you can at least relate to some of it.

So here I am. My first post. I don't really know where to start, so I guess I'll do it chronologically.

I was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, on November 18, 1977. My mom was living in Puerto Vallarta at the time, since she was working for an airline called Hughes Air West. My dad was off in Queretaro somewhere doing his Medical School residency. When my mom bought me back to P.V., I became very sick, so I was left in Guadalajara in the care of my maternal grandmother, abuelita Gloria (just abuelita to me). I had a very happy childhood there. Five of the happiest years of my life. But as they say, all good things come to an end, and I was finally taken back to P.V. to live with my parents. By that time, I already had a little sister, A.V., and so I was thrust from being an "only" child at my abuelita's, to being a big sister to a very fragile preemie child.

That was the beginning of my problems. My sister was born at around 24 weeks into the pregnancy, weighing just a little over a pound. She was kept in an incubator for the first 4 months of her life, and the doctors terrified my mother into thinking my sister would be a very fragile and probably somewhat retarded child, which led my parents (especially my father) to become very overprotective and overbearing with her.

Anyway. So I was thrust upon a role I didn't want, and relegated to a far second place in my parents' life when I had been the apple of my abuelita's eye up until then. To top it all off, my mother and father had always wanted a boy, and I wasn't one. This fact was compounded when my little brother P.M. was born. My sister was a little over 3 years younger than I was, my brother a little under 6 years. My sister was daddy's girl, and my brother a momma's boy. I was the eldest, stuck in the uncomfortable "middle child" position.

Given the family dynamics (and the fact that my parents shouldn't ever have married in the first place... Yeah, really dysfunctional family) I was a lot happier at school than at home, so I became an overachiever in that area, which didn't bring me too many friends. I was the typical know-it-all trying to cope with a difficult family situation by being a grown up in a kid's body, and the other children hated me for it.

So on went my life, with twice yearly respites when I went to abuelita's during summer and winter vacations. Until I was like 8, and my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Well, actually they first thought she had Parkinson's, and was institutionalized, and then they diagnosed her as psychotic, and gave her shock therapy, which just caused everything to worsen. To this day it is still painful to remember my abuelita as what she became, versus the loving woman I grew up with.

My abuelita and me

When I was 11, my abuelita finally passed away. A few months before that, my mother, Y.S., and her sister V.G., took all of us kids, Me, my sister A.V., my brother P.M., and my cousin A.V.M. to see my abuelita for the last time. She didn't recognize her own daughters, so you can safely assume she couldn't recognize her grandchildren either. Except for me. When I came close, her eyes lost the glaze that was over them, and she gave me her bendicion (this is a catholic ritual where the sign of the cross is made onto someone). I was the only one she did that with. It is my last memory of her.

Things went downhill from there. My dad did something that caused him to have to get out of town for about 2 years, and we had a really hard time financially as well as emotionally and things were really hard for me at school, my only haven. i had to work at my parents' business, so social life was out of the question. My day consisted of getting up, going to school, getting out of school, and going to work from 2 pm to 10 pm as a clerk at my parents' pharmacy. Very hard on me, being that I was only 12 at the time. Things went rapidly downhill for that period, but then dad was able to come back, and something wonderful happened. I met my sister C.E. She is my dad's daughter from his second marriage (I have 3 older sisters from 3 different women... yeah, my dad is a philanderer). Well, C.E. changed my life. She became a true big sister to me. She helped me through the nasty teenage years, and, truth be told, I don't know what would have become of me if not for her. She basically saved me.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I was doing a lot better. I finally had friends, I was doing great in school again, and for my senior year in High School, I went to spend a year in the USA with my mom's sister V.G. and my cousin A.V.M. I had a wonderful time there, since I already had an excellent knowledge of english thanks to my grade school classes and living in a total tourist town. I made a lot of friends and learned a lot, and I also learned to relate better to people (something that's always been hard for me).

I came back to Mexico, and did senior year over again since USA High School curriculum is (no offense) very inferior to Mexico's, and I wouldn't be allowed to go into University with those classes. I made a lot of friends in my senior year in Mexico, and retained some of the old ones. Although I still felt like an outsider, I was able to relate to my peers better, and handled interpersonal relations in a much more successful fashion.

I graduated High School with honors, and was the top score on the admissions test to Medical School here in Mexico, in the Universidad de Guadalajara. I was happy there, since I had finally gotten away from my family in P.V. (not my siblings, I loved them, although we didn't always get along, it was my parents I was trying to escape). I was also getting along a LOT better with my father's family, which had until then avoided me because I wasn't very nice. I had changed though, and I was finally accepted into the family with open arms. I did well in school, not trying too hard, just finally being my age and doing things people my age do.

Then I discovered (or rather, finally accepted) that I was attracted to women. I was 19 at the time, and after having relationships with guys and even going so far as going to bed with one to prove myself straight, I finally conceded that I was a lesbian. I fell in love with a girl from the US living in Mexico at the time, but shortly after I went back home for vacations and my parents found out about me.

It was hell. My parents freaked, cried, got mad, and totally rejected me. They said I had to either become straight, or lose my family and support for school. Well, that did it. After 20 years of my parents running my life in every way, including who I could be friends with, where and when I went somewhere, even what kind of clothes I could wear, I was fed up. I made them believe I gave up to their whims to please them (as I always had) and once I was safely back in Guadalajara, I fled.

My parents managed to disrupt my life even then, though, because they found out my gf's parents' phone number in the USA, and brought them up to date with everything. They were Mexican-American, and they were not pleased. They came down here and took her back.

So I was alone, with no family (since my father had forbidden his family to have anything to do with me) and no money. Thankfully, my father's sister A.L. disregarded him completely and would not withdraw her support. I guess it helped that she is only 9 years older than me and was my confidant and already knew about everything, but still, her support was invaluable to me. I was also helped by a cousin of mine, an illegitimate son of one of my father's brothers, who just happened to be gay as well, and whose mom always supported him. I went to live with them for about a month while I got a job, and then moved into a casa de asistencia, sort of like a "boarding house" where you rent out a room (shared or not) from the landlady/landlord.

I worked, initially, as a secretary/receptionist/general "gopher" girl for a whiteboard factory. After that, I worked at the Hard Rock Cafe in Guadalajara. I went through a few girlfriends during that period, which was about a year, until I met M.E. She was from Leon, Guanajuato, and I was in love instantly. She had come to Guadalajara for a meeting of girls from a lesbian channel in IRC. I started traveling back and forth from Gdl to Leon in order to visit her, until we finally became a couple, and I moved.

It was hard once more, because jobs were scarce, I had basically no savings, and I had no local job references. I worked as a clerk for a pharmacy, as a waitress in a bar, as a busgirl in a restaurant, a waitress at another, a cashier at an office supplies store, and finally a CSR in a Call Center. I started to grow with that company, and eventually became a QA there, but meanwhile my relationship was falling apart. After 5 years, we had become very hostile towards one another, and everything became very destructive. It all ended when I learned she was cheating on me. I was devastated. She had sworn she would always love me, and I had always believed her. My world had finally fallen apart.

I had a series of very bad relationships after that, including one that left me highly in debt. This left my self-confidence even worse than it had been to begin with. It seemed I was attracting only the wrong kind of person. Or at least, this is what I thought.

With my last relationship, I think I've found something out. It's not that I attracted the wrong sort of person, but that I made them into the wrong sort of person. Through my insecurities, my clingyness, my co-dependency, I turned a good relationship into a bad one. It's something I'm working on with S.L., my current gf. It's hard though, because it's a long distance relationship (good lesbians are hard to come by here) and we're still working on getting together after 2 years. It's harder since she's Mexican-American (born in the USA) and she feels (rightly so) that she wouldn't be able to make as much money here as in the USA (she lives in a border town on Mexico's side). So she's trying to save up enough money to start up her own business here, but it's been slow, especially since we both felt the need to see each other often (every 3 months) and spending on trips does not help to save money.

So now, I'm working on trying to patch up my relationship with S.L. and meet my lifelong dream of becoming a mother as well as having a fulfilling relationship with a woman I love. It's going to be a bumpy ride, and I'm not sure if we'll make it, but only time will tell...