Insight Into Me

When I was a teenager, around 17 or so, I liked life a lot. I, and my sisters, (whose names I will change for privacy purposes), Marie, Vanessa, and Lenora, and my mother lived in the projects, and it was okay. Matter of fact, it was a definite step up from the row house in the middle of ghetto Baltimore in the early 1960's! I can clearly recall how excited the three of us girls were to be moving out of the tenement and into the "jects". Lenora hadn't come along yet. She came after we moved.

Don't get it twisted; we had a ball growing up in our neighborhood! "Fun" is not a descriptive enough word for it. If you've ever seen one of those Spike Lee period-pieces, then you have a picture of what my life was like as a child. It was poor, and yet it was rich in love, and nobody had any more than the next person. We didn't know that life could get so much better, material wise. But, I, on a personal level, didn't know that life could get so much more horrifying, emotionally. Most of the "high living" was only on television, and certainly for white people. For some reason, though, I had this thing inside of me that had to know if I really could have better. Consequently, I knew I would have to leave. I didn't know where, and I wasn't unhappy. I just wanted more, and I was tired to getting laughed at, and poked fun at for wanting more. Even my mother, now deceased, used to tell me that I was crazy. I would say something like, "I don't understand why we can't have a color television". Now, that statement within itself is not far fetched. But, if you make a statement like that in the socio-economic conditions that we lived in, it did seem like a crazy thing to say. We barely had a television, much less a color one!
Within these pages I hope to leave my family some history, some laughs, and some insight into who Joanne S really was. The "G" came later.

I will start by saying that I was something to contend with on any level. You see, I am a Libra, and I've always known it. When I first learned about my zodiac sign, I was so intrigued to find that so much of what I was supposed to be like was actually what I was really like. But being a Libra was not all that shaped my life. When I was in my mid-30's, I experienced the resurfacing of a repressed childhood memory. I recalled that I had been sexually molested by an uncle when I was around 5 years old. I had no clue why I acted out sexually during my teen years. I thought I was just being me. I didn't know that sex was not the only way to get my boyfriend to stay with me. Don't misunderstand. I knew my body was precious and not be spread around. What I didn't know was that it's okay to feel good about sex and to enjoy sex (when the time is appropriate). That experience from childhood put sex in a "bad place" in my brain, and it affected me for many years into my adult life. Unfortunately, my ex-husband had to live through those unexplainable reactions that I sometimes had to the simplest sexual requests he may have had, and had a right to have, from his wife. I am the eldest of four sisters born to an alcoholic-turned-Christian single mother. Most of my youth was spent being "too grown" for my own good. You know the kind of girl I'm talking about.... that fast-assed, smart-mouthed, quick-witted one who spoke up when she probably should shut up? Yeah! That was me. It's been that way for most of my life, though. I can recall despising my mother for not speaking up and being stronger. I did not know that those very same traits existed in me, and would manifest themselves, and play a pivotal role in my marraige, and in the raising of my own daughters.