Let Me Introduce Myself.

I was born on October 22 of 1973 to a troubled teenage mother who had run away from home with a  young orphan boy from her neighborhood.  My mother was 18 when she had me.  She was coming from the trauma of loosing her father to Leukemia a couple of years before.  My mother was lied about her father's illness, no one told her he was going to die, and then, one morning she was getting ready to see him at the hospital.  She had laid down her clothes on her bed; she was proud and excited about a new pair of boots she would wear that day. She was her father's little girl, his pride and adoration.  She was just wondering when her father would be back home.  That day, my great grandmother entered her room and unceremoniously delivered the devastating news.  My grandfather had passed away.  She demanded that my mother did not cry.  I imagine my mother heard then the thunderous sound of a crack in the Planet, the loudest noise smothering her own inner wail. I heard stories growing up of how my mother suffered serious but partial memory loss at that time. Even now I know she is unable to recall events, names and faces of people she met before her father died. I remember walking with her in the market when someone approached her to greet her effusively.  She would be embarrassed not to remember that person claiming to be a former classmate or a childhood friend. 

I was born within the darkness of my mother's memory; I came forth out of  her alienation, her confusion and distrust of the world.  My birth was one of the events of the aftermath of the great tragedy of her life.  One of the stones stumbling down from an avalanche of disastrous, unplanned occurrences. I came into this world in an atmosphere of crisis and drama.  Those conditions shaped up the way I perceived life from the very beginning.   Pain became familiar, trauma was my emotional hometown.  

Those circumstances should be enough to make one's upbringing especially difficult, but to fully understand where I come from I need to make reference to my family's unique background. My grandmother joined a religious cult at the age of fifteen. She was homeless  after being thrown out on the street by her own father.  She had just become a young woman in his eyes and that, to him, meant trouble.  My grandmother left her parents' home in the Country, in our native Puerto Rico, and came to the city to work as a maid.  

At that desperate time in her life, she came across a group of people in a religious gathering who had very strange spiritual beliefs and practices.  They had come out of their Pentecostal church to form their own, led by a woman who claimed having received a special revelation from God, making her the messenger and medium of the Holy Ghost.  So was my grandmother's need to belong somewhere and be accepted by someone that she was willing to forsake her before cherished Catholic faith to utterly assimilate herself into this new cult. 

The beliefs, practices and idiosyncrasy of this communal religious group, latter called Mita Congregation, formed a parallel dimensional  universe in which I grew up inscribed in the outer socio-cultural reality of every other Puerto Rican girl in the 80's and 90's. My childhood and teenage years where anything but ordinary, with all the common characteristics of life within any religious cult.  You grow up controlled, manipulated, terrified of the outside world, denying your own thoughts and feelings every time they stretched out of the frame of their doctrine.  

Why do I feel the need to write about this and publish it for anyone to see?