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Showing posts from December, 2022

The Shoebox

 My name is Kathleen, and I was born in Los Angeles within a family struggling with addiction issues of different forms. My mother was a registered nurse working graveyard shift with a dependence on Demerol. She stole the drug from work, self-medicating to deal with her issues & yet undiagnosed schizophrenia.                                                   My mother, Christmas 1970 My father had issues with control, money, and keeping his house in order. Many weekends, he drove across the border in Tijuana to purchase baby Amazon parrots and smuggled them back to Los Angeles stashed underneath the backseat of his convertible 69" Karmann Ghia. He did this on a regular basis, and I now realize that back home, he raised the them & sold the adult birds for profit. My first memory ever is lying down in my crib as an infant, with the white bars surroundin...