by Laurel A Rockefeller

Created on: September 06, 2008

Good things happen. But if you looked at my biography, you would be shocked to hear me say that.

The universe has not been fair to me. I was born to a father who used his position in the family to exploit my mother economically and plunge us into adjunct poverty. He used our fundamentalist Baptist church to secure power for himself to justify heinous crimes that, if the laws had been on the books at the time and if he'd been investigated and convicted, would have easily garnered himself a death row sentence-while ensuring my mother and I were properly stigmatized in the process and alienated from our community. As part of these crimes, I was tortured and mutilated so I can most likely never have a natural born family of my own.

At 12, my parents divorced, creating more community stigma and just as junior high started...but there was freedom at last to do SOME healing. Only to have a new disaster strike: a car strike my left temple as I entered the cross walk on my bike just 30 days to the minute of my 14th birthday, shattering my skull like a pumpkin and sending me into yet another "near" death experience.

No, I didn't use bad grammar there; there are simply some details best kept between my friends and me. The accident was a turning point for many reasons in my life. In the 1980s, the immediate and known impact was the complete amnesia that left me unable to recall any personal memories or any learned information, only learned skills like reading how to ride a bike. What was less obvious as my brain rewired itself from massive left hemispheric damage is that on the neurological level I had lost or was losing most of my sight from my right eye. Since I couldn't remember anything from before the accident, I literally could not compare my vision before and after the crash. I was too pre-occupied with the pain of my injuries and the chaos created by the academic environment as I struggled to re-learn everything the amnesia took away while feeling completely lost to notice that more than half of my sight was gone. Instead, I had simply become "clumsy," too challenged by poverty, amnesia, and the pressures of trying to be a teenaged honor student being excessively bullied to worry about why I sometimes walked into walls or had these odd visual lapses. Life was too tough. And my church's stigma's over everything wasn't helping, picking on my mother and I for making choices to live instead of die at my father's hands.

After all that I had by then gone through, how I can

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