My life as a human being

 Being a human being is complex. When I was a tree, life was simpler. My contact with other beings was limited. They had to come to me. I was firmly rooted and relegated to the spaces my roots and branches could reach. As a bird, I had much more freedom but spent most of my time looking for food and was wary of predators. I'm not sure what other lives gave me, but it's a safe bet that those experiences were much more straightforward than this one.

Humans seem to have slightly deeper thoughts. Life is more than survival and basic living if you will. You find yourself saddled with doubt and fear. I know that trees and birds have those things, and I imagine all things do, but life is just for them. Things happen. You deal with them as you can. Humans can combine efforts to combat or increase those things by uniting with conversation and creating a society.

In this life,  the society I was born in, 1958, changed drastically just when I could understand what I saw. I went from a world where Perry Como was cool  ( enough ) to the Kennedy and Martin Luther assassinations. Civil rights, women's rights, black people's rights, and, just to make it more complicated, the war in Viet Nam. And let's not forget the hippies. They carry the torch of an ideal society. Righteous bastards...

Anyone would be confused by all of this nonsense. But the more you saw, the more you realized how much more there was. That, in itself, is difficult. But I had additional difficulties.

I remember when I chose my parents. After being home for a while, I was offered a trip back to earth, but I had to decide when and where I would go. I decided to be the third child of an exciting couple living in the midwest of what is known as North America. America, to be exact. Lansing, Michigan, to narrow it down further.

Born Joy Jeanette Kettlehut, my mother was born the last of three or more children. Her mother died either in childbirth or shortly after that. Her father, unable to support a newborn in this situation, farmed her out to caring friends, and she was adopted by Henry Damrow. She was, for the time, a " wild child. " She was artistic, fun-loving,  and had a great example of what the French call joie de vivre. My father couldn't resist her.

My father, Lawrence Theodore Sullivan, was the last of many children born on a farm outside of Oxford, Michigan. He met my mother in high school in Oxford. It took him three times to convince her to go out with him. Stubbornness is a family trait that I inherited from him.

Dad, or Pops, as I called him, was a very pragmatic soul. He was brilliant, but I think he was hindered by being the youngest of a large family of farmers who had to deal with what is commonly known as the great depression. Dad loved his parents, but they did not have the time to give him the extra care he needed. He was young and more intelligent than I bet he wished he was.

His sisters Annie, Betty, and Laurie, along with his next oldest brother Ed, were the ones that had the most significant influence on his upbringing, to my knowledge. They remained close, so much so that I was blessed with the opportunity to be close to them.

When I saw them together, that combination of the two ( cue Big Brother and the Holding Company ), I knew where I wanted to be. But I didn't have a clue as to what I was in for. I remember watching a live news report of some war; I think it was in the Balkans, where a woman was filmed running from a bombing, shouting, " Why did I choose to be born here ?!?". So my experience with choices was not as dire but perhaps a little more easily managed.

Joy and Larry, my parents, did their best, but I'm not sure they understood how their choices would affect their children. They were also young and inexperienced at life outside of small rural towns and the responsibilities of family life. I would not have done as well as they did.

Joy was born shortly before her mother died. Her father felt he could not properly care for her. After at least one other person or family took her in, Henry Damrow, a family friend, adopted her and raised her, with his wife Martha, in a small town where he owned a bar. Henry and Martha had no other children, so Joy, born into a large family, was raised as a single child. Joy's natural family, whom she knew, were Jewish, but the Damrows were Lutheran. Religion, as far as I know, was not prevalent in either family and not particularly important. As it remains today with those of us from both families still around.

Being adopted and a single child has interesting effects on a kid. I was the third of four children, which also had interesting results, but we are talking about my mother. Adopted children, and apparently even those that know their natural family, tend to fantasize about who or where they came from. My mother once told me that she thought she was the Lindberg baby, stolen from them by the Purple Gang. She was; I knew by that time, delusional and a tad disturbed. But she was my mother, and even though we had our differences, I loved her and chose to ignore it.

When she was a teenager, Joy had cancer and had to have half of her thyroid removed. I learned many years later that the thyroid produces an enzyme that helps prevent psychosis, and she had to take a pill daily to help with this situation. Which she didn't like to do. Perhaps I got my stubbornness from her because I understand that. Not taking that medication, however, caused her to be unstable. So finally, maybe not understanding precisely what caused this problem, Henry and Martha did what they could.

There were times in my childhood when in hindsight, I realized that she only took that medication when she felt like it. Sometimes she would seem normal, but other times she would not. Before the divorce, we moved around a lot. We changed houses, cities, and even states about every 18 months. So I got used to the changes that happened quickly and relatively often in life, and to see this in my mother was not surprising. It just was. I think my brothers and sister were more deeply affected by this, but that is just a guess.

Larry was the last child of a vast family. A farm family. I believe his father was well into his fifties when he was born, and being a farmer, he was too busy to bond with the child that needed him. His mother, younger than her husband, was a wonderful woman and an artist, but she was probably a bit overwhelmed with all that went on. Nevertheless, a farm wife, during the depression, tried her best to maintain a healthy household.