Hey Tarah!

K, well, my mom is begging me for my computer so I suppose I have to make this quick. It's really annoying to have to schedule time with her for MY computer. MINE. FOREVER.

Both of the 30 day "assignments" for today are to describe my parents in great detail.
I suppose I'll describe them as my parents and then describe them individually as people.

My parents. Oh, lord. They are just about the strictest parents that I've ever even heard of. We don't get along very often. THEY don't get along very often. They fight at least once a day- BUT it's always my mom's fault. She says it isn't, but it definitely is. I suppose she has a lot of things to be frustrated about, but none of those things involve us so it's just really stupid that we get the brunt of it. She picks fights with my dad, she picks fights with me. If I do anything other than sit there and take her yap (which I am NOT going to do), I get yelled at by my Dad, which ends in me yelling at my Dad. He just takes her side so that he won't get yelled at, which is really stupid because she is going to yell at him about something later anyway. I really need to not live here for very much longer.

Anyway, they knew each other way before they started dating. When they were little, my mom and aunt used to go to my dad's house because their parents were (sort of) friends. They met later in a night club in their 20s. My mom was actually dating someone at the time. He was a soldier but was stationed somewhere else. She says he would never write back to her letters and when he would come to visit, she would always be the last stop he made and he would never stay for long. So she left his ass for my amazing Daddy :) haha.

My dad- My dad is a really good guy. I haven't met anyone who doesn't like my Dad. He is quite sensitive and cries every time we watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. He is funny and only gets on my nerves when my mom is around. We are a whole lot alike. I'm lucky he isn't a deadbeat- that seems to be a rare find around these parts. Good on ya, dad!

K. About him. He was born in Somerset on December 31, 1961 and also lived in Cincinnati when he was really little. He has really great parents, and an older sister named Pam (who is my favorite aunt!). When he was 4, he was climbing on a tractor trailer and the gates weren't locked so he fell backwards. The gates landed on his legs and broke them. He spent several months in the hospital and then had to learn to walk again. Also, when he was five, his cousin accidentally chopped off his middle finger with an axe. So that is why he is missing half of one. We definitely have the same kinda luck. Hah. Like I said, he always had a super amount of friends, and he was really popular in high school. He was captain of the basketball team and was voted Best Looking in his class. And oddly enough, Mrs. Parkey was a teacher at his school and she told me once that they would talk in the hallways because they hated the same teachers hahaha. After he graduated, he and some friends moved to Texas for a little bit, but he moved back here. When I was little, I remember that he would get in the floor and color with me, he taught me how to ride a bike and he taught me to play basketball. I would always wear his boots around the house and I wanted to go everywhere with him. I remember specifically that he would fix me a sippy cup of coffee in the morning before I went to school, he never had the TV on the right cartoons and he sucked at fixing ponytails. He stopped smoking cold-turkey about 15 years ago and I'm super proud of him. He has had a full-time job for as long as I can remember. He always tries to do as much for me as he can and gets really upset when he can't afford something for me, though I assure him that it is completely okay. He is about the greatest dad I think I ever could've been fixed up with. Except for the time he told me that when he was a teenager he used to run over cats for fun. Dickhole. I didn't talk to him for two weeks. But here comes karma. Giving me twenty six cats, and he has to pay for cat food. For all of them. So there.

My mom- I have a lot to say about my mom. There is some good in her. When she is nice to me, she is really nice to me. But, she likes to start arguments with me out of thin air so her niceties really don't last for long at all. She has had a pretty rough life. She is one of four children, and she is also ONE of FOUR children who will do anything at all for her parents. Actually, my aunt and uncles (and several cousins) kind of make me sick. So she's had a lot to deal with. None of that: my fault. She lies, she talks behind everyone's back. The way that people have treated her is inexcusable BUT I can't say I don't understand why she doesn't have many friends. She likes to tell lies about me especially. And they're really lame and unnecessary ones, too. Like if we're late somewhere she'll tell them that I took too long to get ready, whereas I had actually been sitting on the couch waiting for her for 15+ minutes. She really likes to show off in front of her friends and crack jokes about me, so that's not good. I've been told by her that she's ashamed of me one too many times. She has told me she's proud of me maybe a total of three times. When my friends are around, she'll act all nice and make me look like an asshole for saying she's mean. Until she's been around them for a bit. Then she proves me right. She yells at me for things that they do- and when they even tell her it was them, she says something like "No, it was probably Tarah, actually". You've witnessed that Raeann! She's OCD and it bothers me really badly. I think she thinks I'm a little bit retarded. She is bipolar I am pretty sure. I thought she was just going through menopause, but turns out that she's been going through that since she was 37, and she is 49 now. The thing that bugs me REALLY badly about her is that on Facebook, she will join "I love my daughter!" groups, and post about how she loves spending time with her beautiful daughter! And how she has the best daughter in the world! The reality of it? I'll try to tell her about my day, and she will tell me to be quiet because she is watching television. I'll try to tell her about my day, and she will walk out of the room like she doesn't even hear me. Every thing I tell her goes in one ear and out the other. I just know we are going to have one of those relationships where I move away from home, and I'm never going to answer her phone calls. I love my mom, but I really, really can't stand her.

ANYHOW. She was born in Somerset on February 17, 1961, and has lived in Jabez all of her life. She has a twin sister named Lanna, an older brother named Kenny, and a younger brother named Kevin. Her parents are also amazing but worked her and her brothers and sister really hard. They always had to work in tobacco and things like that. I mean, they had to get up at like 4 in the morning and work for three hours before they ever even went to school. She was cooking full-on meals by the time she was, like, 8. They never had a whole lot of money, but my grandpa was a carpenter so he pretty much built their entire house. He also was a mechanic and a school-bus driver. They were all really religious growing up, and my mom and my aunt made a Gospel album when they were four. My mom has always played the piano (really super well), she's never had lessons, and she sings a lot. In high school, she got into all kindsa trouble but won't admit it. She had a real creepy math teacher that randomly came to their house all the time and followed them to Indiana once. She was voted Best Dressed in high school, and was really super pretty. She got married to my dad when she was 26, had a miscarriage before me, and had me when she was 29. A specialist told her that because she had Shingles, she would miscarry with me and that if she didn't, I would be a walking birth defect. He tried to get her to schedule an abortion but she wouldn't so I had that going for me. I guess there was like a .02% chance that I wouldn't be retarded. Who knew. And then she drank bleach when she was little so she almost died then. There were a lot of odds against me. She always gets sad that she never got to watch me take my first step. I don't have a lot of memories of her when I was little because she worked all the time so I stayed with my grandparents. She's always worked until she got laid off recently. So she is a really really hard worker, I just wish that she would get her priorities right sometimes.