If we’re fortunate in this life we suffer. Enough to humble us to our knees. was blessed with – and I say this with all sincerity – a turbulent, difficult and at times torturous childhood. It’s said that suffering is a gift intended to humble us and drive us inward toward the spiritual center.

That certainly has been the case here, though I’m a slow learner. Really slow. Still learning.

The author at roughly 7 years of age. The really heavy stuff was yet to come.

A military brat with three siblings, life was about change. A lot of change. No sooner were roots planted than they were torn out and replanted in a new locale, state, or country.

Born in Florida, we relocated to another city where my brother was born, then it was off to the New Mexico desert.

From there my dad was off to do his bit in Vietnam while the rest of us spent a year in near my mother’s West Virginia hometown.

When my dad returned we spent the two genuinely golden years of our lives in a small Virginia community before jetting off for a couple of years in New Delhi, India.

It was when we returned to Virginia that the first cracks started to appear. The military base sucked and was filled with bad energy. The nation’s well-intentioned goal of forced bussing (to shove black kids into white schools and white kids into black ones) was a nightmare – we were regularly bulled and tormented by our school’s majority black population (as my older sister and I have often noted with not a little irony, we discovered racism from an entirely different perspective.

From Virginia were were off to Panama and there is where the wheels of the family completely disassembled. The moment my mother discovered my father’s philandering, he packed us up and flew us back to the U.S. where he unceremoniously dumped us in a South Carolina car dealership (“Here are the keys to a new car, have a good life”).

We ended up in the childhood home of my father, where his aged parents did the best they could to tend for a suicidal daughter-in-law, her 15-year-old daughter from a previous marriage who would lickety-split be impregnated and off to live with her 17-year-old hubby; the 11-year-old namesake of their son; and the largely overlooked 9-year-old second son and 4-year-old daughter.

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