Fairbanks, Alaska 
Within one year, mother couldn't wait to get rid of me again.  And I couldn't wait to leave.  Things had gone right back to the way they had been before, except I was a little smarter now, and I rebelled against tom.  He was nothing but a gambling, cheating drunk. 

I had been having a serious (or so I thought) relationship with Dann Kendall, he was in the Air Force.  Mother knew very well where I spent my weekends!  Either out at base in his dorm, or at the Klondike motel....same place tom would take his little hussies!  Either that or I was out partying, getting high and drinking myself into oblivion.  Hmmm, don't most parents try to stop their kids from doing that kind of stuff?  She'll deny it now, but she encouraged it, shit, she bought it for me - how can she deny it if she's the one who bought it?!!  

I worked a LOT!  Had to... I needed money for the pot and the booze!  Pot was still legal here in Alaska at the time, so it wasn't illegal that I had it....  I was doing horrible in school.  I remember ONE time ever that my mother came to something in my school.... it was a Christmas concert.  I DO treasure that one memory, seeing her set out there in the audience, she actually looked like she wanted to be there.  Must have been a momentary lapse of parental needs for her. 

Mother didn't care about my grades, she didn't care about my future, she didn't care about where I spent my time, how I got there, or how I got back, much less what I was doing or who I was doing it with.  She surely didn't care that I would skip school to work.  She used to tell me, "I don't condone what you're doing..." but she never tried to stop me either!  She never took me to see a counselor, or to a drug treatment program, or Alanon, or AA - - she simply didn't care.  I still - - at 33 years old - do not understand how a mother can NOT care about her kid.  Oh she has said she cared... but I am sorry ACTIONS speak louder, volumes more, than empty words and broken promises.

I had just turned 17 but she gladly signed me off when I brought her the papers that parents have to sign for a minor wants to get married.  So... at 17 I quit school, only 3 months before graduation, I was married to a 25 - 27 yr old Army guy, Brian Shaw,  who was my bowling partner, for all the WRONG reasons.  How I got back to Michigan again before the next school year..... that's a whole other story!