I was born on August 25, 1962 in Sacramento, CA. I was adopted at birth and when I was three days old I was brought home to Crockett, CA. Crockett is a very, very small town in the Bay Area of Northern California. My mom went back to work when I was three months old and I stayed with a babysitter while she worked. The babysitter had two daughter's and as I grew older we became more like sisters. I have one sister who was 14 years old when I was born and by the time I was 4 she was married and on her own, so I got the benefit of being a younger sister and an only child.

My mom was a teller at our local bank and my dad was a custodian for the local elementary school and volunteer fire fighter for the local fire dept. I grew up as daddy's little girl. I was his shadow, he couldn't do anything without me wanting to help.

I remember the days when I could hardly wait to get the heck out of dodge. I was related to about half the town, the other half either grew up with my parents or sister and I couldn't do anything without my parents soon finding out. Now, its funny because those are the things I miss and I now live in the town where my husband was born and raised.

By the time I was 9 years old, my babysitter and her family had moved away to Angels Camp, CA. I was heartbroken, her youngest daughter, named Michelle, and I had become very good friends and I missed her. They promised me that I could come and visit for a few weeks during the summers and spend time with them. It was always real fun up there. There was always more to do then in Crockett.

Things were real good in my life. My parents were very loving and provided me the very best. My dad was very protective of me, being in the small town that we were, it was easy to forget what goes on with the real world. The one thing that my dad could not protect me from was what I was soon going to experience.

When I was 14 years old I was really enjoying my freshman year and I was involved with the high school band's flag squad. Then, all of a sudden the floor was pulled out from under me! In January of that year I received a phone call that Michelle and her Dad were killed in a car accident by a drunk driver. I was devastated! I couldn't believe it, in fact I thought that it was some cruel joke or something until I went to the funeral and saw the two of them laying there motionless in there coffins. I barely had time to recover from the blow of that when my mom, who had been struggling with lung cancer for eight months, lost her battle and died in March of that year. I suddenly spiraled downward, not knowing what was happening or what to do, my grades dropped and I lost interest in most everything.

Things seemed to get worse from there, the pain was with me constantly. Then the only person I thought I had left in my life, which was my dad, found another lady to start dating within 3 months of my moms death. She moved in about 2 months later, and she became my step-mother in about another 5 months. I discovered in this time period that if I drank a little alcohol or smoked a little pot the pain would go away.

Ever since my dad remarried my step-mother had been really strict with me. I know now that I am raising a teenager that it wasn't all that bad, but when I had no rules and regulations to follow before this was very difficult to swallow. One day I decided that I would go to my dad and talk to him about the way I felt about things, but before I could even tell him what I wanted to say he told me that he didn't want to hear about it. That was when I knew that I had lost my dad!

A couple of days after my dad remarried I started seeing this guy named John who lived in the city of Vallejo which was just across the bay from us. My parents seemed to really like him even though he was 6 years older then me. I remember that on my sixteenth birthday John took me out for a nice prime rib dinner and when we were in the his car getting ready for him to take me home he gave me this gold ring that had two adjoining hearts and one diamond in the middle of the hearts. I knew then that this was the man that I wanted to marry and be with the rest of my life.

After over a year of dating John, my step-mother said that they weren't going to allow us to continue to date. They said that he was to old for me, that I should be dating 16 year-old guys, like myself, not a 22 year-old. I kept thinking that if this was a problem, then why didn't they stop it before I fell in love with him. This was about all I could handle. I started drinking and smoking pot more, just so I wouldn't have to feel that daily pain that I walked around with. The one thing that kept me sane though all this was that when things were really bad at home I would pack my thing in paper bags just waiting for the day I could leave. I remember one day my dad saw all my paper bags and asked what they were for and I told him that I had been cleaning my room and I was storing stuff in the paper bags.

I continued to see John when my parents went bowling once a week and he would tell me that as soon as he got his own place to live that I could move in with him. A couple of months later John got an apartment of his own and we started planning on how I could move in. On March 19, 1977 John came over about 8 O'clock in the morning, this is when both may parents were at work and I was suppose to be getting ready for school. We packed all those paper bags in the trunk of his car and we drove away from the place that I grew up in loving, but grew to hate.