I, Mikey, having been born of goodly parents in the Year of Our Lord 1980 AD…

I always wanted to begin my story this way. Hey, if Joe, I mean, Nephi did it, why the hell can’t I?

Really though, I WAS born to great parents. I grew up in what was then a small suburb, now a very large affluent suburb, of Salt Lake City, Utah. I was born in the covenant and my folks were your typical young, Mormon, middle middle class couple. My sister was born two years before me, so by the time I came along, they had already begun their little family. My parents were fantastic. They loved each other and they loved me and my sister more than anything. My dad was a self-taught architect and making damn good money for the time. My parents met while receiving their degrees at Brigham Young University; my mom’s degree in Fashion Merchandising, my dad’s in Business Management.

I want to break here and give some background on my parents.

My mom, Virginia, was born in Utah in May of 1953 to Mark and Orpha Ward. She was the fifth of six children; she had three older sisters and an older brother. She spent most of her formative years living in the Seattle, Washington area. My mom didn’t have the most ideal childhood. She was born nearly three months premature, which in the 1950’s was usually considered a death sentence, obviously due to the lack of medical technology at that time, relatively speaking. I remember her telling us frequently that when she was born, she was able to be cradled in one of her father’s hands, and could have been put in a mayonnaise jar and still had room to move.

She spent almost the first year of her life in the neo-natal ICU at Holy Cross hospital in Salt Lake City. The doctors were cautious but hopeful about her prognosis, but also couldn’t make any promises as to whether or not my mom would live. At that time, most of the nurses at Holy Cross were nuns. Throughout her life, she always held a special place in her heart for nuns, as they had cared for her as lovingly as a mother would her own child.

Not long after my mother was finally released from the hospital and allowed to go home, her parents packed the family up and moved to Bellevue, Washington, which is a suburb of Seattle, east across Lake Washington. They moved into a modest, but beautiful home in the neighborhood of Clyde Hill. Much like the suburb I grew up in, Bellevue is one of the most affluent and highly-priced places to live in the Seattle area. Today, the median home price ranges from $350,000 to $400,000.

Because of her very premature birth, my mom was a sickly child. She had chronic asthma (which stuck with her throughout her life), and was a frail, tiny little girl. The children she grew up with and her brothers and sisters nicknamed her “Skinny Ginny”, because of her small stature. This nickname grew on itself as she got older and lost her baby teeth. “Skinny Ginny” became “Skinny Ginny the Toothless Ninny”. Over the years the nickname stuck, but was always used very affectionately.

When she began kindergarten at age five, she was still too frail and ill to leave the house. A two-way communication system was set up at home and in the classroom, so my mom was still able to learn. I always like to think of this as a 1950’s version of online classes. She attended school this way for a couple years, and by then her health had improved enough that she was able to start attending regular classes at the school. Because of her sweet-natured and outgoing personality, despite her health problems, my mom was a very well-liked little girl. She made friends quickly and was always fiercely loyal to those she loved and cared about.

My biological grandfather, Mark Ward, was a violent, hot-tempered, unfaithful, emotionally and physically abusive alcoholic, though as I’m told, he hadn’t always been that way. Outwardly, he was a very charismatic, charming man, who had the looks and the suave of a young Clark Gable. He made his living as a salesman, and because of his charm and charisma, was able to provide a very comfortable life for his family. As time moved on, however, most of the money he made was funneled into booze and other women. He began belittling and emotionally abusing his children, especially his two youngest- my mom and her little brother, Joe. He would constantly say to my mom that he wished she had never been born, and that she had been nothing but a burden from the beginning.

Tutu, my maternal grandmother, was as beautiful as a movie star. She was a wonderful mother, a loving wife and had solid relationships with each of her children. Despite the rapid decline of her marriage, she always remained positive, kind and fiercely protective of her children. They were the most important thing in her life.

When my mom was about nine years old, her father abandoned the family to be with another woman, leaving my grandmother with very little income and six children to raise. My grandmother (we called her Tutu, which is Hawaiian for ‘grandma’- to this day I’m not sure where the nickname came from), was forced to take on two additional full-time jobs to support her family. The job she loved the most and had been working at the longest was at a real estate firm. There, she met Eric Pearson, a successful real estate developer who owned properties all over the Pacific Northwest. Eric had also been married before and had children, although his first marriage had not ended amicably, and he didn’t have much of a relationship with his children. After Mark left, Tutu and Eric began dating and eventually married. Eric was the man that I knew my entire life as Grandpa; I never did meet my biological grandfather, Mark.

Tutu and Grandpa Eric’s relationship was something out of a 1940’s Hollywood movie. They were, as the old expression goes, “madly” in love. He courted her and treated her like a queen. He always used to refer to her as “my darling”. He embraced the entire family as if he had been a part of it since the beginning. Although most of my mom’s siblings were either in their late teens or early twenties when Grandpa Eric came into the picture, he thought of them as his own children, and all of them came to know him as Dad. Grandpa Eric was everything that Mark had not been. He was kind, loving and unconditionally supportive of his new family.

As the years went by, and my mom blossomed into a young woman, she became increasingly beautiful, and closely resembled her mother. She was still “Skinny Ginny”, but no longer frail and sickly. She was trim, pretty and confident.

Although both her mother and biological father were Mormon, they were never consistently active in the LDS church. As my mom grew up, however, she began to attend church on a regular basis, going with a good friend.

After she graduated from high school, my mom decided she wanted to move back to Utah and attend BYU. She said goodbye to her family and headed south.

My dad, Glenn’s childhood was vastly different from my mom’s. He was born in July of 1951 and raised in the Salt Lake Valley. His mother, Martha, was raised in the LDS church, but his father, Bill, was not. My dad never really attended church as a kid, and concentrated more on sports and girls. His parents were very close, and for the most part, my dad had a very happy childhood.

Grandpa Bill was a very successful architect. His office was run out of the house, and that gave him time to teach his sons the tricks of the trade. My dad was the second of four kids; he had one older brother, Mark, a younger brother, Brent, and a younger sister, Linda. He was closest in age to his older brother Mark, and looked up to him in every way.

Mark was handsome, popular, athletic and intelligent. He was everything most boys wanted to be. When Mark was about fourteen, he fell off his bike and got a very large bruise on one of his knees. Time passed, and the bruise didn’t clear up. My grandparents took him to the hospital and after getting an x-ray, the doctor broke the news that Mark had cancer. By the time he was diagnosed, the cancer had spread through most of his leg, and at the time, his only chance for survival was to amputate the leg. Mark underwent surgery and had his leg amputated. Unfortunately, it was discovered that the cancer had spread further than the doctors originally thought, and was now in Mark’s lungs.

Mark died at the age of sixteen. Obviously, the family was left devastated, but it didn’t affect anyone quite as much as it did my dad. Mark had been his best friend and his hero, but now my dad was the oldest, and had to be a role model for his younger siblings.

Time passed, and after he graduated high school, he was accepted at the University of Utah. He began school, and immediately joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity. In true fashion, he began drinking, smoking and doing all types of things that made his parents’ hair curl.

After a year or so at the U of U, drinking, partying and not getting much done scholastically, my dad decided to mend his ways and start going to church. He quit drinking and smoking, and stopped socializing with his fraternity. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that the only way to maintain his new ‘clean’ lifestyle was to transfer to Brigham Young University.

Not long after beginning classes at BYU, he met my mom. It was one of those love at first sight things like you see in the movies. My dad timidly asked my mom to go with him to one of the school dances. To this day, I keep the photograph taken at their first dance.

Like my Tutu and Grandpa Eric, my parents were crazy about each other. My dad always talks about how deeply in love he was with my mom, and how they would make out everywhere there was a couch. They both, however, maintained their “virtue” while they were dating.

My dad received his degree in Business Management, but had learned the trade of architecture from his dad. Right out of college, he went to work for his dad as an architect, although my dad never received “formal” training or a degree in architecture. My dad had a knack and a talent for the trade, however, and soon became my grandpa’s business partner.

After my parents graduated from college, they decided to get married. They were married in the Salt Lake Temple in April of 1976, and immediately began trying to begin a family. It wasn’t easy. They tried for nearly two years to get pregnant, and after going through some fertility treatments, my mom became pregnant with my sister, Amanda.

Mandi was born in January of 1978. She was one of the most beautiful little babies most people had ever seen. She was petite, and had a shock of white-blond hair. That girl could stop traffic, and that continues today.

Two years later, little old me was brought into this world via caesarian section. When I was born, I had a red mark on my forehead between my eyes- not really a birthmark; it would only appear when I was pissed off. In my opinion, I wasn’t the cutest of babies, but I was born with a set of dimples on my face that through the years I learned to work to my advantage in several ways. In my early twenties, those dimples got me laid more often than I probably would have without them. That damn red mark on my forehead, however, followed me until I was probably ten years old, but again, only appeared when I was angry. Why the red mark is important, I don’t know, just a small incidental detail about my physical appearance as a child.

Like my sister, I was born with almost white-blond hair. By the time I was about three or four, however, my hair darkened to a chestnut brown and my face was covered in freckles. God, how I hated the freckles. They were the bane of my existence throughout childhood and adolescence. From adults it was always “oh, look how cute your freckles are!” Fucking freckles. Although they have faded, at almost thirty-one years old, I still have ‘em. Fair-skinned Mikey and his goddamn freckles.

My brother, Kevin, was born about 3 ½ years after me. He was an adorable blond-haired happy kid and was such a great addition to our family. My brother and I have always been extremely close, and he was my best friend throughout the horror that was my adolescence. More on that later.

I was a happy kid, but very shy and reserved. I wasn’t comfortable around new people, and was always kind of a homebody. From an early age, I loved books and devoured as many as I could get my hands on. Records were another passion of mine. When I was three, my parents bought me a plastic Fisher-Price record player, and a whole bunch of those 45s with stories narrated on them that came with the book and the record. I don’t know what it was, though, about the physical records, but I loved them. I loved the shape, the feel of them in my hands, and most of all the turning action of the record player.

Anything that had a disc-like apparatus was a record player for me, even my mom’s Kitchenaid mixer. I used to steal the little disc that the bowl would spin on and play with it. My mom was constantly finding that damn thing in my room and would chastise me not to take it again.

One memory about records that I will probably never live down, happened when I was probably two years old. My mom was a gigantic fan of the Beatles. She had every record they ever recorded, most of them first editions. One day, she came downstairs and I had taken all the Beatles records she had out of their sleeves and spread them out on the stone hearth, thus scratching them all to hell. Again, like the red mark, the record obsession is merely an incidental detail and has nothing whatsoever to do with my life as a whole.

When I was four years old and my sister was six, my mom decided to put my sister in piano lessons. My parents went out and bought a nice upright piano and started my sister in lessons with a wonderful German lady, who I’ll call Gretchen, who lived down the street from us. Gretchen was about my parents’ age and she had kids that were roughly the same age as me and my siblings. From the get-go, my sister hated piano lessons. She was always something of a diva; and had a strong, stubborn personality like my mom. She didn’t like to be told she had to do something she didn’t want to do.

My mom forced my sister kicking and screaming to practice her piano lessons for a mere half hour a day after school. Not long after my sister began piano lessons, I figured, hey, that doesn’t look so hard. After my sister was done practicing, I would go in, sit down at the piano bench and play her entire lesson. Well, my parents figured they had a piano prodigy on their hands and immediately started me in piano lessons.

Thus started my lifelong love affair with music. I loved the piano. Loved it. Instead of going outside and playing sports and games with the other kids in my neighborhood, I would sit at the piano for hours at a time every day and just play. It was a place I could always escape to; it had a calming, head-clearing effect on me, and still does. When I’m playing, I’m able to focus all my attention on the keys of the piano and the emotion of the song, and nothing else really matters to me when I’m in that place. It’s very zen.

I took piano lessons for nearly fourteen years. I was involved in many piano competitions and recitals. It was always something I excelled in, and continued to love throughout the years.

My parents were always active in the LDS church, and raised us the same way. We went to church every Sunday, and my parents held various callings. My mom was Homemaking Counselor in the Relief Society for many years, and my dad served as Ward Clerk for a big portion of my younger childhood. My mom was what everyone would refer to as Supermom. She was active in everything she could be- PTA, Room Mother at school, my sister’s dance lessons, my piano lessons, my brother’s sports activities. She sewed, she cooked, she cleaned house, she even began furthering her education, taking correspondence courses from BYU. My mom was at the top of her game in my early childhood.

When I was about six years old, an event came to pass (hehe) that, looking back, was probably the first time I witnessed how cruel people could be. My mom was Homemaking Counselor in the Relief Society at the time, and was pretty close with all the ladies in the ward. Somewhere around that point, my sister, by brother and I all came down with a raging case of head lice. This was back in the day when they would hold “read-a-thons” at school, and all the kids would bring their pillows and blankets and treats from home and lay on the floor of the classroom reading for a whole entire school day. While there’s really no way of knowing for sure how we contracted the lice, this is most likely where we got it from.

My mom was in a panic. She was very obsessive-compulsive about keeping the house clean and disinfected, although she was never one of those mothers that kept plastic on the couch and never let anyone “live” there. But she did pride herself on the cleanliness of the house. The case of head lice was a huge curve ball. She took us to the doctor and got a lice comb and some anti-parasite shampoo, and spent hours picking the nits out of our hair. She boiled all the clothing and the sheets and eventually, the lice were gone.

Mormon wards being what they are, it wasn’t long before everyone knew we had head lice. The gossip spread like wildfire. The women of the ward shunned my mom, and gossiped behind her back, calling her an unfit mother, saying she should have kept her house cleaner, and paid more attention to her kids’ hygiene. The parents stopped letting their kids play with us, and coming to our house for sleepovers or anything like that was forbidden by all the kids’ parents. No matter what my mom did, she was looked on as a pariah in the ward for a long time.

This incident threw my mom into a deep depression. The vibrant, energetic woman I had always known deteriorated before my eyes. She spent most of her days in bed crying. She would get up only long enough to make sure we were fed and taken care of, but not much more than that. The light had drained from her eyes. All the things she loved to do no longer seemed important to her anymore.

After weeks and weeks of this, my dad decided it was time she see her doctor. She went in and was prescribed Valium. Back around that time, Valium was a very common drug given to people with depression. Not much was really known about depression; it wasn’t diagnosed as commonly as it is now. I don’t think drugs like Valium were really known as being highly addictive. The valium helped my mom return to some semblance of normalcy, and within a short time, she was out of bed and back to being my mom. Looking back, I don’t think she ever fully recovered from the incident with the lice. To me, it was the beginning of the end for her.