A LITTLE HISTORY
I was born August 31, 1963 to Joan Gayle Reynolds Ballard and Billy Bob Ballard. My parents met in high school, got married and had my brother Todd. According to the stories, things were rocky, and they divorced. Approximately a year or so later they remarried and had me. It was just not meant to be for the two and they divorced again when I was 6 months old.
Bill remarried within a year and Joan married my stepfather, Paul Martin, in 1966. Paul was truly the man that raised, fed and clothed us through the years. But Bill was the man I considered to be and was told to be my biological father, my Dad. I have always loved him as my father, but it seemed to be a forced relationship. Vision me with a square peg and Dad was the round hole that I just kept trying to make the pieces fit and work like I wanted them to.
Constantly trying to please everyone under the circumstances and feeling caught in the middle is no easy situation for a child to be in but it was just part of the deal. It felt like a dance that I was out-of-step at each turn, every swing. Stepping on toes while everyone was waltzing around as though there was nothing lying beneath.
This charade lasted 58 years and now I dance to my own beat and the music is of my choosing, not everyone else’s. Indicators that something was amiss were around me throughout life. I noticed them but when I would ask, I was told “oh, don’t be silly, you are just imagining things” or “of course, Bill is your father. Why would you ask such a thing?”
Well maybe because he throws out innuendos like “if you only knew the truth” or “I cannot begin to tell you all that your mother did”. One of my all-time favorites, “you look so much like your mother that I have a hard time being around you.” Who the hell says that to their child? A child that they have supposedly given life to, but it is impossible for them to separate their love for a woman that jilted them from their love of an innocent child.