Yes, this is my life story, the beginning of it anyway. It might be a few days before we get to the how did I end up in Portugal part. Maybe even longer because all of this isn't easy to write. PS: The picture is one my Dad took. I'm the one on Mom's left.

A Bit of Preface#

At 40 year’s old I’ve been told countless times that I should write a book about my life. Why, I ask? What’s so interesting about it? Who would want to read it? Why should anyone care? I’m only a girl from a small town in West Virginia. Nothing special, nothing extraordinary, just a woman, living and making it up as she goes along. Oh, but I live in Portugal now. I’ve traveled. I’m educated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree under my belt. Others have done the same things as me, only they’ve probably done it for different reasons, with more success than I have, better than I have. I’m simply a wanderer, a runner, a “well, let’s see where this takes us” kind of girl. I see the world as a place to be explored, not a place to sit and rot in. The world is bigger than my beloved mountains and I didn’t set out to see it necessarily, but I didn’t turn down the opportunity.

I have been sitting on my story for years, each new version of “you should write a book” causing its own sting. Where am I supposed to start? What do people want to know? Where I come from? What I’ve done? Where I’ve been? The good things, or the bad things? I’m no heroine, I’ve done things I’m ashamed of, but I’ve also done much more I’m proud of. Do I write of those things or only the good? People want a hero, don’t they, not just someone that has managed to trip their way through life, sometimes barely hanging on but still gripping. It’s always been a confusing thing for me, trying to decide what to write, even wondering whether I should. I’m only 40, I’ve not cured cancer or saved a busload of children from a mass murderer, I’ve only gotten up each day to face what I was given.

I guess the beginning is where most people would want me to start, right? Of course, they would want me to start at the beginning. My beginning didn’t start with only me, though. It started with a twin sister, my mother, my grandmothers, aunts and cousins, people who started my story long before I did or took part in my life, influencing it as they went along. Sometimes even those that were gone long before me helped to create my story, helped to create me and I’ve found their stories to be far more interesting than my own. These are the women that formed my opinion of what it meant to be a female; theirs are the stories that filled out the concept for me of what a woman is supposed to be.

But there were men in my life as well. A father, a younger brother, grandfathers, uncles and cousins, also helped me to define who I was, that added their own beliefs, morals, and concepts to who I was supposed to be. Their own stories added to mine to create a beginning, a new life, a person who would eventually be a stranger to all of them.

These people all worked together, though they may not have realized it, to produce a child that would almost be an alien to them all. A stranger and strange, a being so opposite to their own that many would now rather shun me than admit they know me. When I was younger the shunning hurt, it hurt deeply, but now that I’m older I understand their actions for the weak attempts at sparing their own guilt and pain that they were, and in some cases I’d prefer shunning anyway. Knowing some of them, being around them, is too hard because I’m so very different that their self-oppression and insistence on my doing the same is too exhausting to deal with. I’d rather be alone than be around people that hurt themselves in the name of appearances or public standing, of fitting in and being the same as everyone else.

By now you should be getting the idea that I’m not an ordinary person. I wouldn’t say extraordinary, just unwilling to fit into the norm, into the mold that had been put in my place at my beginning. Like a child with its feet bound to produce the tiny feet once so favored in China, despite the ugliness hidden behind beautifully made tiny delicate shoes, I was poured into a mold at my birth, destined to be a copy of those around me. Luckily, not all of those ladies around me came from that same perfect mold. Apparently, over time, little cracks started to form in that mold, each time it was used, until it in no way resembled the original and what was produced with my own little bonds, from my own mold, was something completely different from the rest. People were so busy attempting to maintain the façade of their own perfection that they forgot to check the mold with each new life produced. The cracks and fractures that should have been filled in to ensure each copy was the same went ignored until it was too late and a child was produced that stepped out of the mold too strange to call one of us.

This child was an “other”, one of those on the forms that doesn’t fit into a box, one that lives on the margins of what is acceptable, sometimes going straight off that form and into places the paper doesn’t even cover. The audacity, the gumption, the absolute nerve of that child is perhaps why people think I’m so interesting? Have I bored you now or do you want to know more about this child as well? Shall I continue? I shall, now I’ve opened the box, the form has flown away, and it’s time to make my own form, one for the others of the world, the ones that don’t want to stay in the box but don’t understand quite how to climb out.

You should be warned, however. Stepping out of that box does not guarantee a beautiful life, it does not guarantee that you’ll be free of worry. It only means that when you are met with a challenge, when you do face the hardships that life has to offer, you may just look at that hardship as a stepping stone, as a path that leads to the most unexpected places. Those places may bring you countless joys but they may also bring you despair. You never know, and that’s the important thing about being one of the others, you never quite know what you’re going to get but you know, you absolutely know that each step will be interesting. A mistake may turn into the best decision you’ve ever made.

So What's The Story, Already?

Let’s start with the basics, shall we? I was born in 1977 sometime around 9:30 in the morning. I was born in an old hospital in Welch, West Virginia, where my mother spent a terrifying night in labor with her twin daughters. By the morning it was determined that the single baby the doctors insisted she was having was in fact a set of twins and both were breech. So off they trundled my mother, who had spent the night wandering the halls as directed at one point finding herself in a room with a covered but dead body, to surgery to remove the stubborn and unmovable twins from her body.

Hospitals in those days were not the shiny, clean, freezing cold places filled with smiling faces that we see today. No, back then they were the “let me shove this IV needle into your arm while you scream in agony because I’m doing such a bad job of it I’ve just broke the needle off in your arm and you’re just going to sit there and take it because I’m the nurse and you’re the patient so shut your face” kind of places. Yeah, the story of my birth is almost as traumatic for me as it must have been for my mother.
Stories of disappearing babies abounded and there were quite a few sets of twins born that year. Strangeness was met with fear when it came time for my mother to have us. They really did try to make her think she was imagining things and that there was only one of us in there. This led to the idea that perhaps they wanted to steal one of those babies.

The fact that towns close to us had girls that looked exactly like my sister and I, so remarkably similar that one of my teachers remarked on it when she saw the one that looked like me, have allowed those stories to grow into speculation in my own mind, they’ve fed the story-teller in me until I wonder myself at the possibilities. My teacher went up to the girl and spoke to her, thinking she was me, a child she saw five days a week. I’ve never seen my doppelganger but I have seen the one that looks like my sister and yes, the resemblance is uncanny. But that’s another tale, a tale of speculation. Perhaps a more interesting tale but one I cannot support with facts so all I can do is relate what I know and wonder myself.

I was born in a declining coal town in McDowell County, West Virginia. Now known for its high overdose death rates, poverty, and a penchant for being at the top of negative statistical charts while being at the bottom of positive ones, the county at one point prospered and was a jewel in the crown of King Coal. Now we are reduced to news articles about the negative parts of American life, the focus of studies and think tanks. Who has the highest poverty rates in the state of West Virginia? We’ll be at the bottom of that chart. The county with the most obese and unhealthy people in the state? We’ll be at the very top of that one, never you mind, please and thank you.

Even Australia sent a news crew over, to our everlasting shame, to highlight the problems faced by those left behind when profits dry up and an entire industry, one that built entire cities for the sole purpose of that industry, abandons those that depended on them for everything. Although, it must be said, that piece was something we now deem poverty-porn more than an altruistic attempt at exposing the poverty McDowell County now faces.

Steady on, Smuggly, you’re digressing. Right, so I was born in a proud county, the Free State of McDowell County, West Virginia. The town my family brought me home to was Berwind, a coal town but something akin to pioneer towns, or western towns in some re-tellings while others relate a modern town with theaters, social clubs, and promises that were made to be broken. My maternal grandfather instilled in me a love of history and story-telling by relating to me the stories of the people from the past, some still living, some long gone. I heard tales about mean old Uncle Mose Christian and Dan Christian, about revenuers, moonshiners, and counterfeiters. Then there were the tales about tough women that could outwork a man that had no fear of haunts and spooky things in the night that would as soon take a broom to a man peeking in her window as to go to her man and complain about it. I also heard tales of poverty, the Great Depression, and how love of God and your fellow man was the most important, most humble things on Earth to fill your soul with.

From the other side I heard about getting out of poverty no matter how you did it, about the importance of appearances, about how your standing in public was the most important thing and the best way to prove your superiority was by making sure everyone saw it in church. I was a Stanley and I would maintain my decorum, I would be the proper young lady expected of me, and I would keep my quiet place with my mouth shut as the men talked. Or I could go into another room and listen to the ladies talk quietly amongst themselves. But I always knew, I always understood, that my place as a child, as a female child, was nowhere near as high as a male child and all those wonderful things my other grandfather taught me were useless because I was just a girl anyway.

Not everyone on that side was like that, some had left the county long before me and would come back to confuse an already confused child with tales of other places. Throughout my years with my parents the one constant was that we were together but you never knew where you might be living next. We lived in several places in Florida, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Virginia. We even spent our first year as a family in upstate New York. For such a sheltered child who stared in wonder at those that lived in far-away places like Maryland with two aunts spending time in England and Germany, hearing these tales should have brought understanding of how lucky I’d also been to live so many places. Instead they somehow reinforced the idea in me that I was a country girl, one that had never stepped foot out of the holler, and to get by I’d better listen to that one old man telling me I was a worthless female and I wouldn’t amount to much.

A bit confusing isn’t it? Up until I was around 12 years old I hadn’t spent more than a year of my life in West Virginia. I knew I’d been born there, that that is where my family was from, and my parents loved it so deeply that they instilled in me the idea that West Virginia was home, even when it wasn’t. We were just migrants, in search of happiness, work, and a home, biding our time until the economy improved in West Virginia. I spent most of my formative years in Florida, I loved and adored Florida, but even to a young girl that left by the time she was nine years old, Florida was not home. The three years we spent in North Carolina after that wasn’t home either. West Virginia was. And when we moved back there, eventually, I felt like we’d finally come home. I set my feet in the coal dirt, twisting them to get deep into the dirt good, and the roots I felt were the roots that had always tied me to the place. Somehow, the knowledge that I wasn’t simply the simpleton country girl one cousin accused me of being a few years ago, slipped into my memory and was forgotten as I inhaled air heavy with the smell of coal smoke and the dust of coal dirt that permeated everything. I was home and I’d never lived anywhere else.

My parents loved their children dearly but the roots of West Virginia, the idea of family and being a member of family, ran more deeply in them than it did even in me. They’d seen the good life the county used to have, times of prosperity but they’d also seen the bust. Daddy and Momma both went to college but dropped out. Daddy used the mining card he’d earned to work in coal mines but too many mining disasters too near to home convinced him and Momma that the coal mining life was not for them. We spent a lot of time wandering because of that, searching for the place that felt just right to them. I went to a lot of different schools, made and lost friends, and learned that sometimes you just have to adapt and that the one thing that will not change is who your family is.

Every year, no matter where we were, we’d trek home to go the Stanley family reunion. We’d wander back for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and Easter when we could. We didn’t really have vacations; we just went home for the holidays staying with my dad’s parents or mom’s until they moved to North Carolina. Adapting was important when you had to spend the few days before Christmas having “Christmas” with one set of family, then traveling to another state to have “Christmas” with the other set. Holidays ended up being stressful for many reasons, for me, for all of us I suppose, but for me one of the biggest triggers was how schizophrenic it all was.

It was almost like being the child of divorced parents. His and hers, my family, your family, all combined to provide such vastly different experiences with one being quiet and almost somber while the other was loud, raucous, and completely overwhelming. Each side expected something different from us children. Most of the time I just wanted to hide from the noise, hide from the bragging, sniping people that somehow thought I wouldn’t hear the comments about my mother, or that I wouldn’t notice how they treated her. I also wanted to hide from those amongst us that preyed on the women and children. Holidays became a trial for me, over time. Eventually we would only visit my mother’s side of the family and holidays finally became a time of almost peace but I was almost old enough to leave home before that happened.

Yes, little Smuggly and her siblings had a very strange upbringing. As my parents tried to cope with their own ideas and own stresses we children toddled along behind, hoping only to please them and have a laugh. It would be four years before my little brother came along and in that time each side of the family delighted in having little blond twins to play with. They didn’t care if we looked nothing alike with my hair being almost brown as I grew, we were twins and that meant the exact same presents, an expectation of dressing alike, and criticisms of our differences. Which one is the smart one, which one is the pretty one, which one’s the most trouble were all things we heard as we grew up. Because for all the demands that we be alike, twin-like, we were also expected to show our differences and those differences meant criticism. Apparently our outward appearances determined for many which of us was good and which was bad. I was small, tiny, and pretty they said, my sister was tall, gangly, and pretty but obviously the instigator because she was bigger.

Over time this morphed into I looked the most like my mother, therefore I had to be the instigator, the one that caused problems and my sister must be the sweet, even-tempered, biddable one because she looked so much like my dad. At least, for my Dad’s side of the family. My mom’s eventually figured out we were sisters but not identical twins. They treated us the same as the other children that eventually came along in the family, and we were all equals. Are you seeing the pattern, the problems that defined my earliest life? My Dad’s family, though not wealthy growing up, had a high standing in the community, they were social and expected deference because of their name. They were preachers, children, wives, relatives of preachers, and that meant they were special. Not only to them but it was supposed to mean a lot to the public. And it did, to an extent. Until the cracks started to appear, until times changed, and mentalities changed with it. I’d even say that the predators in our midst caused a lot of damage but apparently my big mouth and my willingness to open it, just like my mother, would be the downfall of us all, would cause more problems.

Because beneath all those smiles, all those brittle ceramic smiles, lived secrets. Secrets about molestation, unwanted sexual advances, and even darker secrets than those lived in the cracks of those simpering smiles. There was physical and sexual abuse, mental and emotional abuse, and we all hid it so that nobody would know of our shame. We were the perfect family, with all of our illusions of being the perfect family, as long as we all just kept our mouths shut and quietly tried to control the problems.

That is, until that other showed up, that child that came with such beauty, as they all described me, from that carbon copy mold to turn into the ugliest member of the family. That small perfect child was too much like her Mommy. The woman that spoke her mind, that didn’t cower or cater to any man, the woman that made sure her children were fed and clothed and worked hard to do it but still somehow never attained status as “good enough” brought them the child that would tear it all down. And neither of us will be forgiven for it.

And I couldn’t care less. I’ve hid so many secrets, left so much of it in the past that I sometimes feel bloated with it all. I spoke about the abuse I endured from one side of the family and it destroyed the gossamer strings that tied all of us together as a family. My parents, siblings, and I made decisions that made us a problem. Apparently that side of the family held their own meetings and decided that shunning all of us was the best solution, the one that would stop the problems and allow them all to go back to their ever so special lives. As a teenager I spoke, expecting that finally it would all end, that I would be protected, sheltered, and all of those other things you’re told during those “special talks” we were given about speaking out about abuse at school and other places but what I got was turned backs, a lack of support, and silence.

I don’t know exactly what happened, who decided what, or even why really but I do know that my claim cannot be denied. The proof is out there and the things that were done to me can be confirmed. I’m not going to go into that here but I thought it important that the reader know; the one thing that could have destroyed me, that could have turned me into a statistic made me stronger. I took my rejection; I took my shunning and learned to stand on my own. It took me a while, I’m still learning, but I realized quickly enough who mattered, who cared, and what was really important in life.

That story isn’t all of mine to tell, I can even make my own judgements and be wrong for them, but I do know that a 16 year old girl finally spoke and rather than being a hero she was ostracized and removed from view. All I can take from that is that appearances are the most important thing in their world. Hiding your own guilt, your own inability to speak up and stop the abuse of children in the future is more important than the life of a young girl. Allowing monsters to remain amongst you is more important than your own sanity if it means people know your shame.

I will probably get a lot of criticism from my family for airing as much as I have. I’ll yet again bring shame to them all. I expect a backlash for that. It’s what they do. But I know what happened, I know what was done, and I know that until I came along nothing was done to stop it. If they’d tried nothing would have happened to me and they have to live with themselves knowing that. They can blame me for the broken state of our family now, they can blame me for anything they want to but I was a 16 year old girl watching her grandmother screaming in the yard. All I wanted was for the nightmare to stop and what I got was much worse than anything I could have imagined. To this day people get a funny look on their faces when my name is mentioned, conversations stop, and people take sides. I was 16 years old. I did what I was told I should do. I stopped hiding the truth and learned that sometimes the truth hurts far more than a lie. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Please know, I have debated with myself about posting this. I finally decided to because I thought there might be others out there, that need a voice, that need to know they aren't alone. This is a very hard story to tell for me, it's not one that I write blithely. It's actually been sitting on my harddrive for two years now. So please, if you feel the urge to comment, make it something that will encourage others, not something that will tear anyone down. Thank you and thank you if you made it this far. I'm going to hit post now, I swear...

How This Mountain Girl From West Virginia Ended Up In Portugal. Buckle Up! (Part One)

A Bit of Preface#

So What's The Story, Already?