This photograph was taken in early 1969.
It is the only picture that exists of me under one year old.

It came from a family portrait session. I was an infant, not yet walking, still new to the world. According to my mother, money was so tight during my first year of life that there were no other photographs taken of me. The next image I have seen of myself, I am already well over a year old. After that, there are only a handful of photos scattered across my childhood.

This picture is not important because it is rare.
It is important because it is all that remains of my beginning.

The Context I Was Born Into

My mother married my father to escape her own home—one marked by severe abuse, religious extremism, and generational trauma. Her father sexually abused her and her siblings: ten children in total—seven girls and three boys. That history was never resolved before she became a wife and then a mother.

She has told me that she did not love my father, did not want to marry him, and did not want to be pursued by him—but that he was persistent, aggressive, and unrelenting. She described “courtship” as being taken out to eat once a week, something she said she could not afford to do on her own with her meager income. Food, not affection, was the incentive.

She has said she was a virgin when she began dating him, and that she became pregnant with my brother the first time she had sex, before they were married. Their marriage certificate is dated April 16, 1966. My brother was born on November 7, 1966.

She said she stayed home with him for his first year, but returned to work because money was tight.

Six weeks after starting a full-time job with the city, she discovered she was pregnant again—with me.

She has told me, plainly, that this was the last thing she wanted.

What I Was Carried Into

Abortion was not legal at the time. She has said that she starved herself during the pregnancy because she did not want to get “fat” again. She has said that she struck her own stomach in attempts to end the pregnancy.

I survived that.

She returned to full-time work when I was 21 days old.

When she came home from work and picked me up from the babysitter, she would place me in my bassinet, roll it into the bathroom, close the door, and go about the business of the household—cleaning, cooking for my father and brother, managing the evening.

I cried alone in a dark bathroom behind a closed door.

That is not metaphor.
That is not interpretation.
That is how my life began.

What This Photograph Holds

This image shows a baby who does not yet know what she has been born into. A baby who has not yet learned that her needs are inconvenient, that her presence is burdensome, that comfort is conditional.

There is no blame in this photograph.
There is only truth.

It explains more than decades of argument ever could.

This is not the story of a “difficult child.”
It is the story of a child who learned, from the beginning, that existence itself was a problem to be managed.

Why This Story Matters

I am not sharing this to indict, persuade, or provoke sympathy.

I am sharing it because truth has a beginning, and this is mine.

This photograph is not evidence of neglect on its own.
It is evidence of context.
And context matters.

Everything that came later—my sensitivity, my vigilance, my intensity, my hunger for connection, my refusal to disappear—did not arise from nowhere.

They arose from here.

A Closing Truth

I survived my beginning.

That does not mean it did not shape me.
It means I am still here to tell it—clearly, accurately, and without apology.

This is the first chapter of My Story.