I’m driving my VW, I don’t have a job, and my son Christian is four. I had a welfare worker. I had to go once a month and say how I was looking for a job. I had my regular meeting with the counselor. She said: “What are you interested in?”

I said that I loved animals. I would like to have been a veterinarian, but it was never a possibility because of so much school.

She said that she had a friend who was a veterinarian in Merced. She said “Let me call him. You could work in the kennels; you could be his assistant.”

I said: “That sounds great.”

Sure enough, she got me a job at Dr. Northway’s Veterinary Hospital in Merced.

I moved out of my parents’ house with Christian. We moved into a tiny house on a farm on an almond ranch in Winton, California. We lived there: Christian, me, and Tenaya, our Afghan hound. I had long straight hair so I kind of looked like my dog.


My Father and I: Oil and Water

I did some therapy with my father when my mother died. When she died, about 17 years ago it was totally unexpected. I needed some help. I went to a therapist, and he said there were some cracks in my life where I didn’t know what had happened. He asked if my father would mind coming. He did. My father told the therapist that I was uncontrollable. I didn’t want to sit in front of the TV. The therapist told my dad that you can have three babies, and they can all be totally different. Children have energy levels just like adults do.

I grew up thinking I was a bad child. I didn’t do what I was told to do. I told my dad I had been born to the wrong parents. If my parents liked to go to the beach in the morning and play tennis in the afternoon they would have thought I was a great child. I thought this was a great therapy session. I was relieved to find out that I wasn’t this horrible person. My dad walked out and said “That’s it! I don’t think we should see each other any more. That was horrible; that guy’s crazy. None of it is true.

The First Big Change in My Life: I Get Pregnant at 17

The other big change was when I had Christian at age 17. I had the same boyfriend for 4 or 5 years. Chuck and I first laid eyes on one another in eighths grade when we were at a ball game. He was a year older than me.

In those days your virginity was a big deal. I was never told the facts of life correctly. My mother was very English and very private. She didn’t want to talk about those things, so I tried to figure out what was going on. Do you know that from being raised Catholic that God knew when you got married, and that then you got pregnant? I truly did not know you could get pregnant by having intercourse with a man. It was never really clear to me the way it worked.

I used to go over to my friend’s house. Her dad was a doctor and we used to look at his medical books. We saw what it looks like, but it doesn’t tell you how the whole thing works. We looked at National Geographic, but nobody said what went where and how it all worked out.

I got pregnant when I was 17; it was the first time I had sex. At the time I didn’t realize it was a Godsend. And me not being a spiritual person, I never felt I had the choice. In those days you didn’t get an abortion; it wasn’t legal. You had to go to Mexico or throw yourself down the stairs or whatever.

I loved Chuck, and we really thought we were going to get married when we got out of high school, so we got married. Now I’m 17 and married, and living in Atwater. We moved to a converted garage in Merced. Chuck worked at a grocery store. He was never very faithful; he had a roving eye and roving hands. I caught him getting phone calls from this other girl. It turned out they were seeing each other. I was very upset and very pregnant, so I ended up moving back home with my parents. Chuck and I separated.

I was seven months pregnant. I hung out with my mother and helped her at her nursery school. She and my dad were with me at Mercy hospital when I had Christian. It was February 25, 1970.

One of my other girlfriends got pregnant at the same time. This is how stupid we were. She and I were close friends and she was a month earlier than me. We used to joke: “wouldn’t it be funny if we had our kids at the same time?”

And sure enough, I was lying in the hospital and I see her come in. We had our children on the same day, in the same hospital. She named her daughter Lachrisha.

Lee is Christian’s first name, because my dad’s first name is Libro, and his family used to call him Lee. My mother used to call him Joe. Christian came because I liked the designer Christian Dior, but also because Christian was conceived on the youth services couch next to the church. I just didn’t want to do it in the car. Not for my first time; I wanted a sofa.

That was my graduation gift to Chuck. He was a year older than me, and was graduating.

Chuck and I were only married and living together for a few months. We never got a divorce.

After Christian was born, I lived with my parents. In the meantime, it was a flower power time. I was trying to find myself. I was 17 years old and now I had a baby. So I needed to sow some oats. I went and lived on a commune in Merced for a couple of months. I didn’t take Christian because I didn’t know how safe it was going to be. When I look back, I didn’t know how I would be responsible for another human being.

I turned 18 in July the year Christian was born. Chuck was exempt from the draft. Chuck joined the Air Force because he didn’t want to go to Vietnam in the Army. My father pulled some strings and got him stationed in Sacramento.