The World According to Jolene

I’m Jolene, Jolene Butler. I’m telling this story my way just in case someone tries to tell it for me and butchers it to pieces! Plus, just because I am white, blue- eyed and blonde does not mean that I can’t be marginalized, victimized or be the recipient of racist or bigoted attacks, even if they are coming from family members. I am not sure at all why I was born, but somehow, I was gifted to a mom who barely possessed a high school education, and an alcoholic, “strung- out dad” who did not want responsibility of any type. I was born by the side of a midwestern road in Kansas in a small white wooden house surrounded by corn fields and silos. It was my maternal grandma’s house. Why in the world did they decide to copulate, have me and another child? When I was barely six years old, my father finally left my mom, my brother and me. I would later find out that he left us for a 17-year-old girl when he was 34 years old. Asshole! I hated him and wanted him dead- I never wanted to see him again! As a young girl, I was always inquisitive, and it was realized that I had “above average” intelligence because of an IQ test that I had taken in middle school. Evidently, I wasn’t “like the others”, but I really didn’t know what that meant at the time. Growing up in the Midwest, there wasn’t much at all to do, leaving lots of time for being pensive, so to speak, by having the time to think or daydream about almost anything and everything. You had a lot of time to think about your life and those who were in it. I knew that I wanted a life that did not resemble my parents’ life. I wanted nice things and I wanted to be able to afford those things, the legal way. I wanted to forget the word, “layaway”! I favor metropolitan living in a stylish condo located in some swanky uptown district and not a trailer in the center of a corn field! I wanted to be a person who could consciously decide to have selective amnesia after the age of 18, and I wanted to be far away from Kansas when I developed it!