In El Paso, Texas, in the summer of 1966, a girl named Mary gave birth to her second son.

Her first son had been born in 1964, and given up for adoption. She had absolutely refused to have the abortion her grandmother wanted her to have, and her family was in no condition to take care of the new child. That first son's father had been the owner of a night club for teenagers there in El Paso, and was also an up-and-coming rock star. Today he is best known for the big national hit "I Fought The Law (& The Law Won)," although he also had several regional hits in places like Texas and California, and everyone expected him to make it very big very soon. The scandal of having a bastard child would have ruined him, though, especially because he was in his 20s and the girl was so young. She was madly in love with him and wanted to marry him, but was too young legally to do so. So all concerned among the families decided the child must be given up for adoption--although they didn't bother much with asking the young mother what she wanted to do.

Eventually, the rock star died an untimely and mysterious death in California, under obscure circumstances no one quite understands. It was officially ruled a suicide, although the family to this day still doesn't believe it. In any case, you can still find excellent collections of this man's music, which feature shockingly good recording quality, almost digital quality, even though almost all his hits were recorded in his home studio in El Paso in the mid-60s. Bobby Fuller was quite gifted both musically and as a recording engineer. Although his taste for young girls seems rather deplorable in retrospect, it seems he was rather shocked to learn just how young she was. Like many teenaged girls she looked and acted a good bit older than she was, and very much enjoyed the company of men. Especially musicians. Especially him.

Interestingly, in the 1980s, Mary managed to make contact with her long-lost first biological son. She also became deeply involved in a national movement to help birth parents and adoptees to find each other, and had significant influence in getting legislation passed to make it easier for both children and birth parents to find each other (if they wanted to). During those years, Mary was also deeply involved in and committed to the Pro-Life movement. But all that was many years away, and in those early days, young Mary did her best not to think too much about her first son, and almost never talked about him to anyone.

So, having been born herself in 1950, young Mary was only 16 years old at the time her second son was born. After becoming pregnant, she had married that boy's father, a fellow teenager named Richard. The name "Dean' being something of a family tradition for the Esmays (going back to an ancestor who married a woman named Laura Dean), they named the boy Dean. Four years later, his sister Kristine was born.

They weren't really very good days for the young couple, although they made a brave go of it at first. Neither one of them'd had what you could call a healthy upbringing as children, mental illness and alcoholism having plagued parts of both of their families. Mary's young husband's upbringing was particularly rough; his parents having been such severe alcoholics that their children often had to fend for themselves for days at a time and sometimes didn't eat. Young Richard's mother eventually killed herself when he was just a child. Many, many years later, he told his (adult) son that when that happened, he'd felt nothing.

Young Mary's family tried to be supportive of the young couple, but her parents had divorced, and her mother and grandmother left the country to work in the Civil Service in Okinawa. This left only Mary's father, her paternal grandmother, and her older brother (all of 20 years old himself) for support, and, being poor, none of them could do much more than offer their presence and guidance. Richard's father was friendly enough when he was sober, but never offered much in the way of moral or emotional support.

In the beginning, however, when their first son together was born, young Richard worked hard at his job with the phone company, and tried to be a good provider for Mary and their child. He was very proud to do it. Unfortunately, at the age of 17, the stresses of work and fatherhood were too much for the young man, and he had difficulty coping. He also had no emotional support structure to fall on except his young wife and his infant child. He began drinking heavily, badly out of control much of the time, and, while he was usually a very gentle, friendly, funny person, when he drank his inner demons would often come out. He occasionally became violent and abusive while drunk. Sometimes, to a frightening and dangerous degree. There was many a time when young Mary had to flee the house with her children because he'd been drinking and was on a tear again. Other times her young son hid in the tree in their back yard, or under his bed, while the fighting was going on.

The divorce was, in the end, an inevitability.

It was easy for Mary's young son to hate his father for all that sometimes. It was also easy for him to hate his mother for rushing into having a child at such an age and under such circumstances. She'd wanted that baby back, and forcing a young man into a shotgun wedding before either of them was ready just so she could have another one was hardly the most responsible choice. But now that her son is 37 years old, he sees the situation for what it was: troubled teenagers desperately trying to cope in a frightening and difficult and painful world, still nursing their own internal wounds. It was all a long, long time ago, and all those involved are very different people today.

Nevertheless, soon after the birth of Mary's daughter Kristine, the divorce came. It was the appropriate thing to do, but divorce was considered rather scandalous in those days, and it was something she was rather ashamed of. But Mary was still young, and quite pretty, and determined to make it in the world. At 21 years old, even with two kids in tow, it still didn't take her long to find another husband.

He was a recently-returned, decorated veteran (bronze star and two purple hearts, amongst others) of the Vietnam war named Gary. He was a Border Patrol agent at that time. He was at the start of a very long and successful career with the Immigration & Naturalization Service, first as Border Patrol, then as Special Agent, and eventually retiring as assistant director for investigations in the state of Texas.

He was a very good man in many ways, although sometimes emotionally cold, and like so many stepfathers who'd never had kids of his own, was less understanding with children than he at times should have been. He could be alternately affectionate and harsh, and occasionally just plain mean. It was hard to predict which side of him you might see in those days. On the other hand, it would be easy to make Mary out as a saint, and she was not one; at times she was rather manipulative, and she tended to try to make herself the center of attention. She was constantly caught up in her own personal dramas, and sometimes played out her own issues through her children.

Still, Gary and Mary were mostly happy together, in the beginning, and the kids were doing okay. A few years into the marriage, though, Mary gave birth to Gary's first son, Michael Harlan, who unfortunately had severe birth defects. He died within days. Both Mary and Gary took that very hard, and it seems that their marriage began to crumble around that time. They did have another son together before the end, who they named Gary, after his father. Recently, young Gary followed in his father's footsteps, first joining the Border Patrol, and now recently having been promoted to special agent within the newly-formed Department of Homeland Security.

Not long after Michael Harlan's death, however, it started to become apparent that Mary had some profound problems. Her own mother had suffered from mental problems, so much so that in the 1950s she'd been institutionalized for a while, and underwent shock therapy. Mary began exhibiting the same symptoms as her mother had, and began spiralling into the depths of that horrible disease, that hellhole known as profound mental depression. Having a second child with Gary did not help pull her through it.

There in the late 1970s, mental health problems still carried a fairly severe stigma. Whether diagnosed or undiagnosed, severe depression was looked down on with contempt and misunderstanding. Although today we understand that these things are medical problems that can usually be treated, in those days that was less widely understood and far less accepted.

Eventually, Mary and Gary divorced, and she wound up alone again, this time with three children: Dean, Kristine, and young Gary. Child support payments and occasional reliance on the welfare system kept them afloat, but Mary's ability to cope eventually collapsed. The children over the next few years were alternately separated and brought back together, in constantly varying arrangements that never worked out to anyone's real satisfaction.

By the time her son Dean hit 15, he was an angry, rebellious, resentful, and cynical young man who did not particularly like anyone in his own family. He left home slightly before his 16th birthday, and never came back. He would go several years at a time having no contact with Mary, his father, his siblings, or any of his other relatives, as he generally wanted little or nothing to do with any of them.

It was not until he was in his late 20s that Mary's son Dean started learning how to forgive, how to place the lives and actions of those young people and the demons that sometimes drove them into some kind of perspective. By the time he reached the age of 30, he'd all but lost the ball of anger that had for so many years seemed permanently lodged in his chest.

Indeed, it was in trying to get his upbringing into perspective, to understand who those young people he called his parents were, that he finally realized that he cared about them after all.

But now let me tell you a few more things about Mary. She gave her son Dean certain gifts when he was a child that he has carried with him throughout his entire lifetime since, and I'd like to tell you about a few of those.

Her greatest gift to him was, of course, life itself.

Her second greatest gift was that she instilled a love of the written word into him. His earliest and happiest memories as a child involve sitting in his mother's lap while she read to him, encouraging him to learn the letters and the words. It was their favorite activity together, and by the time he reached school age he was already reading and writing well in advance of his peers.

She gave him her at-times goofball, at times subtle wit.

She gave him a sense of introspection and, although he's sometimes overused that particular gift, he knows it is a blessing in the end.

She gave him the gift of empathy, the ability to really care about other people's feelings, and to realize that hurting someone's feelings isn't particularly admirable.

She helped him to learn to forgive others for their sins--and to forgive himself for his own.

She helped him to understand just how desperately important fathers are in their children's lives, and how having children is a deep and abiding responsibility--yet that parents are human, and can never be perfect.

But most of all, she gave him the gifts of life and love.

Now I'd like to tell you a few more brief things about Mary, and then I'll be done.

She reads this weblog every day.

She is a big fan of her son's writing.

She turns 54 today.

Happy birthday, Mom. I love you.