Uncle Jack
Because of my Uncle Jack I am a better person.
My sister, brother and I grew up in a fractured environment. Our parents had us very young. We moved a lot. But we had very stable things in our lives. Our grandparents and our school. We moved between living with our Mom and Dad. When we lived with our Dad after my Mom moved to California we lived in our Gram’s house.
Gram wasn’t always feeling well by then and my Dad worked all the time or was out. Jackie was our grown up. I didn’t realize it at the time but he’s only 9 years older than me.
Jackie by default had to take care of us. Gram and my Dad relied on him to pick up the slack when we were teen-agers. I don’t know for sure but I would like to think they didn’t do that to him on purpose, it was just the way it was.
So there we all were 4 very different kids each with our own problems. None of us were easy to deal with on a day to day basis. I would like to say that I was a wonderfully perfect person who never did anything wrong but that would be the understatement of the century.
I can’t speak for anyone else but for me if it weren’t for Jackie I wouldn’t have the first clue how to be an adult, let alone a good parent.
There are no words I can use to express to him how important he is to me. I very rarely see him and talk to him even less. We both live busy lives. But everytime I talk to Cory or Megan about something important in their lives or they ask my advice about something, I ask myself what would Jackie want me to say, or even better I remember something he told me.
The first time I heard someone say it takes a village to raise a child I thought of him. Because that’s how I was raised and he was one heck of a big part of that. Thank you Uncle Jack.
