About Me — Jo Ann Harris

I thought I would try something new

I ran across an article recently introducing the 45 biggest publications to join. It directs you to submit to the ones you want. I decided that I would also go to Smedian to join ones I thought applied to me and what I write about. When I went to the website Smedian, I ran across a publication titled “About Me Stories” which I thought was an interesting publication to join.

I have been on Medium since 2018 writing along with everyone else but have never introduced myself. I do have a profile, but it is only 160 characters.

I am a smarter, better writer now but I thought I could try something else that may help me. I hope this publication is not shut down as you never know. That article was written in 2020. That photo was taken in 2017. A lot of things have changed since.

On “About Me Stories” publication they ask you for the same setup as you used on Medium so I decided to go ahead and do it since I’m half way there anyway.

About Me

I am an older writer and have only been doing this since 2018. I worked previously for fifty years being an office assistant/manager with some financial firms. I found Medium.com through another site I was writing on at the time. I decided not to write on that site anymore to just go directly to Medium.

I haven’t made bank on here yet, but I still try.

I was born in Indiana and my family moved to Georgia when I was three or so. There was too much snow in Indiana and my dad had to be able to work all year round for his huge family of ten which included himself.

I had five brothers and two sisters and I grew up in a Catholic family. We all went to church together, we ate together, we played together, and we were all there when my Dad died when he had a stroke at forty-four. He drank a lot and ate badly. He was unhappy and had just returned from Arizona where he worked on the Glen Canyon Dam for almost three years. When he returned he never felt welcomed or loved as my mother spread as much hate as she could about him to the kids. I remember that I always saw him sitting on a chair arm about to run out the door. I was ten and missed him for years after he died.

We all went to the same Catholic grammar school, but a few of the older brothers went to a public high school as they were quite a bit older than the younger four or five of us. I also had an older sister that went to a public high school. After my brothers graduated they went on to the armed services, but my sister got married and had kids. I lost touch with all of them after that as they went on with their lives.

I was the oldest of the set of four. There was still my older brother that lived with us but only for a few years more. We were about five or six years apart. He also graduated and went into the Air Force and met his wife. But most of this story is about me and my younger siblings.

As you can probably tell from this writing, we were not middle-class on the socioeconomic status chart. We were very poor and mom did not know where she was going to get money after dad died as he did not have any insurance. We lived mostly off government food and money. That did not go very far when you had so many kids. My mom was also close to fifty or so and did not work. She hadn’t since I was small. I remember her working as a nurse’s assistant at a local hospital when I was little. She had so many kids she couldn’t anymore. She also once told me that she felt she couldn’t do that kind of work anymore. That was for the young and energetic.

AND she couldn’t afford a babysitter until she got home.

Life went on as normal for a while until we had to move. I was thirteen. We moved to another part of Atlanta and went to a public school. My younger sister and two brothers went to a public grammar school and I went to a public high school. We had previously all gone to a parochial school with nuns and priests. Some were teachers.

I felt a lot of weight come off my shoulders. You did not have someone looking over your shoulder and watching you all the time as you did in a parochial school. I had some freedom and didn’t know I needed it to grow. I had a job after school and on the weekends at a local theater.

I liked my high school and I had fun there! I bet you don’t hear that much, huh? I loved to learn new things and should have gone to college. I could have gotten a scholarship if I hadn’t run into some folks that changed my life.

I got pregnant and married at seventeen and had my first child that year in March. I turned eighteen in May and had to get a job. We all lived with his family in a large house with many kids.

I found my job working at a bank and worked there for thirteen years. We were divorced when my daughter was four and she was left to be raised by her Dad and family. I was on my own to be single. It was 1972 and I was trying to find out where I fit in. It was difficult and lonely until I found the right guy. We stayed together for over seven years.

During that time I saw my daughter every other weekend without fail. She was still in my life until she graduated high school and moved on with her boyfriend of five years. They had a baby when she was twenty which was 1989. By that time I was with my third and final husband.

We stayed together for about eighteen years and went through many situations that would make your hair turn gray just reading about them. I had twins when I was forty-four, we had no money, and we were living in another country. To save their lives and mine I wrote to my husband’s wealthy aunt and she sent money for us to get back to the States. We used that money to pay taxes, fees, etc., and grease palms to get back to the States. We ended up in Florida where my daughter was living at the time. We stayed there for about a year then decided to move back to Atlanta.

We lived in a shelter and various hotels for four years after we moved back to Atlanta.

While living in the shelter I was able to get the boys in school and I was able to find a job. Our next step was finding a place to live. We did and were happy for a while. Their dad was suffering from a mental breakdown so it was all up to me.

So in 2006, he took an overdose of morphine and took his life. He was 54 and my boys were eleven. We grieved and cried, moved on and continued our lives, and were better off for all we did and had.

The boys had their teenage years and troubles and I was fortunate to find a job and a boss that was lenient when I had to be with them. I was there for ten years. I left after that and moved to Florida with my family.

I moved to help my daughter and granddaughter and their relationship. And now I am here, doing this. I am retired and my boys live with me as I now cannot afford to live on my own. They can’t either as housing and expenses are so much more than they were in Atlanta. My daughter, granddaughter, and her two babies have moved back to the Atlanta area. We are doing our best without them now.

I paint, write on Medium and have a nice relationship with someone I met four years ago. Things are better now but financial problems have shown their nasty heads. We are doing our best to survive during the pandemic and all the fallout from it.

My boys are working part-time, but I’m not since I am now seventy and social security payments only go so far. The homeowner went up $300 more on the rent which has knocked us silly but we are dealing with it.

We all live in a 55+ community and since my boys get along with everyone, everyone they meet loves them. We have a lot of amenities here that I take advantage of so in the long run this may be the best for us.

Happy writing!