Born Under a Black Cloud

I always say that I was born under a black cloud and that if it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all. I've always tried to be positive throughout my life nonetheless. My mother died an hour after I was born. Not exactly a stellar beginning for me, but obviously it could have been worse. But there isn't a day in my life that I haven't wondered about my mother. So every birthday, this past February was my 51st, is the anniversary that my mother died. It's hard to explain how difficult it is to experience that every year. When I was born, I was the youngest of 7 children. My mother was young, not even 30 yet, I think. I don't know for sure. No one ever spoke about my mother to me. I don't even know when her birthday was. I was told that she hemorraghed to death because the afterbirth was not expelled as it should have been. I've never seen her grave. I remember being very little and my stepbrothers saying to me that my mother died because I was so ugly she couldn't stand to live. I ended up being one of 12 children, as my father remarried and I have 3 stepbrothers and 2 half sisters. But I never call them that. We were all brothers and sisters. I never called my stepmother a stepmother, because she was the only mother I had. I won't go into detail now, but eventually I'll explain how our family put a great, big DIS in front of the word functional. The 60's & 70's and into the early 80's were a wild and crazy time.