I grew up in rural West Virginia. My mother found a boyfriend and he moved in with us and she had two more kids. I was thirteen and I was totally crushed on a girl at school. It was my job to babysit and to take care of them until my mother got home from work. Lots of times her boyfriend got home earlier and I had to deal with him too. He didn't help, and he liked to get me and hold me. One night he got me in a head lock and walked me around the house. He walked me outside with him and stood on the back porch and pissed into the grass. He asked me to suck him and I told him he was a jerk, he took me back inside and showed me what a jerk can do to a girl. My little brothers watched the whole thing.

When my mother got home he told her I was a little bitch and he had given it to me and that she had better put me on birth control because he had open season on me. He was sure I wasn't going to be talking about girls anymore. I had to learn to be his wife and when I was 17 I had a kid. He still slept with my mother, but I married him. He was 48 then.

One day my mother told me that I better accept that he was never going to leave her. He had married me to keep me there, but she was his real wife and if I couldn't live with that then I needed to make other plans. At 21 he divorced me, I left my son with my mother and joined the Navy. I just wanted to get as far away from West Virginia as I could.

In the Navy I found out that if you are cute, and you are obvious with the girls, your ass belongs to a dyke. She took me down in boot camp, she was 24 and she had worked as a security officer in her town and she knew how to wrestle. I never had a chance. During my four years in the Navy I was her steady girlfriend. When we got out we moved to California and she joined the sheriffs department in L.A. My son came to live with us. Four years with her had changed me and I was completely given to being with her. We would joke that no matter how close we got, I wasn't going to get pregnant.

Before joining the Navy she had gotten an associates degree in criminal justice and she trained to work parole. The stories she brought home made your skin crawl and give thanks that you weren't there. I knew a lot of people in West Virginia that probably were in jail there or doing time, for the same reason as those women in the county jail. It is a bad scene. She was always interested in any young lesbian girls who were in trouble and she tried to make their time easier. You look after your own. When they got out she asked me to help look after them.

I tried, I really did, I tried to work with these girls, but they were already lost. Everything you can imagine, a lot of prostitution, dependency on drugs and alcohol, bad relationships, and total poverty. They were lost. And I had this home with my son and my girlfriend and somehow we were normal. We were an out and out lesbian couple and no one cared, and no one ever bothered my son about it. But these girls, they just had all kind of bad stories. My life at home with my mother's boyfriend was bad, but not this bad.

It took me a long time, the four years in the Navy, to fully accept that I was and had always been a lesbian. I just needed the right 'woman' to put me in my place and make a good girl out of me. The Navy changed me too.

I am currently a full time homemaker. I am taking off work for a year and working on my associates. I know that for a chance moment in time, I could have been one of those lesbian girls in and out of jail, rehab, working the streets.