Mirror Image Edutainment, Alan John Mayer
For twenty nine years, I was a public school and college instructor named Alan Johann Goetschkes. Having learned my mother wanted to name me Goetschkes at birth (and was prevented from doing so by my father whom I was told was an old fogey) I changed my name at fifteen, and did so legally at eighteen, with my father at my side, thinking it would make my mother love me. Had my father only asked me “Alan, why are you doing this?”
I was born on September 23rd of the Western calendar, the first day of fall, as an American citizen on a French Air Force Base, Noisseur, in Casablanca, Morocco.
I am an African American, pink in complexion.
My maternal grandfather was an industrialist. He owned sheep farms in England, and a carpet factory in Berlin. My paternal grandparents were sugar beat farmers in Sugar City, Colorado, and owned a grocery store. My father was a 19th Century decorated United States WWI Veteran who never carried a gun. Rather, he translated at the signing of The Treaty of Versailles. In his younger years, my father was also a hypnotist, a printer, an artist, and during my lifetime, a United States Department of Defense Education Adviser who dragged me across four continents before age eleven, along with my abusive Nazi mother, and sister.
All I can do is forgive her.
I never knew what my father did at work, until I was well into my forties, and after he was dead. That’s how close he came to me. He spoke all about mother, but seldom about himself and his long prosperous life a the quintessential 20th Century American man.
I had too many questions for my mother. Because I got in the way, I spent part of my youth in foster homes on both sides of the Atlantic. Beginning my junior year of high school, mother and daughter tossed me into the armpit of post-war Europe, Germany’s Ruhr Valley. I escaped to a favorite aunt, who, on my paperboy and lawn care savings, sent me to visit eight classmates of hers who had emigrated to eight European capitals.
Since a very young age, I became sensitively aware, my mother did not want me around. I often heard “Geh weg, hau ab, verschwinde” — “Go away, disappear”. At fifteen, torn from my friends once again, this time Americans in America, I was not going to let her prevent me from enjoying my life away from her.
I paid dearly for that year of independence away from Mother, and my father. Anyone can follow my journey on this blog. If you read anything of interest, please click ‘Like’ and share it. Allah is watching, and She is pleased.
There is one life.
This life is God.
This life is perfect.
This life is my life now.
I accept.
I give thanks.
I release.
And so it is.
Amen.
AmerIcanValuesRestored 