There is some question whether people are born with a certain moral compass or whether they develop one growing up. I can answer that question for myself. What my parents did so offended me in later years I realized that I was simply “born” different than they were, and for a time questioned whether or not I was adopted especially since I ultimately grew to be six feet four inches tall and 220 pounds even though both my parents were of slight build and much shorter. My dad was five ten, 160 pounds, and my mother five feet five, 115. When I was fourteen I did find my birth certificate when I rifled through my mom’s papers when she was out, and it looked legit. Also my facial features and coloring were similar to both my parents so I concluded that I was their biological child, just a mutation when it came to both size and moral compass.
According to one supposedly scientific study – at least the one most recognized by psychologists – the divorce rate among swingers is over 90%. My parents were no exception; they apparently made it work until I was twelve when I heard the yelling in their bedroom in the middle of the night that my father wanted out of that lifestyle and my mother wouldn’t agree. Shortly after that, when I was twelve and Jen seventeen, they divorced. I would have preferred to live with my father in view of his changed position, but I had no say in it. I stayed away from the house as much as possible, playing sports, learning martial arts, or studying at a library. That turned out well for me because I became an excellent baseball player, a brown belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and made the high honor roll in High School.
In the state that I lived in, when a child turned fourteen years old he/she could ask the court to have the custodial parent changed. Shortly after my fourteenth birthday when I caught my mother with the third different guy coming out of her bedroom when I came home from school I called her a slut and a whore. Her lover tried to be a big man and intervene. By that time I already weighed 180 pounds – about the same that he did – but he didn’t have my anger or knowledge of jiu-jitsu. After he pushed me he ended up needing my mother’s help to get to his car. When she returned she reamed me out but I didn’t back down at all. The mother of one of my friends was a well-known attorney and I went to see her that same evening. By the end of the next week I was living with my father and had little contact with my mother after that.
My father and I got along OK. When I was sixteen we had a heart-to-heart talk where I told him how disgusted I had been by his morals. We had an uneasy truce after that until I graduated High School and left town three days after that.
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So, now about the Jenkins sisters.
I met Brenda Jenkins when we were both eighteen. By that time she was an avid drinker and partier. Brenda’s father Jack and stepmother Michele had apparently either given up trying to discipline her, or never even tried. Michele was only six years older than Brenda was. Brenda’s mother had died when she was eight and her father remarried when she was fourteen (yeah, he married Michele when she was only twenty years old); Michele had a meek personality and was more like a friend to Brenda and her younger sister Brie than a parent; Jack just didn’t seem to care.