Anomaly: Chapter 1

A Memoir: "This is the story I’ve always known I must tell. Long before I was a writer, I dreamed of writing my memoir because I knew this story had to be told."

This is by far the scariest thing I’ve ever publicly written or posted. It’s the beginning of my most vulnerable writing yet—my attempted memoir. My first attempt to write it was in 2006, and since then, I’ve written hundreds of pages, scrapped them all, shoved it aside, and started from scratch at least a dozen times. I’ve always struggled to get the “voice” right—something I still feel I haven’t fully achieved. As a self-help author, writing narrative is terrifying. It’s not what I do, and it’s far outside my comfort zone.

But last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I read a note on Substack that encouraged memoir writers to release their work one chapter at a time as standalone posts (something I’m already doing with my book Think It). They suggested focusing on each post as an independent story rather than obsessing over the whole. As a blogger, that approach made a lot of sense to me.

So, as scary as this is, here is the preface and first chapter of my memoir Anomaly.

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Book Preface

This is the story I’ve always known I must tell. Long before I was a writer, I dreamed of writing my memoir because I knew this story had to be told. But with this knowing came immense pressure—pressure I put on myself to get its telling right. It also came with a decent dose of fear: now the world would know my story, a story I’d kept hidden my entire life.

It’s not that I’ve spent my life denying my past or trying to cover it up. It’s more that I didn’t know how to talk about it. Anything I’d ever say about my childhood or how I grew up was simply unrelatable to anyone I’d ever met, and I realized at about fifteen years old that it was just easier not to talk about it. It made other people more comfortable if they thought I was normal, and so, I learned how to be normal. Then, at a certain point, I really couldn’t reference my upbringing without it seeming attention-grabbing, “one-upping,” or too shocking and in need of far more explanation than whatever that moment allowed.

So, I kept it to myself.

But every day of my adult life, this story has haunted me, screaming to be heard. So, to all the people throughout my life that I tried to gloss over stories of my past, avoided the topic altogether, or made a silly joke about it and then changed the subject—this is why.

How do you say one thing without telling the whole story?

My mother has lived an unparalleled life, and in her quest to find meaning, she’s hurt a lot of people. Writing about her has felt like a behemoth task, and one I’ve struggled with over the past fifteen-plus years, through multiple attempts to write this story. Her mental health struggles combined with her fanatical religious beliefs made for an often-torturous upbringing. But I’ve always believed it was important to write this with raw honesty and to be truthful about my experiences and memories, because I know I’m not the only child raised by a bipolar, mentally ill parent. It’s important to shed light on what that’s truly like, even when it’s ugly, because if more of us do, more parents who need help might seek it and protect their children from the abuse that untreated mental illness can cause.

It’s hard to describe Mom’s addiction to her religious beliefs because, my whole life, they have been so far removed from normal reality that I’ve never been able to talk about what it was like being raised by someone so irrationally obsessed. The closest comparison I can think of is being raised by a drug addict or severe alcoholic, where rational thought is no longer at play. That’s what religion and her beliefs did to Mom; they controlled her every thought and action.

My mother is an avid and vivid storyteller, which was something I truly detested growing up because she would tell the stories I share here (especially in Part 1) ad nauseam to anyone who’d listen. And so, I grew up hearing them recounted with great detail over potlucks, at Bible studies, or even to strangers at the laundromat. To her, each of these stories was a glamorous tale that proved the magic of her faith and the miracles she and God had jointly created. This is the ONLY lens through which Mom views the past. But it’s thanks to these stories and the many times my sister Kim, Jenny, Nonie, and other family members have recounted them with me over the years that so many details arise in the story of my early childhood.

This is my story, seen through my perspective, and is true to my memories and experiences. Many names in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of most individuals.

Here is the whole story.

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Chapter 1

A Crooked Road

I was born in the back of a Volkswagen bus in the hospital parking lot. If it’s true that the way a person enters the world sets the trajectory for their life, then that explains a lot. My chaotic arrival may have been my first life lesson: prepare for turbulence.

My parents had been driving for hours over the mountain range from Chico, California, to a little Adventist hospital in Napa Valley. My father, frantic behind the wheel with his panic rising, began begged my mother to wait—to hold those contractions just a little longer until they could make it to the hospital. Mom laboring on a mattress in the back while Dad’s eyes remained more focused on the rearview mirror than the road ahead. It was an exceptionally hot June afternoon, the kind where you can taste the dry heat and dust whipping through the open windows. The steep grades and winding two-lane road caused the van’s engine to overheat, whining and pitching steam from its hood. Every time Dad pulled over to refill the engine’s water, he’d yell back to Mom, pleading with her to breathe and keep that baby put until someone qualified could deliver it.

For her part, Mom wasn’t that worried. This was hardly her first rodeo. At twenty-seven, she was familiar enough with this routine and promised my father that the baby would likely just fall out, and that his job was to simply catch me. The thought of this terrified my father and only made him drive more erratically with each progressing contraction. But Mom was confident that God would fix any issues they’d encounter that her vast birthing experience hadn’t foreseen. All would be well. I was about to be her fourth child (third birth), which was great, my 20-year-old father kept reminding her, but this was his first delivery room experience, and he wasn’t about to have it be on the side of a country road with him pretending to be the attending physician.

Mom figured that nothing could be worse than the birth of my twin sisters five years earlier—if she survived that birthing nightmare, she could do this, no problem. When Kim and Shelly were born, her doctor had shown up to the delivery room smelling of whisky and more than a little pissed to be called in on his night off. He’d grabbed the forceps and pulled the babies' heads right out of her without drugs. She decided right then that she’d do this on her own from then on. But Dad had pleaded her to let him take her to the hospital, having never remembered so much as holding a baby in his entire life—how could she expect him to deliver his firstborn child? This took immense convincing, but eventually, Mom relented with the stipulation that it had to be an Adventist hospital or nothing. And so, he drove, faster around each bend in the road than he intended, determined not to be the one responsible for bringing me into the world.

Mom’s first experience with childbirth came when she was just fifteen, giving birth to my oldest brother, Eric. Her pregnancy, once impossible to conceal, became a scandal my grandmother was determined to bury. Ashamed and furious, she pulled Mom out of high school and sent her to live with her grandmother—to save face until the baby was born.

Mom had no say in the matter, much like she had no say when she was forbidden from marrying the baby’s father. Her parents made their position brutally clear: they would disown her if she even considered it. So, naturally, Mom went and married him anyway.

But Mom wasn’t the only one capable of wielding power. Because both she and her new husband were underage, my grandmother stepped in and ensured that she remained in control by having the baby whisked away for adoption the moment he was born, and the marriage immediately annulled. For this, and countless other reasons, Mom and Grandmother hate each other.

Andy came next—baby number two, born to Mom’s second husband, Bob. For his arrival, Mom went to the hospital alone; Bob was either off getting drunk or long-haul truck driving—it’s hard to say which. Still, the experience was surprisingly uneventful: doctors, nurses, drugs, and a baby to take home afterward. By far, it was her least traumatic birth, though not one she celebrated.

This is why, by the time I was forcing my way out of her uterus, Mom was fairly unbothered.

Dad screeched to a halt at the ER entrance, jumping out of the driver’s seat in such a blind panic that he forgot to put the van in park. It began rolling slowly toward the exit as he sprinted to the back, flinging open the rear doors and shouting for help. Nurses and orderlies soon swarmed my parents, but before anyone could take control, my shellshocked father instinctively reached out his arms between my mother’s open legs. And into them I slid.

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About the Author: Sarah Centrella is a multi #1 best-selling author, master life coach, executive coach, speaker and the Founder of VIVIAMO.

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