Edit: thanks for the gold kinda stranger I didn’t expect this post to blow up! My life started growing up in a small farm in northern Kansas. My father was a farmer and my mother was a cashier in our local town down the dirt road. We didn’t have much and income was very little, my best toy I got growing up was a pig bladder blown up like a balloon that I could play around with between me and my two brothers. At the age of 11 things started getting tougher in my house life due to my fathers drinking problem as it was not a good harvest that year. Like his father before him once he was done working he would come home and drink but unlike his father he wouldn’t beat us unless we messed up, his father left him and his mother to fend for themselves after world war 2 though so he had it tougher than me growing up. One time my father did drink too much and he hit my little brother Jamey. Jamey didn’t know what to do and ran away during the night during a storm. The entire family was out looking for him but we never saw Jamey again. This made my father drink more and lead him to take his life when I was at the age of 16. My older brother and me had to completely take over the farm with the help of our mom quitting her job as a cashier, life got very hard from here on out. We got a break when I was 18 with a good harvest we were able to save up some money. I was able to move out at the age of 21 and into a larger city in Tennessee. It was hard leaving the family as my ma was getting older but my older brother completely took over the farm and even expanded it into a more profitable work. I began working in what I was good at, repairing mechanics. I was a hard worker and moved up in my chain of work easily within my town. I dated aroun’ a bit but never settled down with anyone I would write home about for my first few years. When I was 26 I got a call from my ma, my brother was working with some machinery on the farm and got his hand caught in it and heavily damaged. I had to come home and help with the farm, at the time I had attained a high position as a senior mechanic within an auto shop and sometimes worked on the side with repairing electronics. I went home and had to help with the farm for a year, ma wasn’t doing good at all. She passed the next year due to kidney disease. My brother eventually recovered and I returned to Tennessee, I attempted to return to my position but due to the time I was out I had been long replaced. I had to begin to work from the bottom again when I had a client come in, she was the most beautiful woman I ever seen in Tennessee with gorgeous brown hair. Nice to say that we hit it off pretty well, within a few weeks we were dating. I can say that she was one of the best things to have happened to me in my life. At the age of 30 I married her and my first child was on the way then. I had returned to my previous position and bought a nice house near the mountains of Tennessee. At the age of 34 my second child was born. My two kids are now both in high school, one a freshman, another a Senior. I continued my career into more electronics working on computers and fixing them. In 2013 while googling how to fix a small problem with a motherboard I found a strange site named reddit.com, this website had all the answers I needed and a community always ready to help. I’ve been on the site ever since. As you can see recently, I commented on this thread and some kind stranger gave me gold. Thank you again kind stranger.