Greetings my lovelies,

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but some pictures are just a thousand lies told in a single flash. Today, I’m taking the frame off the ‘Fairytale’ of April 1970 and showing you what was actually happening in the shadows of that fur coat and that NJ snow. 

I have the “evidence” in a box—or I did.

April 11, 1970. North Jersey was caught in that biting, indecisive chill where winter refuses to leave, even as the calendar begs for spring. They always told me there was snow on the ground that day—a dirty, slushy white that clung to the edges of the pavement, mirroring the forced purity of the event.

In the photos, my mother is a vision, a masterclass in the aesthetic of the “Baby” heiress. Her hair is an architectural feat of perfection—every strand sprayed into a defiant, unmoving crown that could withstand a gale-force wind. She wears a pristine white dress, but it’s the fur coat that tells the real story. It’s heavy, luxurious, and loud; it whispers of the Paterson business world she was born into, a soft armor draped over a hard-edged reality.

My father stands in front of her. In the frozen silence of the lens, their heads touch in a pose of whispered intimacy. He wears a smile so warm it looks like a promise, the kind of look that makes a crowd sigh about “young love” and “meant to be.”

This picture is ingrained in my mind. I can see it today as clearly as if I were standing in that April slush. For decades, I carried that image like a talisman. I looked at their leaning heads and that fur-draped “perfection” and it made me believe in true love. I used it as the blueprint for my own heart, thinking that if I could just find my own version of that neon halo, I would be safe.

But it was a fucking lie. All of it. If you look past the grain of the film, you can see it wasn’t the lean of two people in love; it was the huddle of two conspirators bracing for impact. They weren’t leaning in to share a secret; they were leaning in to hold each other up against the weight of the lie they were about to sign into law.

April 1970 wasn’t a season of blooming romance; it was a deadline. My mother was already pregnant with me—the clock was ticking against the social mores of the time. But my father had a different clock running in his head. Born in 1952, he wasn’t looking for a soulmate; he was looking for a foxhole that wasn’t in a Vietnamese jungle. He looked at his draft card and saw a death sentence; then he looked at a girl from money and saw a sanctuary.

He traded a ring for a deferment. He traded his freedom for the Paterson safety net. And I became the biological anchor for two teenagers who used my heartbeat to buy their own survival. As the camera flashed against the April slush, they weren’t celebrating a beginning—they were finalizing a transaction.

The Erasure of the Bloodline

That farmhouse in Lafayette, where they supposedly started their “pioneer” life, was painted as a symbol of Dickensian isolation—a lonely girl left to rot in the country. But the facts are slippery in her hands.

That farmhouse wasn’t a symbol of neglect; it was a trophy of success she didn’t earn. It was fueled by the grit of the women she later tried to scrub from the narrative to keep her “victim” status intact. My great-grandmother was Elizabeth Geng, a pioneer who broke the glass ceiling of real estate with The Geng Agency in Paterson. My grandmother worked right alongside her—women who dealt with high-stakes clients like Donald Trump long before he was a household name.

On the other side, there was my grandfather, Florian Pfuntner, of the Elmira Pfuntners, a name that carried the weight of New York industry. Even the Todds had roots; my great-grandfather Joseph Todd owned his own farm in Sussex.

My mother didn’t marry into a wrecking ball life; she used my father as a wrecking ball to blow a hole in a legacy she was too small to lead. She didn’t want to be a successor; she wanted to be a martyr. And to do that, she had to turn the “Fair Story” of her ancestors into a horror story where she was the only protagonist.

The Hostage Situation: “For the Kids”

They finally divorced in 1995, but the twenty-five years leading up to it were a psychological war zone. Every scream, every violent explosion, and every time the furniture was broken or my head was forced against a wall, was followed by the same toxic refrain: “We are staying together for the kids.”

They stayed in the trenches, bleeding all over us, and then told us we were the reason they were still there. They turned our very existence into the prison walls of their misery.

I wasn’t a reason to stay; I was a human shield. My siblings and I were the convenient excuse they used to avoid looking in the mirror. I begged them—over and over—to just get a divorce. I pleaded for the peace of two separate homes. But they refused. They needed me and my siblings to be the “reason” so they didn’t have to be the “failure.” 

The Beauty and the Butcher Knife

The woman in that white dress and fur coat is the same woman who later brandished a butcher knife at her eighteen-year-old daughter. (We will get to the details of that blade later—for now, just know it was there.) She didn’t stay “for me.” She stayed because she needed a landing place for her rage. She stayed because she needed an audience for her martyrdom.

I wasn’t the fruit of a summer whirlwind; I was the collateral damage of two people so busy outrunning their own lives that they forgot they were creating a new one. They used my heartbeat to avoid a war, and then they used my life to justify their own cowardice.

The camera captured the moment the contract was signed. I’m just the one who finally decided to stop honoring the terms.