Lindsey Altom
Bio
For me, writing runs in the blood. I've written songs, poems and short stories ever since I was a little girl. I mostly like to write about my life experiences mixed with a little fiction or just things that come off the top of my head!
Stories (97)
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I do and then I don't
I never thought I would be here, sitting in this lonely crack in your car. I'm just under the seat but you can't see me. What will become of me now? Will I ever get to adorn someone's ring finger again? Oh! How far I've fallen in this crevice of misery. I remember when your father bought me for your mother. There I was just sitting in that dime store glass jewelry case just hoping to go home with some happy couple. Then, there he came and he brought me home with him. He was so excited to show me to your mother. You were there already, laughing and giggling in your baby swing in the background. Down on one knee, he presented me to your mother as a token of his love. I remember how thrilled she was when with a smile on her face she said, "I do." After a couple of years though, things started to fall apart. She no longer looked at me with happiness and instead, it was with disdain. I was so sad when her "I do" became I don't. For years, I sat in a small compartment in your mother's jewelry box. It was so lonely there and dark much like this space under the seat in your car. Finally, one day, she carefully took me out of the jewelry box, and imagine my surprise when she handed me to you on your wedding day. You were grown and looking so lovely and beautiful. She explained to you that her wedding bands that once adorned her finger should now adorn yours. You were so happy to see me, I felt so loved! You were so happy for years to wear me, so proud to show others and tell others where I had come from and what I meant to you. I was there through your marriage but it soon became obvious to me that you two couldn't live together and yet you couldn't seem to live without each other either. One day though I noticed that you seemed so tired. You couldn't handle the fights anymore. Much like your father and mother, you and your love were moving in different directions. I was so disheartened when you sadly took me off your finger and once again, I was placed in a jewelry box. You still took me out every once in a while though and wore me simply because I was a testament to your parent's love and that is how I came to be lost in this crevice. One day, I was in your car and you had taken me off and placed me in your cup holder. Soon, your little boy came out and picked me up. He wasn't supposed to touch me I heard you say later while I sat in my crevice but he was curious. He picked me up and suddenly I slipped from his small hands then I was in this crevice. It's so sad and dark here. I wonder if you'll ever find me? You've already looked so hard. Is this it? Is this where I'll stay? The years go by and yet here I stay. One day, you sell the car giving up all hope of finding me. This car is now my home and we two are one. My new owner as I'm a part of this car now is a young man. He has a girlfriend I know this because I hear her. One day, the young man is cleaning the car. he is giving this car a good detailing job and suddenly I hope. I had forgotten what hope felt like because for so many years I'd set here. Suddenly, against all odds, he finds me. I see it in his eyes as an idea sparks in his mind. I go to a small box and there I sit. I want and hope so badly to adorn someone's finger as a token of love again. Could I have mistaken the look in his eyes? Suddenly, the young man opens the box and I'm at a restaurant and the girl, the girl I've heard in the car stands before me. She looks so beautiful and happy! She takes me from his hand and places me on her lovely finger and says those words I've longed to hear for so many years..."I do."
By Lindsey Altom2 years ago in Fiction
My hopes, dreams, future...
This past year has been so full of change and growth for me and my children and Vocal has been one of my biggest inspirations. You see, in September of 2022 I broke up with my narcissistic alcoholic now ex-husband, and since I had been with him for 8 years my brain had forgotten who I was anymore. I thought I knew but honestly, I had no clue. However, at some point in my healing journey I found Vocal...again. I discovered something that I had long since forgotten because according to Vocal I had joined in 2017. I discovered a world of writers much like myself here and more importantly, a place to express myself and not be judged. Here on this platform are my people. The forgotten in society, the swept under the rug, the creators, the artists, those of us who fight for the light but know sometimes you must know the dark well to appreciate the light... we're all here. I've worked for almost a year now on Vocal honing the writing skills that I once used so often and was so proud of but had all but forgotten thanks to my ex-husband and life. The challenges that Vocal provides have provided me with both a new and exciting challenge to both grow and expand my talent and excitement at trying something new. I haven't won a challenge yet but I plan to keep trying as that is one of my goals for this year. I did recently have my first Top Story which I was extraordinarily excited about...https://customer-opinion.top/families/fort-mother. Finally creating a story that achieved Top Story on Vocal seriously made my week and I can only imagine what winning a challenge would do for my excitement levels. I am simply a struggling single mother of two like many others who is just trying to achieve my dreams for both myself and my children. This year I have already enrolled in college and am taking an English Comp class to start with so I can better hone my writing skills, I've joined a domestic violence survivors group which I am so thrilled about and I have several plans for here on Vocal as well. This year I have a couple of stories still lingering in my Drafts folder that I plan to finish. One is about a girl who is just trying to broaden her horizons by moving from California to Arizona and in doing so she finds herself on a journey that she did not expect nor did she invite, she almost dies and the other is about a woman in a domestic violence situation who fled and in doing so killed her husband or so she thinks and now she has to start over in a brand new town that she knows nothing about and everyone is suspicious of her. I also hope within this year to keep writing on this platform as much as possible as my schedule is very full and to take what I can from the writings of others. If I were to win this challenge or any other challenge I enter I would use that money to go towards a better future for myself and my children. I would use the money to pay off some debts, put food in my children's bellies, and save some if I could. I hope to one day be able to use my writing as a side job/passion to be able to make money from my writings and save that money so my children can go to college or wherever they want to go in life and live a brighter life than I have at times. I have made mistakes as we all have but I am trying and learning every day. I hope to one day live a life of comfort and travel. No, I do not want to live lavishly only comfortably and I believe that I can achieve some of these dreams through Vocal. Vocal has been such an inspiration to me as you can tell and I'm not just saying this, it truly has...so thank you for reading this and any other of my work that you've read.
By Lindsey Altom2 years ago in Writers
Hate.... Content Warning.
I left my toxic and abusive ex-husband over a year ago at this point and I've done a lot to try to heal and recover from not only that trauma but my childhood trauma as well. I've worked hard over the past three years to look at every aspect of myself and notice not only where I was damaged and broken but where I went wrong too. I've tried very hard to own up to my faults and take responsibility where it was mine to take. That being said I know that everything I did in the toxic relationship with my ex was not perfect because for one it's called reactive abuse. You can only take it for so long before you start giving it back. The next thing is that I am human and I am prone to making mistakes and my decisions and thought patterns were not always the greatest. However, everything I did and/or said or didn't say had a reason and most people only know the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what happened between my ex and myself. Also, that's just it, isn't it? No one except who was in the house truly knows what happened. I have my story which I've told and I have a right to tell and he has his. The abuse that I and my children suffered in that home was real and was not made up by any means. I don't have to explain this to anyone I know but because of poor mental health and comments like this I for some reason feel as if I need to explain. This comment I'm assuming was taken down either by Vocal or the author herself yesterday but I got to read it through my emails. This is from my ex-sister-in-law and this is called victim blaming/shaming. I was already feeling stressed due to the holiday season and the financial burden that it puts on one especially when you have children and then I read this. I just can't help but wonder why. Why as another woman would you intentionally seek out another woman to tear her down? I mean I would never. I feel as women we should always be building each other up because being a woman is hard enough as it is so even if you don't like said woman then just don't say anything but don't intentionally seek her out to try and destroy her. Also, as a Christian, I do not feel I have the right to tell another Christian that they are being hypocritical or "need Jesus." Everyone's journey is different and you calling into question their walk with Jesus is just not right in the least little bit. I'm not saying I'm perfect or was the perfect wife to her brother or the perfect stepmother to her nephews but I did try my best and no, I did not blatantly to their faces call the children mean names such as saying they were fat. Most of the time, the boys called themselves that and I told them not to do that. When you only have one side of the story it's hard to see the whole picture but I suppose it's also hard to see the whole picture when you just don't want to. I know nothing I say will matter and everything I say will just go in one ear and out the other because you've already picked your villain and that's fine but all I want is to be left alone. I'm trying to heal over here, I'm trying to find my peace, I'm trying to not stare at every red truck in town afraid that it might be him ready to run me down, I'm trying to not start shaking violently, and getting sick to my stomach every time his name or any of his family's name comes up because the fear lives just beneath the surface edge so please just go away. If you have any sort of decency about you at all please just leave me alone and I will leave you alone as well. I'm not sharing your name, but things like this? This is part of my domestic violence story and I will share it. You were right about one thing though, I'm not a victim- I'm a survivor.
By Lindsey Altom2 years ago in Humans
Lenora...
I am thirty-six years old and yet I feel I have lived several lives in just this one life. I started as this scared, timid little girl who was afraid of her own shadow at times but loved to play and explore. Oh, the hours upon hours I spent with my cousins from both sides of my family, both father and mother playing in the woods or the fields on my great grandparents' farm. It was in those woods and fields that I truly started to learn about myself. It was there that I started to learn I was more than just a shy, timid child. I liked to explore and learn things, I liked fire(yes, I was a bit of a pyromaniac and still am if truth be told), the woods were a great place to listen and to be heard by God, I loved to imagine a world in which things were different from my world and the woods and those fields were my place to do that. Things at home were complicated so I spent as much time as possible with my cousins. My parents had divorced by the time I was three and I honestly don't even remember much about them even being together other than the fighting. My mother started dating and then married my stepfather shortly thereafter when I was eight. My mother and my relationship has been rocky from the very beginning of my memories. It was not all her fault and I know that now. My stepfather intensified her already anal and narcissistic personality even though at the time he looked to me like a savior because he would intervene on my behalf at times. She was also very young and immature and unfortunately did not know better. I spent my childhood with her remembering very few good times and mostly with memories of yelling, arguing, her never understanding or accepting me for me, and raising my little sisters which came when I was eleven and then thirteen years old. It took quite a few years to work through all this trauma and some days I'm still working on it. My life with my father on the other hand was not all that bad. We would hang out, and watch TV, he taught me a love for weather and storms as we would chase tornados every time they got close to home, he also taught me a love for backroads as we would drive up and down the backroads most weekends, a love for cooking as we would cook together and a love for cemeteries as he would take myself and my cousin to all the local cemeteries to see if they were haunted. However, all that fun meant that he was the fun dad and he didn't handle my developing attitude as I got older very well. My snarky, smart-alek comments would be funny one moment; the next I was getting punished for being disrespectful. He and my mother argued and fought all through my childhood and treated me as if I were a rubber band to be played with; I never wanted to disappoint either of them but it seemed that no matter what I did someone always got their feelings hurt. It was a lot of pressure for a little girl. That is one version of me that I don't like to remember. The shy little girl turned into the angsty, resentful, bitter, depressed teenage girl but in that teenage girl, I found out more about myself. Around the same time I turned into a teenager, I also started dating my first love, Jay, and then found my two best friends whom I now consider sisters, Alisha and Mia. I also found a few other friends at this time. They would become my pack of friends and people that would get me through my teenage years which were some of my hardest years to live. I had no clue who I was, all I knew was that I was pissed and I wanted out of my mother's house. This pack of friends and Jay, my would-be lover taught me that I was someone to be loved and gave me a reason to get up every day. I learned that life could be very dark and I saw and learned all the ways it could be or at least I started to learn that. I also learned that my love for God was the only thing keeping me alive and I shared that as best I could. Once again, the woods were my reprieve. Myself and my friends went to the woods just to explore and be ourselves, to love and be loved, and to simply run away from our own miserable lives. I learned I loved to draw and write poetry and songs, I learned that I was fairly good at this and that made me happy. I began to explore my creative side in a whole new way. I learned to lean into that anger but also how to express and release some of it. Since the first thing I wanted to do when I got out of high school was get away from my overbearing mother, I moved in with my grandmother and went to technical school for a year with my cousin Candace. After that, I used Jay as my escape ticket and we married and I had my son within a year after that. Then, my new life as Army wife emerged as Jay joined the National Guard to take care of his growing family. We went through Basic training, AIT training, countless weekends away, and then a year of deployment. I rather enjoyed my life as an Army/National Guard wife. Jay and I tended to fight and argue if left to our own for too long so having him away at times meant that left us with just enough longing to be together that we didn't fight too frequently. I loved his uniform and found it very attractive that he was fighting for our country. It made him into more of a stand-up man and often in the harsh reality of civilian life, he let me down more times than I care to remember. I was left to pay the bills, figure out where that money was going to come from, and take care of the house plus our son. Jay would help out when and if he could and when and if he felt like it. However, when he put on that uniform things were different. He took things seriously when normally he did not, he was proud of his work in the National Guard and wanted to serve his country in any way he could, and he was proud to say that he was a warrior. I also enjoyed visiting all the different Army bases, having to have a military ID, visiting the commissary, and stopping to salute the flag every day when we were on the military bases; it all came with such prestige and I soaked every bit of it up. Soon, all that dried up though as Jay simply couldn't be the man I needed him to be at home and was dragging us both down. Our marriage ended and I was left with a little boy and pregnant with our second, a little girl. I was terrified as I knew I couldn't keep the home that we had just gotten by myself and he was supposed to help me but had bailed so now I had to figure this out alone. Instead, I found another man to help me and although that seemed like a Godsend at first it ended terribly with him just adding more narcissistic trauma to my background. I became a domestic violence victim along with my children of verbal, emotional, and mental abuse. The very things I suffered through as a child. This caused me to take a long, hard look at myself and decide what do I want the rest of my life to look like. In 2020, I started the road to figure that out. I began therapy. I decided that I was tired of being angry and depressed at everything that had ever happened to me and everything that continued to happen to me and I decided that the one thing I wanted and needed most in this world was peace. I also decided to take back some control of my life as I realized through therapy that my life is all about my choices. What do I choose to live with and what will I not accept? I learned about boundaries and enforcing those boundaries to keep my space safe. I learned and am still learning how to go back and reparent myself. I'm giving that shy, scared little girl and that angsty, angry, depressed teenager what she always wanted and needed- love and attention. In every situation that causes me distress, I ask her, what do you need in this moment? We're in this together she and I. It's been three years and we're never going to stop learning. I divorced my abusive spouse in 2022 and have never looked back after that. It took a lot for me to do so, two years of therapy in fact but I did it and I'm still going. I've enforced boundaries in my life with those people who have caused me trauma in my past and will continue to enforce those for my well-being because she deserves this. This is my life and I choose how this story will end.
By Lindsey Altom2 years ago in Confessions
My Best Friend.... Content Warning.
The first words I ever heard you say were a warning. You called to me, I went to my mother twice thinking it was her but then she told me to ask if it was you if I heard my name again. And Oh! Your still, small, sweet voice as it told me that something was coming but do not be afraid. I would be fine, everything would be fine. You would be there. A couple of weeks later, as my mother's car tossed and turned with us inside I knew this was it. You had warned me and I was calm because I knew, I knew that I would be fine and so would my mother. I closed my eyes and prayed that you would hold my hand. Next, you came to me in a dream...asked me to make a choice. You said that I would need protection to go through this life and all it had in store for me, I would need to choose. Would it be your army or Lucifer's that would offer me this protection? I whole heartedly chose your army to stand by my side. That has been almost 30 years ago and my oh my what a glorious few battles we've been through.
By Lindsey Altom2 years ago in Writers
Grandma's Beef Stew
My grandma's beef stew is something that I feel most all of us women in the family know how to cook. Well, any one of us that has ever taken any amount of time to learn it that is. I was first given the recipe when I was just 19 years old and marrying my highschool sweetheart. My aunt had decided to do a special activity at my bridal shower where all the women wrote down recipes and any advice they may have for me as I embarked on this new journey in life. My grandma wrote down a couple of recipes that day for me that she knew I held dear to my heart that were from her kitchen but this one has always been able to make a rainy day seem bright and even a sunny day brighter. It is put together with love, care and all the aspects of a good cook. I believe every single one of us probably cook this dish a little differently, each adding our own flare to it but also somewhat sticking to the original recipe. My grandma likes to say that this dish is about emptying out your pantry and your freezer, anything that needs to be cooked can have a chance to get cooked within this dish. This dish is about family....So, without further pause you will need..
By Lindsey Altom2 years ago in Feast
Holy Water...
This story is inspired by the song Holy Water by Michael Ray. I do hope you enjoy. Well, this is one story that I do not plan on telling my grandkids one day but it is a story and so I'm gonna tell you then I'm gonna deny I ever said anything about it. I used to go to this small little church in my hometown in southern Mississippi. The pastor there, his name was Timothy, he was a real stand-up man. He took good care of his congregation and cared a lot about us and that church. He'd come to us with about 20 years experience pastoring, had just lost his wife and little girl in a car crash the year prior and so he'd taken a year off to get himself right.
By Lindsey Altom2 years ago in Fiction
