Hello there!
I never really know how or where to start these kinds of things… So kind of like a dating profile… I guess we will start at the beginning.
I was born in Lansing Michigan on October 12th, 1991 to Derek Chisholm and Brooke Brown.
7 months later Brooke became pregnant again with my younger brother Branden who was born prematurely on December 3rd, 1992, shortly after we had moved to Lafayette, IN. My youngest brother, Nick, would also come prematurely 2 years later on September 5th, 1994.
Shortly after my youngest brother was born, my parents split up because Brooke continuously chose a life of partying and drugs over having a family and raising her children.
My dad worked and still works incredibly hard to take care of us kids. Not only to keep a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, food in our bellies, but we also never wanted for anything.
In 1999 my dad was working for a body shop in a small town about 25-30 minutes from our home. The secretary for the body shop had been badgering him about setting him up with a friend of hers. She eventually was able to wear him down and convince him to go on a blind date.
When he tells his version of the story, he says that he was really relaxed (read: not the normal pre-date jitters) prior to the date because he knew going in to the date that it wasn’t going to be anything more than a one time blind date to get his secretary off his back, but as all fairytales will have it.. by the end of the date, he knew that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
A couple months later, when I came home from school, they were waiting at the house to meet us. About a month after that Sallie, her son Jonathon who was just two months younger than me, and I all went to the children’s museum together without my dad. It was the first time I had ever been and I had a blast.
It became our new norm to travel the 45 minutes from our house to theirs several times a week and spend several weekends a month at their home and the weekends that we weren’t at their house, they were at ours.
In October of 2001, my dad asked Sallie to marry him, and she said yes.
The following fall, we started building a new home. One that could house four growing kids. My dad and Sallie’s dad, Charlie, built a lot of the house with their own two hands.
Like that home, I want this little corner of the inter webs to be a safe place for us to connect with each other, be ourselves, share our stories, ask for and share advice, and/or speak our truth. We all need somewhere we can call home and I hope that this will be that place for you.
Bumpy Back Roads 