Out of Habit

My mother, Sister Mom, who dresses in a white habit and has a chapel (complete with tabernacle, altar, pews, stations of the cross and an organ in the back) for a living room, shares at least one thing with the Virgin Mary - difficulty in explaining children. For that reason, and others, I prefer to refer to my fathers as the fothermuckers.
My first fothermucker was a Los Angeles Police Officer who worked in the Rampart district. I have little independent memory of him - a late night visit when I was in the hospital, crying at the door while he was leaving. He knocked up a dispatcher when I was a toddler. I never knew my parents were divorced. He was just gone all the time.
One morning, my whole family was sitting in the living room in their pajamas, and it was suspiciously quiet. Something was definitely up.
Daddy was dead.
Dead?
Dead.
Fothermucker number two's number came up. He is an engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. My mother, a pretty woman with a beautiful singing voice, was his boss's secretary. She had taken courses in typing and shorthand after fothermucker number one had moved out, and had quickly risen from the typing pool to a high level engineer's very own.
Soon after the demise of number one, he was in. Like his predecessor, he was rarely around and very loud when he was.
At first, he was fun. He took us to the beach, where I got burned to a crisp at Scotchman's Cove, playing with the Wolfman, Big Dave, and fothermucker two, the belly-bumping King of Scotchman's Cove.
After he took his place as the King of our family, he was less fun. After the birth of his first child, Charlie-John-Jack, I, with my sister and brother, was relegated to the position of servant, politely serving hors d'oeuvres at the huge parties he threw for his fellow engineers.
He and my mother had loud, late, raucous fights. Eight years after he moved in, with Charlie-John-Jack and I the only remaining children in residence, he packed up and moved in with his pregnant cocktail waitress from the Red Fox.
It was quite a while until the third fothermucker came along. My mother was already living in the Holy House with Sister Taresa Candacelottra - as a novitiate, of sorts. A man named Manual Luna (whom I called manual labor) did some cabinetry at Sister's house. Both my evil Aunt Eleanor (soon to become Sister Martha) and my mother were smitten. Mom won.
Off to Las Vegas for a third round of marital bliss with fothermucker number three. He failed to add her name on the deed to his house, however, so the bliss was short lived and he was relegated to a fothermucker footnote (and went blind, undoubtedly a Vodou curse) .
The effect, at least in part, of these fothermuckers was an equally ridiculous parade in my own life (current excluded). Time will tell whether I'll don a habit and marry God, but the odds are against it.
I have very fair skin. White washes me out.