Frankly, all of this ambiguity surrounding the name change was starting to get to me. My mom had always said that she had picked the name "Corey" for me. If anything, she would have tried to persuade me to keep it. Toward the end of their marriage, she explained, Mom was just too psychologically beat down to deny me something I supposedly wanted. Still, I have absolutely no memory of ever disliking my name. To make matters worse, Mom's timeline seemed a bit off as well. I distinctly remember living in our home on Ellis Ave when all of this took place, and not our next home as she'd suggested.
Today I decided to take a little trip to our offsite storage facility to investigate further. I figured that there had to be some clues, if not hard evidence, hidden in my old records.
Shown left is a Family Christian Academy yearbook from 1985, FCA's inaugural school year. Note, the First Assembly Christian Academy yearbook (shown right) is from 2 year's later.
Once inside my storage unit, I quickly located the box with all of our old yearbooks. There weren't that many books to sort through. With all of the instability in our home life, things like photos and yearbooks just sort of fell through the cracks sometimes. As I flipped through the books, I began to get my bearings:
- 1984-85 I was enrolled in K-4 at Family Christian Academy.
- 1985-86 I skipped kindergarten (or, K-5) and was enrolled in 1st grade in a public school. I have class photos, but no yearbook for that year.
- 1986-87 I was enrolled in 2nd grade at First Assembly Christian Academy.
I was a little confused about why my sister wrote "K-5" on the inside cover of my K-4 yearbook, but this appears to be an anomaly. More importantly, the inscriptions from both yearbooks establish a possible timeframe for when the name change took place. In my K-4 yearbook, I am referred to only as Corey. Yet two different teachers address me as "Michael" when signing my 2nd grade yearbook. So, somewhere between the '85 and '87 school years, I transitioned from Corey to Michael.
It's a bit depressing now, to think about how much upheaval took place in my early childhood. I believe I attended multiple pre-schools including Country Manner and Runnels before landing at Jimmy Swaggart's FCA. Then I jumped into elementary school 1 year early and ended up attending 4 different elementary schools in 5 years. During that time, we saw the first big public Jimmy Swaggart scandal, multiple church splits, my little name change fiasco and my parents' divorce. We moved out of my childhood home and eventually relocated to Houston, all by the time I was 9 years old.
I do think that some good may have come out of it, though. Whatever wisdom or grit that I possess as an adult could be attributed to the lack of stability in my home life as a child. Still, it's no way to live, and I want something much better for my wife and daughter. Being married to me has not been a walk in the park for Mignon. I have scrambled for years just to keep the money coming in and survive at whatever cost - and in the face of utter chaos and hardship. I just wonder how I would have handled all of the trials of married life now, had I let all of that adversity crush me all those years ago.