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About Me — Jo An Fox-Wright Maddox
I’ve been living this roller coaster of a life for 70 years now, so I have a lot to tell.
I was born on a December morning in upstate New York weighing 4 lbs. 14 3/4 oz to a mother who had her second nervous breakdown 4 days later. I was named by my father, who went to city hall to have the spelling changed when the nurse told my mother she couldn’t spell “JoAn” like that. Dad said he could spell it “Zqh” if he wanted to, so they changed it. I have the proof, as my birth certificate is a Xerox copy of the page my birth was recorded in. You can see where the original spelling of “JoAn” has been whited out and the corrected spelling is above it. I had to add the space between the “o” and the “A” when computers came out and spelled everything all in caps.
For the first nine months of my life, I lived with my grandmother and aunt, who shared a double house, so I was easily passed and shared. I bonded with those two women, who remained my mothers forever. By the time my biological mother came out of the hospital, she was a stranger to me. I remember I thought she smelled funny. Who knew you could remember things from when you were 9 months old? But I did.
Before I was a year old, my mother was judged well enough to rejoin my father in Windsor, New York, hours away from Fulton…
