Interlude: The Dream That Lead

Originally Titled A View From the Outhouse, this is the blog I had to remove from my MySpace page because of the conflict it caused with my husband.  I put it hear because it is pertinent to what lead me to where we are now.

A View From the Outhouse

The title of this blog is what I have in my future.  I am trying to have a more positive outlook but I am stuck in the middle of moving and I am finding it very difficult.  Likewise, I am trying to find the humor in it, but honestly I have been spread so thin I don’t laugh much at anything at this moment.  I know I wrote of the whole CPS thing, but there have been a lot of other things going on as well that I have not been writing about, it has all been just so damned overwhelming I have been walking through life in a fog.

 

It was the Murphy’s Law of months was March, 2008. My van was in constant breakdown and with over $700 in repairs complete and it still needing more I want to junk it but can’t. We don’t have the resources to buy a new vehicle. My Mom had a scare and an overnight stay in the hospital for pains in her head. My Mom is 77 and getting old lady brain so pains in her head are to be taken very seriously. I didn’t even know she was in the ER until she was out the following day because my bonehead sister, instead of picking up the fucking phone and calling me (a local call, mind you) decided to power up her computer, connect to the internet and send me a fucking email about it which I didn’t even get until AFTER Mom had gotten home from the hospital and talked to me. There are days my sister is in sore need of a serious bitch slapping. We’re close that way. Can you bitch slap someone in an email?

 

Then there are my wonderful landlords. They are the caretakers of the property, taking care of it for their son who bought the place last summer and who works out of state to make more money. My lease was due to be up this month of April. They sent me a letter ‘addressing’ some ‘issues’ they had and a new rental agreement for me to sign.

 

When they bought the place last summer, they decided to ‘fix it up by power washing and painting it. Real professionals they were, too, moving the couch I had on the porch onto the deck right under the eaves BEFORE power washing the roof so that all the debris on the roof ended up on the couch. Granted, mostly it was a couch for Fat Dog who lives outside and loved that couch. But please. Use some sense. Then of course, washing out the fucking paint bucket IN THE LAWN after they were done. There is still green paint in the grass. Oh. New house color? Shiny brown with green trim. Yes, SHINY. They chose a glossy paint for the exterior. And it is a dark brown. And they painted it this color last summer when it was almost 100 degrees outside. They also showed up at 8:00 every morning and not consistently. I never got a phone call when they were going to come over and also happened to be sitting on the toilet buck naked when the grandson helping him decided to paint around the bathroom window. I had the blinds drawn, but the top of the window is arched and has glass so it is only the lower windows that have blinds. He was on a ladder. Luckily there is a bit of a partition but I had to duck and cover then streak for safety once the guys head was not in sight.

 

I tolerated that. They wanted to get it done, it was hot. I wanted them the hell gone A.S.A.P. Then the owner remodeled the apartment connected to the garage to rent it out. Fine, ok. I had enjoyed having no neighbor since the previous owner had moved on but whatever, they gotta make the mortgage.

 

Then I found out the owner was renting it to his nephew. One of the Grandson’s that had helped the owners father, whom I call That Old Bastard, do some of the painting. (Though not the one who had caught me au natural on the shitter.)

 

I started to get that uneasy feeling twinking at my gut strings. Why would they have a nephew rent the place? Why, to help ‘keep an eye’ on the premises for James, the owner and uncle. That and now That Old Bastard began to drop by often and unexpectedly to ‘visit’ the grandson. Which may have been legitimate. However, he would then find a reason to knock on my door and make inquiries about things.

 

Now, I we are a low income family and my reality is that if I didn’t have housing assistance we would have no home. The job market sucks and even though I have been registered with two temp agencies even the temp work has been next to non-existent. I did have a job before Christmas with a building company, but got laid off that because of the wonderful housing market crash. I have to report all income changes and there are yearly inspections to deal with from the housing people. Checking the place out once a year makes sure that I am not harboring illegal aliens, growing a pot farm or cooking up a meth lab. It also lets them track needed repairs, make sure we aren’t kicking out all the walls and forces the landlord to do needed repairs. Fine. I know how to jump through the hoops. Hate it, but have found it necessary.

 

After inspection, That Old Bastard came back to the property, unannounced, the next day to ‘check up’ on a vent plate I told him I would have to take off the back of the house because when I put it on I locked cats under the house. Now, I have been in violation of the whole pet thing. I have outside animals and feeding outside has snowballed into other cats coming over and one cat I had got knocked up before I got her, then her two remaining children fixed, etc. And two dogs, one outside couch potato, one inside small dog. The previous owner had no beef with it even if the rental agreement stated only one dog and one cat. Anyway, they had been under the house because every vent in the plywood foundation had been kicked out when I moved in. Then James boarded it up without telling me, trapping cats underneath the house. Expecting me to let them starve and die under there I guess. Anyway, I took the back plate off out of sheer laziness didn’t replace it all winter until the day of inspection. But I told him as I replaced it I would have to take it off but would be sure to feed them and put it on when they were all present and accounted for.

 

That Old Bastard decided to come back, as if catching me in an evil act, but chose to start yelling at Lew for it as I wasn’t home. He also screamed about a door that was damaged when we moved in, trying to say it wasn’t damaged last summer and informed Lew he would be back on Monday to do repairs.

 

He never showed Monday and didn’t call. Tuesday he showed up at 9 in the morning. This is after I had repeatedly told him repairs needed to be done after 11 because Lew works graveyards and that is like waking him at 3 in the morning.

 

Not only did he show up in the morning, he WALKED IN TO MY HOUSE without waiting for Lew to answer and was in fact, in the bedroom doorway and walking into the bathroom in this bedroom while Lew was still in bed after yelling. “I’m yellin’ here!” before he walked in. Lew was left to scramble to get his pants on with That Old Bastard standing in uncomfortable proximity.

 

Lew went in the bathroom to help him, heard a noise and looked up and lo’ and behold here comes the grandson, my neighbor WALKING UNINVITED INTO MY HOUSE without knocking or calling out!

 

These are just a few of the more blatant things. There are more. Combine that with a rental agreement they wanted me to sign that wanted us to power wash the OUTSIDE of the house when we moved out. Told me to ’talk to my children’ about ’bothering’ the other tenant (their grandson) if he were outside his apartment. Stated that there would be no outside noise allowed that might disturb their grandson.

 

Basically, it sounded as if they wanted us out and I was mad enough to oblige. After writing a highly incensed eleven page response letter not only outlining all the bullshit they had pulled but giving them direct quotes from Montana’s Landlord Tenant Act of 1977 law that clearly states what they were doing were in direct violation of my tenant rights. I also demanded that all harassing behavior stop immediately or I would seek injunctive relief as was my right by that very law. I gave my 30 day notice on the last page.

 

The Monday they would be receiving the letter from me That Old Bastard called and wondered when I would be signing the new rental agreement and mailing it to them. The Old Bitch, That Old Bastard’s wife had put a sticky note on the rental agreement saying parts that didn’t apply to me would be taken out of the agreement I was to sign. Every time I had spoken to That Old Bastard about anything rental related he told me to talk to The Old Bitch because she was in charge of all things rental related. Which made me wonder why the hell he was calling me about a rental issue. It was also before they got to read the part in the letter where I told them I wouldn’t speak to That Old Bastard about any rental issues anymore due to the fact he kept telling me to deal with The Old Bitch instead.

 

I know I sound a bit bitter and more than a little angry. I think most people could understand the anger. I have had it with the invasions. I told them in my letter I would rather live out of my camp trailer than put up with landlords who felt it was their right to be in constant violation of their tenants legal right.

 

And I would. I have had to move two years in a row now. First because of mold in the basement apartment under the funeral home where we lived. Now because I refuse to subjugate myself and my family to the whim of landlord tyrants. I am tired of moving.

 

I could have curled to their will, signed their questionable and possibly illegal rental agreement. But I know they want us gone. We’re poor people, you see, so we must be scum of the earth and criminals.

 

We have the mixed fortune of living in one of the most beautiful, and highly sought after places in Montana. The rich have discovered the Flathead Valley and even with the housing market crashing everywhere else, here you can’t find land on acreage with a home for anything under $200,000.

 

So Lew’s Dad owns five acres on the backside of Teakettle Mountain. They lived there about ten years, the two of them. There is an amazing collection of vehicles on the property. No well. The closest running water is a seasonal creek about three miles down the road. No electricity. Of the two I will miss the water the most. I will miss my huge tub here that was big enough for all three of my girls and I to fit in.

 

Why this route? I know people wonder. When my father was alive he told me I was crazy. Just plain crazy to go out there. I lived there for a summer but drove out there every weekend the whole winter when Lew and I were first together. With my then three year old daughter. I got stuck. A LOT. I learned how to put tire chains on. I had a beat to shit pick-up then. I went out there because I had loved the guy that lived out there since I was sixteen. He just didn’t know it until I was 29. I didn’t mind the summer, but I swore I would never live out there during the winter as ill equipped vehicle-wise as I was. The snow can get damned deep out there.

 

When it was just Lew and I up on that mountain, things were good. I could see the way to make the dream I had of having an organic farmlet a reality. There was solitude and beauty, even though you could always hear the highway noise across the river. You could walk over to our makeshift shooting range and blow the hell out of stuff and no one would call the cops. You didn’t have neighbors to worry about. No landlords to tell you to polish all the rocks before you moved out. No landlord to drive you out in the first place.

 

This is where it’s at I suppose. I am tired of being homeless. I am paying people for the privilege of living in their places until they decide they don’t want us there anymore. Or until my Fuck You attitude kicks in and I shake the dust of the place from my boots. These dwellings are NOT my home. They are shelter over my head until circumstances change. That’s why I have never tried very hard to get rid of my pathetically tiny 15 foot camp trailer cause by damned that thing is my HOME. Mine! I own it. Free and Clear. No one can take it away from me.

 

I have long known Lew would be happier out in the sticks again. He grew up there. It is important to me that he is happy and I want to make a home he is happy to come home to. He has made a lot of sacrifices for me and the kids. But living that rustic with a pack of small children is going to suck ASS until we get the water situation designed. Even if we have to haul water, little kids are grubby individuals on days when you have all you can run water. I bought a generator. So we can use occasional power. Thank God it’s warming time and not autumn.

 

I know a few people will think I am crazy, even me at times. I have prayed long and hard about the direction our lives are supposed to take. Faith sometimes requires just that. Faith that all is as it should be and all in the Great Spirit’s design.

 

I have misgivings. The largest is that the land is not in our names and Lew’s father is not in the best of health. There is no will. I am balking at building any permanent structure. Lew and I have been fighting about it regularly in fact. He sees the necessity of a permanent structure. Which is a real necessity. Especially living wall to wall with six people in a small camper. But I can’t get past the knowing that unless there is land in our name we are just tenants again who own nothing and can lose our home. Then wee really would be homeless. There would be no last resort and all we would have would be that damned camper.

 

There are days, like today, when I want to leave this valley. I want to leave what it is becoming. I want to go live where the majority of people don’t. Realtors and wealthy people have already discovered the land adjacent to Lew’s Dad’s. I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time before we would be pushed out of there as well.

 

That’s it, I suppose. It’s not ours. Not really. No matter what we built. So it would never feel like my home, even though to Lew it is home. I would just be another resident tenant. Until circumstances changed and I was left a nomad once more, children in tow.

 

There is too much division in this for me. I do not feel like we are standing on solid or unified ground at all. I don’t like this quicksand footing. Perhaps it is because my faith is being tested. I don’t know. I feel there is no place in this valley for my family and I. Nothing I will be able to say is ours. We are just living off of someone else. I HATE that! I have wanted to get off public assistance and can’t. I have wanted to finish school but can’t seem to do that either. Right now I have no hope of a happy future.

 

I know I am tired. Beyond tired. I took the week long temp job that I was requested for this week and it has thrown me a week behind my packing. Stress and more stress. I keep waiting for my arrhythmic heart to just explode. Some days I wish it would. I am into mind numbing exhaustion now, lack of sleep, headaches.

 

We were supposed to be getting married in May. Finally. After 8 years. Nothing has been planned for that either. I feel like it is the least of our worries and now just another added stress. I had been looking forward to it, but now. Well. I feel like there’s no point. I really, really wanted to have a wedding. We could go over to Idaho and have it over and done in an afternoon. But if one of the most important days in my life will be relegated to a side trip why fucking bother? It’s supposed to be a time of celebration. I think Lew would rather not even bother with any of that stuff and just blow the gas money to drive over to Idaho. Besides, what do I put as my bridal registry? Western Building Center for lumber or the Army Navy for winter survival gear.

 

My pessimism is reaching an all time high. I may even be out doing my late Father, Heaven forbid. I just want the fucking moving OVER with and I want my children sent off to boarding school so I can pack a fucking box without someone unpacking it right behind me because ohmygawdthat’smyfavoritetoyandwhereHASitbeen!!

Ah well. At least I have my camp trailer. Maybe I can set up along a highway and offer palm readings to stupid tourists while my children pick their pockets. Now I just need a trailer hitch on my pice of shit van so I don’t have to borrow a vehicle to pull the trailer…

Poverty to Live: Of Thine Own Self Speak True

I have learned, from experience, and the experience of friends that abuse can be categorized.

 

As girls growing up, we would compare our domestic war stories and in our own minds rate each others experience. Madonna Wannabe claimed severe abuse from her step-father in early childhood but often came to school to brag about the new waterbed or big screen television or monstrously large satellite her family had just purchased. We never took her abuse claims too seriously because she was usually full of shit for the most part and her hobby was causing conflict among our group of friends, all for the sake of attention.

 

Mouse never said much, only that her Dad was an asshole but she hated him with a passion that was terrifying for such a tiny person. She never came to school with visible bruises but the little troll that was her father was always drunk. I lay awake in her bed one night at a sleepover, unable to get comfortable enough to sleep, overhearing the porn movie sounds coming from the living room television down the hall. I felt dirty, tainted, horrified and fascinated, even though Mouse had told me that’s what he was going to do later that night. I finally hid my head under the pillow and wondered if that was part of why her house never quite felt safe.

 

Crazy V, who was eleven when we met. My parents appalled when she said she didn’t have to be home until 9 pm even on school nights. Big blue eyes, blonde haired little pixie initiated into the world of sex at the age of twelve by someone who thought it would be fun to tell the whole school what a slut she was. She pretty much wore the mantle after that, but she remained and still is one of the friends that would stick by me through anything. And she still makes me want to slap her because she is having the same type of boy problems now as she did twenty-two years ago. I tell her she needs me to come bitch slap the crap out of her often, only now she lives in another state. Besides, we’d probably only end up getting drunk with each other and making public asses of ourselves. That would be ok too. Nothing is going to change my Crazy V and I’ll love the vain little shit anyway.

 

Tops, who finally let the world know her father had been molesting her since she was three our Freshman year of high school. She did it after he came after her younger sister and she did it to protect her. The bastard only spent two years behind bars, less time than a rapist who rapes a stranger would spend behind bars here in Montana. He spent two years behind bars and is on the Montana violent and sexual predator database for life. Tops got an abortion at age 15 because she didn’t know if the baby was her boyfriend’s or her father’s.

 

After Tops came out with that, the shit that I went through with my own Dad didn’t seem to be anything. At least from the outside. On an outside scale of judgment it didn’t even rank.

 

I didn’t’ live it from the outside, though. My heart told me my own experiences were the worst, even though my mind knew I was getting off pretty lucky.

 

My parents were most affectionate when I was small. Tiny ones are always easier to love. They are cute and don’t issue demands in quite the same way as the bigger ones do. I have two sisters who are ten and thirteen years older than me. When I was small, they were big into the party scene and making Mom and Dad’s life hell. I couldn’t quite understand what was going on. Mom ranted and cried a lot, worried about them getting high and Dad just ranted. During the year I was four back in 1975 I was awakened from dead sleep in the middle of the night by people screaming. Mom, Dad and someone really literally screaming their ever loving guts out. It was my eldest sister, in the living room floor being held down by my father who was sitting on her and pinning her arms to the floor as she was in some drug induced freak out episode. The local doctor and friend of the family came in to put a needle in my sisters arm that made her quiet down. I thought they had killed her. I had started screaming and jumping up and down at first sight and watched in wide eyed terror. Mom held on to me and eventually put me back to bed, no explanations. The second time it happened I remember jerking awake thinking, ” I will have to go out there and scream again too.” That is the last I remember of that incident.

 

I became the somewhat overprotected nestling watching and observing the puzzling goings on between my parent’s and sisters. I learned early to blend into the background and listen. You can learn a lot that way. I also learned to question. I remember my mother pouring out her grief and frustration about my older sisters and their drug use. I saw the hurt it caused and didn’t ever want to do that. So I saved my own experimentation for later.

 

My sister’s let me know whenever it suited them how spoiled they thought I was. The only kid at home after age five, my middle sister having moved out at age 15. In one respect I was raised as an only child. My mother claims to have been more lenient with me, but I still felt caged. I was only allowed to go over to certain friends houses, only after it was made clear we would go nowhere else, and only if my father was in a mood to let me. If my friends came over we were pretty much restricted to coffee marathons at the local greasy spoon for entertainment purposes, or holed up in my bedroom recording ourselves having belching contests. My Dad was consistently a rude, mean asshole to my friends. In high school I had only two friends that would brave staying over at my house. With friends whose parents were much more permissive than my own, I was soon not really invited anywhere. Why? They knew I wouldn’t be able to go.

 

In my childish mind I didn’t get to do a whole hell of a lot. Considering what some of my friends went through, I had it pretty easy. Too easy in some respects. My biggest responsibility at home was to do dishes. I had no motive to challenge myself or to even expand myself in the ways of eventual adult responsibility. I hated school. I felt directionless. never an athlete (unless you count spitting for distance and accuracy as a sport) I was more interested in writing, drama, dance and singing. I did these to some extent on my own but never felt accomplishment because I was flunking out of high school.

 

Then there was the fact of my father.

 

I once looked up our horoscopes in a book titled the Secret Language of Relationships. It listed Best and Worst for combinations of our personalities. Our worst combination was ‘Family’.

 

My father and I hated each other. If we were in the same room with one another there were one of three scenarios. 1) Complete and stony silence. 2) Terse word exchange with thinly veiled hostility, or most commonly 3) War.

 

When I say war, it doesn’t even cover the level of vitriolic seething fury that my father and I exchanged. No matter the issue, insignificant or not, we were out to bait, stab, gut and wound each other in any verbal way possible. I got better at it as I got older because there were times that, through the exchange, I would provoke him enough to attack me.

My father had a hand that had been severely burned as a child and made a very bony fist.

 

Trying to write this, bringing up these memories, because they are my own and even though I know there is so much worse things that have happened, are happening now, I am still, even after all these years so agitated by the memory of the whole dynamic between Dad and I that I have to keep getting up from the computer chair to pace, rub my aching head, grind my teeth. Go find something to eat even though I know I am feeding my body out of fury not out of love or the desire to maintain and I am only adding to my weight problem even though I don’t want to. Tears keep springing up and it is a combination of distant memory and recent domestic arguments that race in my head, my husband’s and father’s voices commingling to wipe away all sense of time and place. That was then and this is now and now is then as well.

 

This is always a major problem. I can see so clearly and judge so well the lives of others, but have such a hard time turning that eye inward.

Perhaps it is because, when I turn that eye inward, it burns into my soul with the same merciless rage and anger that was burned into me by my father when I was growing up. Somehow, somewhere along the way as a child I lost all possible compassion for myself. As I grew up I tried to find it, pieces of me to put back together and re-create as something I felt worthy of, well, of anything. Love, I suppose? Compassion? Mercy? There is little mercy in me for myself or my husband. Sometimes this bleeds through to encompass my children and the War continues even more inside me when I am weak enough to allow that to happen.

 

Though my fathers fist would land in my face, on those handful of occasions it did, the legacy that man left me was one of feeling as if I could never accomplish or be successful at anything. His litany runs through my mind; lazy shitass, knuckleheaded, slut, mean streak, pig, selfish, why can’t you…you’re never gonna amount to anything…you always gotta be so stubborn…never gonna do nothin’…

 

Somewhere, in my developing mind and belief system, I picked up that litany and at 37 years old am still at war with him. Shitty thing is the old bastard’s been dead for six years.

 

I know it is my relationship with my father that has seriously influenced my choice of relationships with my male partners, as Freudian as that may sound. I have either picked men who were total emotional vampires, totally emotionally unavailable, and every one of them has exhibited some kind of abusive characteristic.

 

Most shamefully, I have exhibited abusive characteristics myself. Toward my own children. If provoked enough, toward my own partners. Most days I am a passable parent, other days I am a worthless bastard, like father, like daughter. I can’t even rate my own degree because it is all unforgivable in my own mind. I don’t hold my kids down and punch them in the face but I have slapped them. In anger. I hate myself for losing control like that. I struggle not to then slip up again. Some days it seems I just scream at them for everything.

Why is it we always hurt the ones we love? I am no better than my father, yet I have gone back and told my children it was wrong of me to do that, or to have said something, though I fight most of all with myself on using belittling language with them. I try to tell them how angry I am feeling instead of using that anger as a mode of verbal or physical striking out at them. I make myself sit down to snuggle or read or sing to them or just be silly. I do this especially on the days I want to push them away and tell them to go do something, not to bother me. I have had to apologize to them. I don’t ever promise that it will never happen again because I don’t want to be a liar.

 

I feel like a complete failure as a parent and most days as a member of society. I don’t feel like I have anything to offer that is worthwhile. Sometimes the despair is depressive enough to turn to suicidal thoughts, especially if I don’t watch my nutritional intake or take my vitamins regularly. I don’t know how many times I have pictured suicide by pistol, or train.

 

The only thing that keeps me from taking that route is also being able to envision my kids faces, their bewilderment and grief and knowing I would be abandoning them to a life with a father who was even more emotionally fucked up than me. Knowing, then, that their futures would have no hope for betterment, only more of the long, unbroken chain of neglect, abuse, denial, co-dependence and alienation from society that his family has taught him as family values.

 

These post of mine really are too long. I have tried other blog sites, but this one was the easiest to use. I have a blog on MySpace at

www.myspace.com/hipiichyk

that actually shows the lighter side of my personality. Anyone reading these posts would never know I had a sense of humor. But I cannot post anything on MySpace that could deal with the deep turmoil and unearthing of the domestic strife between myself and my husband because he has access to the MySpace page. I once posted a blog entitled A View From the Outhouse (which I think I will post here, out of pure spite if nothing else, damnit!) that I ended up removing later because he threw a huge fit about it ‘making him look like an ignorant hillbilly asshole’ because I made a reference to us living like the Clampett’s before their oil strike. I think I have seen two episodes of Beverly Hillbillies in my entire life and was using that as a well known reference only. But Guitar Man thinks the world is out to get him because of his shitty, downtrodden childhood and I think he’s a pathetic whiner so I told him I would write where he would never see it. I have to. Because if I can’t open this abscess and drain some of the poison it is going to eat me alive.