Coming from the upbringing he did, change had always been catastrophic for Guitar Man. In the first five years of his life it usually revolved around death, and it started when he was two with the death of his Grandmother, sister and cousins in that car. Then another cousin was killed when snow came off the roof and fell onto the woodpile, collapsing both on top of her five year old frame and suffocating her. That was the story anyway. The little girls parents were also physically abusive. It makes you wonder. Another uncle had two infants die in infancy. That was suspect as well because his wife was very mentally unstable and also from an abusive upbringing.
Later on, F getting involved with his Mom, then S finally leaving B. S sold her property where Guitar Man had been living. It wasn’t his in name but it was his home. He found out it was being sold after the paperwork was done. His mom was moving over east of the mountains to buy new property. GM didn’t want to leave so he moved onto his father’s property. He at least had had electricity at his Mom’s.
Change had never been kind to him. He did and still does fear it. Hates it. Unfortunately, this has sculpted an attitude that change is bad deep within his belief system. I knew this. I told him he didn’t have to come. But I was carrying his child and one of the good things that came out of his upbringing was the belief that you do NOT abandon family. You take care of them. The method of care is not always healthy or nurturing. But you do not leave them.
I couldn’t have stayed at the river all winter, though my spirit wanted to. We moved into my Mother’s yard. It was very difficult. My father was going through a long and laborious dementia in his dying process. He slept most of the time. He was slowly forgetting how to walk. Always demeaning and verbally abusive, it compounded threefold as the illness progressed. He had the very beginnings of lung cancer from asbestos exposure years earlier.
I helped Mom when I could. But you become a child again moving home no matter how old you are. I can’t remember how long we were there now. A long time.
I worked as a pizza delivery person. It got us cash. I had been on the waiting list for housing assistance for about a year, and still waited. I was pregnant and I knew we needed to find a home before the baby was born. I refused to even consider living back up on the land even though Guitar Man talked about improving it. I knew what the winters were like. I didn’t want to do that. Especially not with a newborn. Guitar Man did a lot of work, hard work. Feeling trees, hauling wood, water. But he didn’t know how to help me with the family tasks. Tied to his family by the neck he still didn’t interact with them as a nurturing, well functioning family unit. My resentment sparked arguments.
He talked constantly about how he hated moving. I hated listening to him. Change came again. I saw an ad in the local paper for a low income apartment in a complex in a town 30 miles away. The idea of leaving this town made me feel a wash of hope. Maybe things could get better! I mentioned it to Guitar Man, who of course didn’t like the idea. So I made the decision. I went to see the manager for the two bedroom apartment he had advertised. I told him our camp trailer situation. Turns out a three bedroom apartment had opened up and we were offered it. I took him up on it.
Guitar Man was pissed when I told him. I told him he didn’t have to come with us. I didn’t really think he would and I kind of hoped he wouldn’t. His constant negativity brought me down to suicidal thoughts more than I wanted. I started smoking pot occasionally, even though I was pregnant. Not much, but still, I did it. I was having a difficult pregnancy with constant nausea. It never let up. Twice during that time I made marijuana tea and drank it. It ended the nausea, but it still got me a little stoned. I don’ t know how it affected my boy. What is attributed to genetics and what to that? Those were the only two times during the first six months of pregnancy I felt decent. I didn’t have a good relationship with my care provider. I met a midwife and wish to this day that I had used her then and had not waited to go to her with my last two. I could have really used that support.
So we moved. I could nest. Guitar Man had decided he needed to find a job because he was going to be a father. I admired him a lot for stepping up to that responsibility where so many of his peers, especially coming from that background couldn’t have given a shit. However, there was a problem. The bullet in his spine had left him unable to do the heavy equipment/logger type duties he knew how to do. He didn’t qualify for disability. We tried vocational rehabilitation. The first thing they told him was get a haircut and shave. The female VR case worker he got was a harridan bitch, pushy, obnoxious and by the book to a T. Exactly the worst personality to have GM work with. Part of what she told him was very valid. That you have to jump through societal hoops to get things done. He hated it. He had never liked being ’told what to do’ and every suggestion from them made him feel and think they were only doing that. He couldn’t see past that to the helpful aspects of it. Then again, it wasn’t exactly presented to him in a was he was willing to or able to absorb it either.
The job they found for him, detailing cars for a mechanics shop, put him in a position to do a lot of repetitive movement. His back hurt him constantly. But he never gave up on it. Not once. He didn’t’ like it, but he never gave up. He was acting as a fill-in and they decided they would hire a full time person. One problem. GM was restricted to a 20 pound weight limit. They wrote the job to require a 50 pound limit. Then refused to change it. They told GM and the VR people that he did great work but they were unwilling to make the exception, perhaps out of fear of future injury to him. I don’t know. This was a blow to GM. It only seemed to make his mantra more true. “Nothing ever works out for me!”. I hurt for him. Could do nothing.
Labor and delivery were a traumatic experience. The female CNM I had threatened to have me c-sectioned unless they allowed me to induce. I cold feel contractions coming on, slowly, but they were there. Because they weren’t showing up on the monitor, they wanted to ‘break my water’. I wanted to know how they would do that since the amniotic fluid level had dropped so low. The CNM, whose real name is Jeannie Tremper asked me if she could strip my membranes. I told her absolutely not. She insisted on breaking my water and assured me it would help even though the fluid levels were nonexistence. She again told me there was an on call doctor who would order a c-section if I did not cooperate with her. My gut instinct was to leave. GM stood by helpless when I really needed him just to pack me the fuck out of there and head to the next towns hospital. I felt trapped. I reluctantly agreed to having my water broken. I had refused the oxytocin from past experience. I asked Jeannie Tremper to use the amniotic hook. She told me she would use her finger instead. What happened next was something that can only be described as a rape experience. I had had my water broken before. it had NEVER hurt as much as what she did to me with her finger did. Afterward I was cramping severely and bleeding all over the place. What Jeannie Tremper, had done was gone ahead and stripped my membranes anyway. Without my permission. She raped my membranes out of me. I have never gone through a more painful and out of control birthing process. I am still angry about it and think part of my healing therapy will be in writing a letter to her, her fellow CNM, the doctor in whose office she works and the hospital board. Two years later, after I had gone to a direct entry midwife to have my daughter, I spoke with another Mom who had used Jeannie Tremper’s CNM services. She had a similar story. Jeannie Tremper also stripped her membranes after permission to do so was refused. She should really lose her fucking license.
I was so angry at the treatment that it was the attending nurse who delivered Bird. I told them to keep Jeannie the fuck away from me. Yes, those were the words I used. The other CNM came in seconds after Bird was already laying on my chest. The nurse went to clamp the cord and I barked at her “Leave it ’til it stops pulsating.” She said they could take him to the warmer, I snapped at her “He stays with me!” They finally got the clue and backed the fuck out of there, leaving us alone for a good long time.
Bird had gone long overdue. I am a slow cooker to start with, carry over term babies thanks to my Germanic heritage but I know that I was holding him in longer than necessary because I hated and mistrusted Jennie Tremper and her partner Julie Sherrick (Julie, a CNM who has never had kids or gone through the birthing process) who had delivered my previous two babies through induction as well. I had felt afraid and powerless in my own births until I met a local midwife who birthed my last two girls and allowed me to go through the process entirely without induction though I went 44 weeks with Bunny and nearly 46 with Nunkee. But I digress.
GM had had it with his case worker. He went out and got a night janitor job. I was on maternity leave from my pizza delivery job but had gotten tired of the wear and tear as well as driving all that way for minimum wage. In November I got a job as a teacher’s aide in a Head Start. My eldest daughter, Butterfly was enrolled so she could be with me every day. It was a very long commute for me. Thirty-seven miles one way. I took Bird to his daycare close to where I worked so GM could sleep. Though we received state assistance for childcare we still had a few hundred dollars to pay each month. GM resented this. I would come home to a filthy kitchen with sink and counters full of unwashed dishes, overflowing trash and piles of dirty laundry. My method of asking GM to help was to bitch that he never helped which got me nowhere. He can be held accountable for his lack of initiative as well, but growing up like he had, I don’t think a clean house was a priority.
He talked down about people whose house we clean, in fact. Saying they had to have everything “spotless” and you couldn’t even sit on the furniture. he couldn’t seem to make the distinction at that time between having a neat house and living like a germ obsessed neat freak. I just wanted to walk in the house without dodging piles of crap that hadn’t been put away. We couldn’t communicate on that.
We bought a computer with our tax return. With internet service came porn surfing. Time and again I told GM how distressing I found this. My figure was overweight, post-baby. That wasn’t what he was looking at on the computer. It made me feel like a piece of shit. An ugly, fat and unattractive piece of shit. He had a box of VHS porn movies that one of his friends had given him when the friend went DVD with all his porn. GM said he couldn’t get rid of them because they were still his friends.
The full time job, the travel to it, trying to keep house alone and feed the kids alone made my interest in intimacy non-existent. He didn’t seem to notice or care that if and when we had sex it was all one sided. More often than not I would be running the days events through my head just to keep the fury at what I had allowed myself to become in check. I can only keep the lid of that maelstrom so long before it starts sending out mini-eruptions like the geysers in Yellowstone National Park. Only my geysers have more lava content than Yellowstone’s. A lot more.
I got a job in Bigfork, working with the elementary school. Problem was, Bigfork had very little option for childcare. GM had had such a problem with childcare that he insisted he could watch Bird while Butterfly went to kindergarten. And still work nights.
What happened was Bird, not even age two, would get parked in front of the television set while Dad dozed on the couch. He would prop his bottles and change him if he had to, but there was little interaction. Perhaps it is this, combined with genetics and combined with my marijuana use during pregnancy, but we now have a 6 year old boy who had been kicked out of three daycares the year he was three, whose gone through one very unsuccessful year of kindergarten and two years of counseling. While Bird is not ADHD or Autistic, depending what kind of stimulation he gets he can be very borderline. He is emotionally about 3. He plays best by himself with no external distraction. He has explosive temper tantrums which I attribute mostly to how GM and I had reacted with each other and the kids. I have had him out of school this year to try and give him a year home just to try and grow up a little. I definitely see a dramatic change toward more antisocial behavior the more television he watches.
I couldn’t let that kind of ‘babysitting’ go on. I managed to find a childcare provider in a nearby town, then one in Bigfork. GM protested the extra expense of it. Our rent went up and bills piled up. We couldn’t seem to control the impulse spending, even though it was not huge amounts, still, we frittered away money we shouldn’t.
All this added up. I told him I thought he should move out. Told him I had had it with porn. As usual, he tried to make it seem like it was all my fault because we had, as he put it, “a dead relationship” as far as sex went. Since he could spend literally hours compiling photo collages of starlets and ignore me completely, it was no wonder. I figured and probably told him he could go fuck the computer. I am like that when the geysers erupt. Which they began to do with frequency. We got into a very loud and nasty argument over something. He spoke of leaving and I took Bird out of his arms. GM went ballistic, punching a hole in the bedroom door. I was on the bed and curled my body around Birds in case he decided to go after us or take Bird. He didn’t. I made him pay the apartment manager, who lived right under us, the $50 repair fee.
I gave him a month to find a place to live. I was done. I asked him to please promise me he would leave the porn sites alone. He promised me he would. I had gone through the computer and found everything he had on there and deleted it. I had once been a computer tech and knew how to find the files. I was working at a school, for shit’s sake. I told him this. he was going to ‘barely legal’ sites. A teaching colleague of mine pointed out that I could lose my job if something like that, for whatever reason was found on my home computer. I explained this to GM. A week later I found a compilation of Asian porn on the computer. He had hidden it where he thought I couldn’t find it. He had lied. To this day he will lie about breaking that promise.
I opened one of the nudes with the paint program and wrote in a text box over the top of it that I was done with his lies and he needed to just get the fuck out. I set it as a desktop background. I heard him come in after work, heard him turn the computer on like he did every night. There were a few moments of silence, the computer went off and the front door slammed.
I thought, “Good riddance you lying son of a bitch!” and went to sleep, sad, angry and relieved.
