A Hard Look Within, Part Nine

I didn’t know what post partum depression was. I had heard of it, but I couldn’t understand it.  I didn’t know I was about to live it.

We celebrated Carter’s four week birthday in Park City, Utah. We had made the eleven hour journey with Cain. I was still in shock about the apprenticeship and could not seem to wrap my mind around the fact that when I went home to Montana I would be going without him and with only our new baby. I kept wanting to think it was all a vacation. I didn’t want to be a single parent before my baby was two months old!

Cain had wanted us to stay in Montana for purely practical purposes. He didn’t want to give up the house, deal with moving and storage. Plus, it hadn’t been like the bastards had given us more than two days to completely change our lives anyway! Two days! I still couldn’t believe they could do that.

The drive home was one of the longest drives in my life. I drove down the road to despair on that car ride home. I couldn’t get used to this little being that was completely dependant upon me for his survival. I could see him, touch him, hear him. I nursed him. I bathed him. Yet there was this level of unreality still attached to the idea of him being mine. I couldn’t seem to make the connection that he was a real living breathing human being with feelings, however new. I couldn’t feel him in my heart.

When I got home, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t feel like myself! I didn’t know who or what I was. I was Carter’s mom. But the title ‘Mom’ linked with my name didn’t make sense. I couldn’t wrap my brain around it.

My days began to blur together in a haze. All I wanted to do was sleep. Carter was a good baby, my experience now tells me. I didn’t know enough about healthy breast feeding practices to know not to supplement with formula. I had read somewhere that new mother’s should take advantage of the baby’s naptimes to sleep as well. So I did. Cain sent money home. I stayed in the house and watched cable television. My Mom and, even more rarely, my Dad, would occasionally come to visit, but not often. Mom called everyday to chat about what she was doing. Other than asking in a half hearted sort of way how I was, she didn’t seem to want to hear about any difficulties I was having. So I didn’t talk about it. My Mom had never really wanted children. She felt it was more expected of her. It was what you did after marriage in her day.

I didn’t have my own car at this time. We had used a rental car for Carter and me to get home. Cain’s best friend Leon would come to take me to the grocery store every couple of weeks and check up on us. I never felt that comfortable around Leon and to me the visits seemed awkward. Most weeks would go by with me only going out on the front porch to get the mail, hoping for a letter from Cain.

Cain’s letters were always very eloquently written. Ironically, he could show more emotion toward me in his writing than he ever could in person. I know he was lonely as well and I think it was because of this he found more ways to express the feelings he kept so much to himself ordinarily. We did miss each other.

The letters were a bittersweet blessing. They brought me pieces of Cain but were a tangible reminder of his absence. My heart broke a little every time I got one. I counted the days until we could see one another. I tried to tape letters on my tape recorder, sounds of Carter as he grew bigger. I still have some of the tapes and I sound completely depressed and pathetic. I took pictures by the dozens and always had doubles printed so Cain could see every week how much our son was growing.

I felt like a paper doll playing pretend. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be! I didn’t want to try and figure this out all alone! I didn’t know who to talk to about it. I slept. I ate too much. I gained weight. My sleep schedule, always touch and go before parenting, got really fouled up. I never felt like I had a moment to myself, even in this ignorant self imposed isolation. I stayed up late watching movies that meant nothing to me. Soon, I wasn’t wanting to get up when Carter got up. I would change him, make him a bottle and put him back in his crib. If I was tired I would try to go back to sleep. For a long time I slept in the same room with him, but would put in earplugs to muffle his crying. He would cry for an hour or more before falling asleep in exhaustion.

I was so wrapped up in my own miserable self pity that I couldn’t see or understand that I was emotionally neglecting my baby. I would get up with him later and play a bit with him, but I honestly can’t say if I could have brought myself up out of that black pit far enough to give a shit that I was neglecting him. How my heart cries at the thought of it now. How I so wish I could go back and pick him up, the him that was then, and tell him how much I loved and wanted him. Ah, the sting of the bittersweet ‘if only’.

I still have not forgiven myself for this, post partum or not. I look back and think, with the knowledge and hindsight I have now; “Why didn’t you get up off your fat, lazy ass and DO something? ANYTHING? Why?”

But I couldn’t. My whole world was covered in a black caul and I could not tear my way out of it.

My sister, G gave me her old Chevy Nova. I finally had transportation. Still, though it gave me more self sufficiency, I could not find my way out of this inner blackened landscape of depression.

Carter was almost five months old and I had enough money to drive to Salt Lake City where Cain was now working. I needed to get away. I talked to Cain’s step mom and asked her to take Carter for the five days I would be gone. She agreed to. So I left my little son so I could selfishly go spend a week with his father. Cain didn’t seem to mind. I imagine if I had a hard time adjusting to Carter’s reality being with him day after day, he was even more of a figment to Cain.

My breasts became engorged and the manual breast pump only relieved the pressure a little. I didn’t know how to use it well. It was a constant reminder that I had a child at home waiting for me. I tried my selfish damndest to ignore it. I knew he was taken care of and probably didn’t miss me.

My son. My baby. A child that I didn’t even feel bonded to. I knew on some level that this was seriously messed up, but I didn’t know what to do about it. We didn’t have money to spare for anything. I didn’t know who to reach out to. My internal voice told me only weak people or users went to others for help.

I knew something was wrong with me. I cried over it to Cain. He would hold me, but emotionally he was distant. He was usually emotionally unavailable, but strong emotion on my part, especially the tears seemed to push him even further away. I didn’t know what to think, feel or do. He couldn’t help me. The person I needed most to be there for me couldn’t because he couldn’t deal with emotions.

I knew it was messed up that I was feeling so apathetic toward my own baby. My son. I didn’t know what to do. He needed me! He wasn’t even a very demanding baby, but I still felt stifled. I cried a lot on the drive home. I was numb and exhausted. He seemed happy and well cared for when I returned. Not overly excited to see me or anything. I took him home and the same cycle started again.

I had by this time, moved into the other bedroom in the basement. The mother in me now is horrified to think I did this…being on a whole separate floor from my baby! What if a fire had broken out? What if, what if? But the Creator had been looking out for us then, not that I could see it.

It was a highly unlikely way that brought me to bond with my baby. Having nothing else, looking for something, ANYTHING to alleviate or change the frozen landscape of emotions locking me so tightly in this unchanging world of black misery. What brought me to my son would, down the road, have a hand in taking him from me, but at the time and to this day, legal or not, all I can say is it saved my sanity then and taught me how to look at my son as a person. A real live, feeling, growing and miraculous person.

A Hard Look Within, Part Eight

Seems like my whole life I have been looking critically into my soul demanding “What the hell is wrong with me?”  My dreams of what I wanted out of life have always been vague and uncertain, with no deep driving direction to fuel them.

When they were younger and dating, my mom introduced her sister to my father’s brother.  They fell in love and were married.  Uncle J and Auntie K had six kids together.  Even better than a big family, in my young eyes, was the fact that they really loved each other.  They held hands!  My parents never held hands!

It made me want a big family of my own some day.  My sisters were ten and thirteen years older than me and so by the time I was five, they had moved out.  My middle sister, G had moved back home once when she was seventeen and going to college, but other than that I was raised almost as an only child because of the age gap.

Yet, at twenty-one, when I found myself pregnant I was terrified.  Cain and I weren’t married, in fact he told me he didn’t WANT to be married.  This conflicted with every moral that was drilled into my skull by my very traditional and old fashioned mother growing up.

The day I found out I was pregnant was such a paralyzing moment. I can walk in to that frozen heart-stop every time the door of memory opens on it.  It was one of those moments that, once it has touched your life, no matter what you choose in the outcome, you will never be the same.  For the rest of your life you will carry with you the knowledge that the house of your spirit carried within it another life, not your own, but one which you are completely responsible for weather you choose to let that life into the world or not.  As well, you will live with the responsibility both physical and spiritual of what you choose to do with that new life.

I could tell by the look on the Family Planning nurse’s face what the test results were before she spoke.  Cain was sitting in the chair behind me.  After she told me I turned around to look at him and burst into tears at the look on his face.  He looked condemned.  Like, walking-up-to-the-gallows-to-be-hanged condemned.

I am pregnant and he doesn’t want a kid and now he will leave me.  I thought as I began to sob.

We left the office.  On our way out I had gained a bit of composure, not wanting to bawl in public.  Outside I asked him, “What should we do?” hoping, as my mother’s voice railed in my mind about marriage before sex, that he would ask me to marry him.  Even though, I didn’t really believe in getting married just because you got pregnant, I was hoping maybe that his mind about marriage would change now that this had happened.

“What about abortion?” was what came out of his mouth.

I felt like a second crushing kick to the stomach had come right then that day.  I couldn’t believe that was the first thing out of his mouth.  I felt hurt and angry beyond belief.  I have always been of a pro-choice standpoint.  But I don’t believe you just have an abortion and it’s like nothing ever happened.  There are some serious spiritual consequences for ending a life, no matter how small.  While I didn’t believe in stopping others from making that choice, I didn’t feel I could live with that idea.  Besides, I loved this man.  I was carrying a part of him too now.

On the car ride home I sat with an angry lump in my stomach.  Cain didn’t speak to me.  I was to angry to speak to him.  I was terrified.  In a way, I too, felt condemned.  My life as I knew it would end and what the future held and the hardships and uncertainty involved left me reeling.

I couldn’t get used to the idea of being a mom.  I didn’t know the first thing about it!  I was, as always, afraid of failing.  I felt certain of it in fact.

Yet, I decided to keep the baby.  Cain wasn’t too happy about it, but he wasn’t going to leave me over it.  Cain’s father didn’t like me, and I never felt like his step-mom was entirely forth coming with me though she was always nice to me.  Cain’s father never bothered to get to know me, but felt certain in his arrogant assumptions that he had me pegged as a gold digger.  He had, in fact, told Cain at one point when we first got together that I was only going out with him for the money.  Cain worked part time at a pizza joint.  I worked full time at the title company. It was me Cain borrowed $190 from to buy his school books because his own father refused to help him pay for any schooling though the man was a lineman and worked on power lines for a utility company.  Cain decided to move in with me in part because paying half rent at my house was less money for him than what his Dad was charging him for rent to live at home!

About four months along and we found we were to have a son.  Cain’s father was more friendly to me then.  The brood mare would put forth the first Grandson, so she was tolerable.  Cain’s paternal Grandmother came down, a wonderful woman who was the one person in his family that truly made me feel welcome.  Together she and Cain’s step mom purchased a set of nicer China for us, bought us a large second hand sectional couch in fantastic condition and bought a lot of baby items.  I was at once overwhelmed, gratified and a lot freaked out by the generosity.  I did not want anyone thinking I was using people to get this stuff.  I felt a little bit okay with getting things from his Grandma simply because she seemed to genuinely want me to enjoy them.  It was hard though.  I don’t have that a lot in my family.  I didn’t know what was expected of me for it.  To me, some of it didn’t seem like it came without some agenda, though that could have been my own internal paranoia.

I know what it is liked to not be liked by people.  As a child people had looked at me sometimes and weather it was my face, my expression or the fact that I had always been overweight I had children and sometimes grownups say things or just treat me in ways that made it perfectly clear they didn’t like me.  This hurt my heart very much.  I have quite a sensitivity to things like that and feel things very deeply.  While I can hold a grudge, my most common reaction was to just build an internal wall.  You hurt me once, I won’t every give you a chance again…so the litany in my head went.  I had never done well with people who say cruel and nasty things behind my back then treat me as if I were a welcomed family member to my face.  That duplicity leaves me in a constant state of indecisive insecurity.  I always felt as if I were walking on eggshells.  And it hurt.  A lot.  It is in my nature to want to be open and trusting with people.  It is in my learned survival skills to hold back and come off as stand-offish or cool with people.  When it is family, it is too much to bear.  I dealt with it the only way I knew how.  I just kept my mouth shut and tried to be invisible.  When I was seven months pregnant my landlord told me he found a different house they were going to move onto the property.  They would tear the old one, the chicken-wire shack, I liked to call it on account of the chicken-wire and plaster walls, and move this other one in it.  He would have sold it to us for $10,000 dollars and I didn’t take him up on it because I was for one, a complete fucking idiot, and two, so naïve I didn’t think he was serious.  I was also worried we wouldn’t be able to afford it.  Or something.  All I know is I had my head way up my ass and let that deal slip away.

When I first met Cain, I had been coming off my party-life, unemployment diet, which pretty much consisted of beer, coffee and very little else.  I had lost over forty pounds in less than a month. I began to have dizzy spells and actually fell down a few times, though I didn’t lose consciousness. Not eating made me feel sick to my stomach which made me not want to eat.  My thoughts were sluggish.  I was horrified one day when I reached up under my hair and felt not one, but two bald spots.  One was almost as big as a baseball.  My hair had begun to fall out because I had no protein in my diet.  But everyone told me how great I looked.

After I met Cain and got regular employment all my weight and then some came back.  Cain’s father made comments to him about that too, I later learned.  The pregnancy didn’t help.  Always an emotional eater, it got worse and worse.  By the time our son Carter was born, I was well over 200 pounds.

I had been very depressed when I got pregnant.  I had been, for a year, taking belly dance lessons from a woman in her 50s named Molly.  She was friends with both Cain and I.  Yet, when I became pregnant, she started to treat me differently.  Molly never had kids.  At one point she and Cain and I were going to try and bike ride together to stay in shape.  Being my first pregnancy though, I was always so tired I could barely function.  I was still a night person.  Molly started wanting to go bike riding at five o’clock in the fucking morning!  Cain had no problem with it.  Soon, she and Cain were going on daily bike rides and I was left at home.  I wasn’t worried about an affair, she was married and faithful to her husband, but I grew to deeply resent the fact that the friendship I thought I had with her was obviously influenced by my soon-to-be-motherhood.  Molly was the one person who threw me my one and only baby shower and I will always be grateful to her for that, but our friendship pretty much died by the time my son was six months old.

Being left.  Ever since I was a small child, the idea of being left has held a fear paramount to nightmare proportions to me.  I know in part it is connected to a few childhood incident.  Shrinks call it “abandonment issues”.  Perhaps I wouldn’t have been as jealous as I was of the friendship Cain and Molly maintained if it hadn’t been so obviously exclusive.  It was hurtful.  Yet Cain was never the type to nurture emotionally.  Not even a little.  He was respectful, courteous an attentive lover, yet there was no emotional feedback.  He was and is a very self-centered person.  He knows his own mind and desires and everything else must orbit around his world.  He leans toward arrogance, being a very intelligent person.  That is his preservation skill.  He constantly spoke then, as now, about ‘stupid people everywhere’. Anyone that he considers of inferior intelligence is classified one of the ‘stupid people’.  This bothered me a great deal.

Cain, after leaving school, and under constant pressure from his father, gave in to that pressure, paid the union dues and signed the books to become a lineman’s apprentice.  He worked with his father’s company for awhile.  While learning to run the backhoe he accidentally misjudged and tipped it over backwards. He was not injured, but it cracked the window of the backhoe.  It also, no doubt, gave the other lineman something to laugh about.  It did not sit well with Cain’s father, whose own arrogance was fucking mind-boggling.  It was only a couple of months later that Cain fell asleep at the wheel driving a line truck home and drove off the road.  He awakened enough to keep it from flipping, but it hit the ditch with both front wheels hard enough to drive them firmly up into the engine compartment, doing extensive damage.  He was fired.

I knew Cain had no interest or desire for this field of work.  But his fathers kept after him.  Cain’s father and mother, both born in Canada had met at a drunken party one night.  After that one night, Cain was conceived and his parents ’did the right thing’ and got married.  After Cain was born his father worked for a few years there in Canada, but at the age of four decided that, to better support his family, he would become a lineman.  Then he went to America to work.  Needless to say, divorce eventually followed.  Cain lived with is mother in Canada until he was fifteen.  He never even went and stayed with his father.  But he was not at all close to his mother and needed to get away from her.  He wanted his father to be proud of him.  His father was only proud of himself it seemed to me, and unless Cain lived his life according to his father, well, suffice it to say I never heard a ’Well done!’ come out of that man’s mouth.

Cain went to work for a printer.  Carter was born in the fall.  Three weeks after he was born Cain came home to tell me the printer’s business had fallen off and his job was cut.  That was on a Tuesday.  The next day, Cain got a call from the lineman apprenticeship program.  They had a position for him. Be in Park City, Utah by Friday.  That quick.  Our son wasn’t even a whole month old and now his father was being called out of state to work.  I felt my world shift again.  I had no support structure outside of his dad and step-mom.  My mother made it clear she was old enough to not want to deal very much with babies.  My father hadn’t even come to see him until he was a week old.  I had not friends but Jessica and we actually hadn’t spoken with each other in about two years.  Cain was my world, weather he liked it or not.  Now I had a new baby and a husband getting ready to leave.

I hadn’t listened to Depeche Mode since that one awful night, but I could taste its echoes in my head as a reminder: You’re going to be left alone.

Again.

A Hard Look Within, Part Seven

Bryan was an intelligent, personable well read and well spoken individual.  He never spoke down to me or would have ever raised a hand against me or any woman.  Unfortunately, he had no problem with holding no job, allowing other people to support him and he was a thief.

I tend to be more naïve than I like, and I am an idiot when it comes to relationships.  Bryan was captivating in his intellectual capacity.  I was blinded by his bullshit.  Bryan ended up moving in with me.  Sort of.  Some of his cookware ended up at my place, in fact, I still have the pizza pan his sister gave him for his birthday all those years ago.

Bryan had an old military backpack with his clothes packed inside.  Instead of a move in, it was like an extended crash-over.  We never really agreed to stay exclusive to one another, though, while he was staying there I didn’t see anyone else.

We bonded over coffee and getting stoned.  Smoking pot that I purchased all the time turned me into a moody bitch.  I didn’t like it.  I did it anyway.

I knew Bryan occasionally swiped a pack of cigarettes.  I didn’t really want to know what or if he took other things.  I considered myself immune until the day I got off my courier job and Bryan, who was supposed to pick me up since I was letting him use my car to ‘look for work’, didn’t show up.  Chuck had his son give me a ride home in the courier car.  No Bryan.  I thought perhaps he was in an interview.  Since I had no phone he didn’t really have a way of calling, but I was pissed.  He could have left a message at my office.

The hours rolled by and I finally went to bed at midnight deciding I would walk across town to the police station in the morning and report my car stolen.

Around three in the morning Bryan came in.  With some guy I had never met before named Jesse.  I was up and snarling.

What the fuck?  Where the hell were you? Give me my fucking car keys right now!  Do you know I was going to call the cops in the morning?

Sorry, sorry, had a job interview in Missoula.

Missoula?!? That’s 175 miles away!  And who the fuck is THAT!?

I actually was pretty reserved for how I was feeling, confronted with a complete stranger in my own home and not wanting to make a scene.

Jesse needed a place to crash for a couple days….

Jesse actually was a very like-able person, but cut from the same cloth as Bryan.  I don’t know if he was a thief, he never took anything from me.

I began hiding my pot stash the day after I came home and Bryan and Jesse had been helping themselves to it.  Bryan had decided to get my little .22 Jennings pistol out, trying to show off to Jesse his vast knowledge of firearms, handguns in particular.  While trying to fast eject the bullets from the pistol by pulling the slide back repeatedly and as fast as he could, one of the shells didn’t eject and the gun went off, missing Jesse’s kneecap by less than a foot, and destroying my favorite Alice Cooper tape.  I never did find out where that slug went.  I hid the gun.

The shine was beginning to wear off Bryan, big-time.  In this time as well, he had introduced me to a friend of his I’ll call Cain.  Another intellectual, but this guy was working to put himself through college.  His hair was naturally curly, long and stood out from his head like  electro shock, when he took his huge felt cowboy hat off.  Couple that with the floor length black duster on a well proportioned six-foot frame and you had a very imposing figure.  I was twitter-pated.

Cain was a gamer, a role playing gamer.  People are most familiar with Dungeons and Dragons and all the good or ill associated with the idea of it.  There are, however, many, many different role playing games on the market ranging from those like Dungeons and Dragons to more science fiction styles to everything in between.  Instead of having a game board and pieces the person running the game, called the Game Master, spends time either setting up the scenarios from the book or making up his own.  Like puzzles there are situational challenges and obsticles to overcome.  Using dice and rolling numbers to create stats like strength, endurance, physical beauty, charisma and the like, the players create characters to run in the game.  Everything is determined by roll of the dice.  You roll to attack in a battle but also to parry or dodge.  If you come to a booby-trap your dice roll along with you character’s ability to disarm the booby-trap all play a part.

Cain was a very imaginative game master and ran an awesome campaign.  I enjoyed the challenges he set for us.

Contrary to popular belief and misconception, we didn’t do drugs, (Bryan and I were the only pot-heads or drinkers in the group) hallucinate, summon the devil, try to actually become our imaginary characters or sacrifice any innocents in the playing of the game.  It’s a game.  Role playing.  Like acting with words, for lazy people with no stage.  My eldest sister got wind of us playing, and being an extreme rabid fundamentalist I once endured (after I got phone service) a three hour lecture on how I was “playing on Satan’s playground” and “inviting all sorts of evil and demons into” my life by perusing an activity in a fantasy based setting where we could pretend to use magic and didn’t go to church on Sunday.

God and I had a good laugh over that later.

There was an odd occurrence that came about one time when my landlord, Chuck came over to check the pump under my house.  As I have said I always felt uneasy with him.  As we were under the house, looking at the water levels he started to ramble on about the office politics.  How some of the workers made crude jokes he didn’t appreciate.  Like one of the male office members talking about his ‘pud’.  This, being raised by depression era parents, was a rather old term slang for penis, one not often heard anymore.  I wondered why the hell he was telling me this and I couldn’t believe I had actually just heard the word ‘pud’ come out of the mouth of my landlord.  He then began to go on that ‘some of the office staff’ thought that maybe there was something going on between him and I on account of him letting me slide on the rent.  He further went on to say ‘someone’ at the office was insinuating that I was paying for rent with sex.

I didn’t have to think long who could have been spreading THAT particular rumor.  After all, Joan hating me was no secret.  Why stop at offfice bullying?  I had no proof, but you get a feel for these things.  To this day I don’t know what Chuck’s intention was in relaying that information to me.  I didn’t want to know! He did not make me feel at ease and in fact I got out from under that house as soon as I could.

Soon after I came home from work to find Bryan packing his knapsack.  He told me he was going to Seattle.  I was relieved.  I didn’t know how long he planned on being gone.  Didn’t care.  Cain had taken to flirting with me on occasion and I was really falling for him.  Bryan left for the highway to hitch a ride and I went to Cain’s parent’s house where he still lived.  It was like we had just been waiting for Bryan to leave.

Imagine Bryan’s surprise when he showed up a month later, after no contact at all with me, to our Friday night game session at another mutual friend’s house.  I was sitting on the couch with Cain.  I had my feet propped up in his lap.  Bryan made some gracious comment about how he was happy for me.  Asked me for a ride to my house after to get his knapsack, which he not only had left at my house but had left in my bedroom.  Arrogant, assuming son-of-a-bitch.

But I was with Cain now.  Cain and I would change each others lives forever.  I had finally found ’the one’ to spend the rest of my life with.  So I told myself.   I underestimated the internal damage I carried within, and how that would effect both our worlds.  In fact, it is only in recent years that I came to understand self-sabotage.

Cain and I were together for almost a year before he moved in with me.  Trying to hold a job and take physics classes proved too much for Cain.  Our relationship no doubt took its toll on him as well.  He opted for ‘taking a break’ from school and working.  He never has gone back.  We both worked and paid the bills.  We never really planned or talked about the future.  We had been together a year and a half before we got the news that would change our lives.

I had messed up on my birth control pill pack.  We were going to have a son.

A Hard Look Within, Part Six

I stayed with my folks about three days.  It wasn’t long.  I went home and was greeted by a temporary job offer from my landlord who owned a title company.  Their courier girl was on maternity leave and for three months they needed someone to take her place.  Full time at the then-current minimum wage of $3.75 an hour.

My landlords names were Chuck and Kathleen and they both worked at the title company.  They hated each other and it was apparent.  Kathleen was a bit of a bitch and Chuck was just sort of a crabby weird little guy.  I didn’t feel very comfortable around either of them, but I needed the work and they were cutting me a break.  They could have thrown my ass out.

So began the job of courier.  It was fairly fast paced and easy.  I was out of he office most of the time and that suited me just fine.  I got to avoid the office politics, or so I thought.  One of the office managers took an active dislike to me.  Her name was Joan.  A gray-haired late 50s, early 60s something woman with wide, vapid blue eyes, short curly hair,  stacked like a porn star. This woman hated me.
But, being raised by depression era children, she was my elder and I treated her accordingly. For awhile.

Joan was one of these petty little women who was very good at using her position of power to screw with other people, mainly, me.  She treated me as if she thought I would lie to my own Grandmother and steal out of a church coffer.  This made me extremely angry.  What’s more, she tried to talk down to me and act as if I were stupid.  The fact that I was a smoker at this time of life also gave me a black mark in her book of judgments and she acted as if I were filthy.

Now, it is not in my nature to meekly accept ill treatment at the hands of others for long.  I can’t stand to see other people bullied and, having grown up at the hands of a bully myself it was deeply programmed into me to rebel.  However I took it from her for longer than normal because I was afraid of losing my job. How many people over the years have suffered at the hands of workplace bullies because of this?  How many still do?

I have to give the old hag credit for subtlety.  She knew how to harass with the small stuff.  Nit picking everything.  They got a huge shipment of office supplies and I had to put them away.   She didn’t like how I stacked the toilet paper rolls in the cabinet so she made me re-do all one hundred rolls of them to her specifications, while she stood there watching to ’make sure’ I did it correctly.   She  tried to tell me that same day it was my job to clean the bathroom if we were ‘slow‘.  This struck me as very odd since I was hired to be a courier.  I found out from another office woman that I got along with, Brenda, that they hired a cleaning lady come in to do all the cleaning and the office staff wasn‘t expected to do it.  I could not figure out what this woman’s deal was.  I had done nothing but be respectful to everyone in that office.  She knew I had gotten behind in my rent.  I dressed professionally.  I even wore a black derby hat.  Was it the hat?  Did she hate my hat?  These thoughts kept circling in my head.

When I first was getting to know the ropes of the job, Joan would take time out of her stack of work to sort through my deliveries, putting them in the order she thought they ought to be, then telling me that was how they were to be delivered.  The problem was, after the first week or two, she kept trying to do that.  I found that, by following her method of delivery, I was not only  back tracking all over town, but taking twice as long.  It made me feel like a chicken, running around willy-nilly with my head cut off.

So, true to my own rebellious nature and what I considered a superior sense of efficiency to do my own job, I would sort through the stack on the way out the door, rearranging as I went, plot my driving route by the time I was in the office courier car and be on my way.

Joan must have caught wind of this because soon after that she changed tactics.  Part of my job was to carry a pager in the event they had a rush document or needed me to get hold of them.  It was a voice pager, so it would page their voice in a rather static laden  message.  I couldn’t page them back and they couldn’t hear what I said which was just as well because after Joan started on her new harassment tactics nothing that came out of my mouth at the sound of her voice was even remotely civilized.

I began like this.  I liked the other 99% of the office staff and wanted to do my job to the best of my ability, so I would make a walk-through of the office before going out to see if there was anything else anyone had going out that they may not have had time to get into my courier box.  I could tell that a lot of the folks appreciated this extra effort on my part.  I was starting to be more at ease with the people, even though I was still on the fringes and liked it that way.  After checking with Joan, I would head out the door.

Four blocks down the road, Joan paged me back to the office to pick up a document that needed to be delivered A.S.A.P.  I took it in stride because that happened.  Out the door again I went, to go deliver said document.  Before I arrived at my destination, however, Joan paged me back to the office, again.  Another ‘high priority’ delivery.  Odd, I thought.  What a strange day!

But it didn’t end with a day.  It became a constant thing.  Being rather gullible at times, I even thought that it was just a busier week in the business world and since I had no idea what level of importance these documents really held I had no clue.  That is until one particularly frustrating day when I did have actual rush deliveries other office members needed to get out and Joan had paged me back to the office no less than four times for ‘rush’ deliveries.  One of these ’rush’ deliveries of hers was going to my new friend Floss at the courthouse, and I knew some of those courthouse documents were really important. Upon my arrival at the courthouse, I apologized profusely to Floss, a very nice older lady with a wicked sense of humor, who was the clerk of court.  She laughed and told me it was no big deal.  There was no rush on that document at all.

What?!?

No, it wasn’t a rush.  In fact it was some minor document they just needed to be sure was filed BY THE END OF THE WEEK!

Joan, you dirty bitch.  I was pissed.  I have to say, though, I began to look more closely at the documents I was delivering.  Soon after, I knew what was truly a rush and what wasn’t.  I talked more to the people I delivered to  find out what they may need.  Call it professionalism or ego.  I did NOT want to look bad in the job I was doing!

I was still surprised that Joan was going so out of her way with this crap.  Did this woman have no life and nothing to do at her desk all day?  She was actually MAKING time in her day specifically to fuck with me.  What the hell was up with that?  I didn’t feel like I could go and complain to anyone, because Joan had been with this company a long time.  I was a temp.  My landlords were intimidating to me, Kathleen because of her constant surly nature and Chuck just because he gave me a vibe that made me feel extremely uncomfortable without knowing why.  He had told me once that he viewed me like he would his own daughter, but that didn’t make me feel all warm inside.  It made me feel like I needed a shower and a nightlight.

The other partner in the business, who was higher up on the office food chain than Joan, was a very sweet lady named Connie whom I respected very much.  But I just didn’t know how to stand up for myself in an office setting at that time of life.  I spoke with Connie a few times and sort of clued her in that I thought Joan was perhaps being a bit hard on me.  Connie, bless her heart, told me if I had an problems or questions to just come to her.

Joan began making accusations to me that I was taking too long on deliveries and that the gas gauge was showing that I was using too much gas for the amount of deliveries I completed.  She was in charge of the fuel card for the car of course.  Yet I knew I had cut my delivery time in half by foregoing her delivery methods.  I found out as well, that Chuck and Kathleen would let their son use the company car on occasion.  Still, it bothered me a great deal that I was being accused of something I was not doing.  Joan went  so far even, as to complain to Chuck and Kathleen about it.  I was called into the office at least twice and questioned about my supposed ‘activities’.  I told the truth, gave them an account of where I went, including driving uptown or home for lunch, which I was allowed to do per company policy.  Nothing came of it, but it rankled.  I was done trying to please that woman with my job performance.  I knew that nothing I did would change her opinion of me.  I knew that her harassment wouldn’t stop.  I also learned something else that I could use to my advantage.  No one else seemed to give a shit one way or the other what I was doing as long as the job got done.

This is where the dual side of my nature raised its rebellious head in full.

Before, I had tried to adhere to the no smoking policy Joan wished to have in the company car.  After, I powered down all the windows to let the smell out while driving with the butt hanging out the window between drags.  I learned that one window was more than sufficient while smoking and all windows should follow after smoking the day the cherry red end flew off , out the front window, sailed in the back and burned a dime sized hole in the seat.  I spent my whole lunch hour that day at my house with the gray thread carefully sewing and weaving that hole and another I discovered but was sure wasn’t mine.  I did a great job, too, you couldn’t even tell.

Before, I planned the quickest route through town.  After, I took alternate and scenic routes and always made sure to drive at least five miles under the speed limit.

Before, I would leave for lunch late and get back early.  After, I took random hour and a half lunches.

As before, I would make my office walk-through before heading out.  After, when I came to Joan’s office,  I would look her in the eye and then ask her, speaking very slowly, as you would to a retarded child, if there were aaaannnnnyyyy other IMPORTANT doc-u-ments that needed to go out RIGHT AWAY?  No? Okay.  Then I will be RIGHT BACK, after AALLL the other deliveries were completed!  Okaaaayyyy?

Then I turned on my heel and walked out the door with a touch of evil glinting in my eye.  When my pager went off four blocks later with her prissy, demanding nasal twang, I giggled like a mad bastard and shut that damned pager right the hell off.

I knew I was being childish and I just didn’t care.  My time at the office was winding down and I was fed up.  I had decided to quit smoking.  I had wanted to for a long time and I felt it was time.  I must have chewed a case of Big Red gum and that first week was hell.  But I bragged about it to the ladies of the courthouse and the were very supportive of it and cheered for me the whole time.  I had been on the wagon for a week when Jerry, the regular girl wanted to come back for a day to get a feel for the job again.  When I got in the car the next day, I smelled cigarettes.  I found a half smoked butt in the ashtray.  I left it.

The next day, Joan confronted me and accused me of smoking in the car.  Well, I hadn’t been (not for a whole week!) and was able to tell her that truthfully.  I told her I had smelled cigarettes in the car and saw the butt there as well and suggested she talk to Jerry.  Of course she refused to believe me.  I finally got mad enough I told her to call the courthouse and talk to the ladies there about my quit smoking progress and left the office to do my work.  She may have called them, I don’t know.  My days were fast coming to a close.  The day before my last day, out of sheer spite, I picked up a cute little hitch hiker guy and gave him a ride into Whitefish, seventeen miles away just to kill some time so I didn’t have to be in the office.  My give-a-shitter was broken for good by that point.  It would be more than a year later that Joan would try and get back at me, but for now, we were done.

Life on the outside of work had still been brewing its paths and lessons and the next one was already in place.  His name was Bryan.

A Hard Look Within, Part Five

 

For about five months after I had broken up with Rich I drifted in this haze of aimless irresponsibility. After two months, Jessica moved back home with her parents. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I could drink a twelve pack of Keystone beer and not get a buzz. Wow. What an accomplishment.

 I was exhausted. Unemployed. I couldn’t see any point to my life or any hope in it. I was miserably lonely. My sleep schedule was so messed up I was staying up until after sunrise and sleeping all day. I felt wrung out, hollow and empty. My landlords had let me slide behind on my rent, but that time would be drawing to a close if I didn’t do something. That was the problem. I was sunk so low emotionally that I couldn’t see a way out.

 I spent my time wandering the streets of Kalispell while the town slept. There is a sacred stillness that descends in the wee hours between midnight and dawn. The quiet peace of a dreaming town. I always felt like I was looking for something unseen and impossible to lay physical hands on. I found some consolation in the night winds blowing through the branches of the giant willow in that yard on 3^rd Street on the west side where I lived. I called her the Grandmother Tree because she is over a hundred years old if not older. I would stand a her base, staring up at the huge branches, wind whispering among the leaves, feeling somehow that if something as huge as that tree had stood the test of time and man, I should somehow, some way, be able to as well. I would sometimes go into the yard to lay my hands on her bark, a nameless yearning tugging in my belly. I just couldn’t figure it out.

 I met a few cool cats out for their nocturnal wanders and we would stop an chat, their temporary companionship easing for a moment the hollow echoes in my heart and mind. Sometimes I would go down to Woodland Park to listen to the sleepy rustling of the ducks and geese at roost in the night. Listening to the night sounds in this sleeping mid-sized city, I could hear the whisper of possibility for something more. At the same time, those night winds blew through the heart of me leaving an empty, nameless ache.

 On particularly lonely nights I would wander to Finnegan’s restaurant to have coffee, flirt with the cute waiter and hope maybe someone I know would come in. Party buddies were better company than silence. Still, bars were never my thing. I seem to hold an unapproachable air about me when I do wander in to them. On the rare occasions that I found some main street dive with a blues band I would take up a table by myself and it would stay that way. On one or two occasions much older men asked me to dance. I danced, but I never invited company or conversation and always left soon after. I had seen the type of people that inhabited bars on a regular basis, and that wasn’t my thing. I never wanted to go into heavier drug use, and I had already reached the bottom as far as I was concerned.

 It was some faceless night. I was in my living room listening to Depeche Mode, which isn’t very uplifting music for happy people, much less people in the state of mind I was in. It was 3 a.m. and I wanted to die. My life was going nowhere. I hadn’t eaten in two days and I couldn’t seem to bring myself up out of this hole of despair. To top it all off, I was out of cigarettes.

 I had a small pistol my sister had given me in case Rich ever came back. A .22 Jennings. I had shells for it. I couldn’t stop crying and I just wanted it done.

 Get out of this house.

 That voice again. Call it intuition or Divine Guidance. I think of it as the latter. At least I do now.

 “I want to die! I hate this fucked up life! I can’t do anything right!” I said aloud, tears on constant leak.

 Call your Mom.“It’s three o’clock in the goddamned morning! She doesn’t need me calling! She‘ll be pissed.”

 

 I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I had done wrong. I couldn’t even keep a job! I was a failure. I shouldn’t be alive.

 Get out of the house. Call your Mom.I should be dead! It’s not worth living, living like this!

 

 It’s not your time. Get out of the house. Call your Mom.There is nothing worse than being nagged by the voice in your head telling you to live when you are trying to find a way to die.

 

 I felt I had to do something, anything, and the voice was winning.

I left the house and walked across town to Finnegan’s. I had enough change to use the payphone.

 “Hello?” her voice was groggy. And concerned.

“It’s me.”

“What’s wrong?” fully awake now as only a mother whose kid calls in the middle of the night could be. I started to cry. That was such a loaded question.

“I’m sorry. I can’t explain right now. Could you just please come and get me?” I couldn’t keep the tears out of my voice.

“Where are you? Are you in Kalispell?”

“Yeah. Finnegan’s.”

“See you in a bit.”

 I picked a seat at the counter. Lit up the half smoked butt I’d dredged out of the ashtray outside the door. The graveyard waiter I normally flirted with cast me a few odd glances. I tried to smile and pretend nothing was wrong but I know I must have looked like train wreak. I know the smile on my face looked like it didn’t’ belong. It felt like it didn’t belong and I’ve never been a very good liar. I must have presented a fairly odd picture, pale, eyes red and bloodshot from crying. I stared into my water glass and stole a glance down the counter at the balding fat man four seats down from me. He looked like someone who had just crawled out from under a rock. I had the discomforting impression that we could have shared the same rock just then. Inward, I cringed. Another voice in my head, one that wasn’t so nice told me;

 

Look. That’s you. Different face, same broken interior design.

 

Fuck you, I thought.

Soon, the door of the restaurant opened. I was quite amazed, actually. Beside my mother stood my father. The man whom I knew didn’t even like me. My stomach lurched.

We rode in silence which was a second shock to me. I expected him to launch into a tirade at any moment. He didn’t. What was more is, I caught him glancing at me once and I was stunned by the expression in his eyes. Concern. I had seen many expressions on my father’s face before in life, concern was not one I recognized.

But I was never one to ask for help either. How could I? If I did I was either told I wasn’t trying hard enough or I was a lazy user.

 They didn’t smoke, but bum that I was then I must have gotten a couple bucks for a pack somewhere along the way. The nicotine helped me feel a little better for a moment.

 For a moment.

 For a moment I was safe. For a moment I was small again under my parents protection. For a moment time could stop it’s downward spiral.

For a moment, the demons were held at bay.

 

 

 

 

A Hard Look Within, Part Four

I knew Rich was sick. Mentally. I had just been too young and naïve to know it. Dealing too with my own issues I couldn’t see it. I didn’t really know how severe his mental health issues were until about a month after I broke up with him.

 

By then I had gone on my own sort of rebellious path of self discovery/destruction. Mostly it involved men and booze. Then one of the boozing men introduced something I had only tried twice with ill results: marijuana.

 

I guess back then what happened was that I had felt so repressed growing up in high school, then in that relationship with Rich that I just took sowing wild oats to a whole new extreme. At least an extreme for a shy, introverted girl raise by Depression Era parents with a religious background. What I did would be nothing for most people, but for me this was extreme, over-the-top behavior.

 

I had been reputed to be a bad ass in school. I didn’t do a lot of the things I wanted to do, like sneak out of my parents house because my Mom for years had told me how much my sisters doing that had hurt her. I didn’t want my parents to be any more ashamed and angry with me than they were. Really, I only wanted them to love me and actually enjoy my presence in their lives. I didn’t want to hurt them. I, save for a handful of times, always went where I said I would be and always came home when I was supposed to. Looking back on it now I really wish I had snuck out more. Perhaps it would have saved me a headache later.

 

After Rich I turned for the first time in my life hardcore to the party life. My friends Jessica and Mona moved in to room with me and we started drinking a lot. I lost my job at the dairy because staying up all night screwing some guy I used to go to school with was more important to me. The truly sad part was that the guy told me not to tell anyone we slept together because he didn’t want to ruin his reputation. That made me laugh because everybody in school thought he was a fucking putz. It also hurt me a lot. I convinced myself that I was using these guys instead. And more guys there were. With no job I didn’t buy food but somehow we always had money for beer and coffee. I lost 40 pounds the first month after I broke up with Rich and for the first time in my life discovered the power of my own sex appeal. Which I used like a common slut, I might add. I found a smorgasbord of men for one night stands. Well, it was a smorgasbord for me anyhow. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty in a very short period of time.

 

I picked a hitch hiker up that ended up being my boyfriend for three months. He was the one that introduced me to the joys of marijuana. Jessica was my partner in crime. We soon ran Mona off, I think the wild life scared her.

 

We had no phone service. One night my hitch hiker, Terry had stayed over. Early in the morning there was a pounding at the door and Jessica answered. It was Rich. She gave me an odd look when she told me he was there. I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks. I came out to see what the hell he wanted. He walked into the house. I had to either walk backwards or be stepped on. He was talking non-stop the whole time. He wanted to know who was in my bedroom, what I was doing with someone in my bedroom. I told him it was none of his fucking business. He started to babble at me that he had walked the seventeen miles to Kalispell from Columbia Falls and he had counted every one of his steps. I asked him if he was fucking drunk. He then started to tell me all his friends had turned against him and it was all my fault, that I had turned them all against him.

 

I told him I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about and told him to get the fuck out of my house. He shoved past me to the kitchen and I asked him what the fuck he was doing and continued telling him to get out. When Jessica heard me yell, “What the fuck are you doing with that knife?!” she was out the door to try and call the cops from the neighbors house.

 

Rich grabbed one of my kitchen knives and proceeded to try stabbing himself in the chest through his shirt and coat. I freaked out and tried to grab him. Ironically, the only though in my head was, What the hell am I going to tell the cops about a dead body in my house?

 

He and I struggled by the counter, he jerked away from me and I heard a pop noise and felt warmth flood over my hands and legs. I froze in shock and he reeled away from me.

 

For a brief moment I felt myself truly teetering on the thin edge of sanity. My mouth was open, but I couldn’t breathe. I expected him to collapse thinking I was watching a man die. He’s stabbed himself in the heart! I thought. Then I realized he was not only not going down, he was still trying to stab himself. I felt a rush of confusion then dared to look down at my hands. It was then I noticed the paper biggie sized soda cup on the counter laying on it’s side. It had held ice the night before which had melted. Knocking it over in our struggles was what made the sound and it was water dousing me, not his blood.

 

In a snap my paralyzed fear was consumed in towering fury. I was consumed in some unholy rage right then. In two steps I was over to him and yanked the knife out of his hands, by the blade, not even caring at this point. I knew he was over the edge. Somehow we were back across the dining room and he had me shoved up against t he door, pinning me while simultaneously trying to open it. It was then I saw Terry standing casually in the doorway, one arm propped up, looking for all the world like he was watching us play a friendly game of darts.

 

“Terry! HELP ME!” I screamed as Rich began striking at me. Terry sauntered over and made a half assed attempt at putting Rich in a full Nelson. Rich, suddenly realizing there was another person there seemed to revive from his animal state and ran out the front door. Jessica came back, none of the neighbors had been home.

 

I have never been so pumped on adrenaline in my life. I knew we had to make a police report. I stood there in the dining room and we talked about going to the police station, when I rubbed my forehead.

 

“You’re bleeding!” Jessica said, alarmed, pointing at my head. Confused, I reached for my forehead, thinking I was bleeding from there and noticed the blood in my hand. I had forgotten I grabbed that knife by the blade and all for of my fingers were gashed open and oozing blood. I couldn’t even feel it right then. I stared at it for quite awhile, in complete disbelief, waiting for the pain that didn’t come until later, then went in the bathroom to wrap my hand.

 

We went to the police station and Terry took off. There were large, half-dollar sized drops of blood on the walkway in front of my house. The animal had wounded himself after all. We wrote out the police report. I told them how Rich tried to kill himself with the knife, about our ensuing struggle. Before we even left the station the dispatcher informed us the police had him in custody. They had arrested him as he was heading back to my house.

 

For the first time, I was truly scared. He was obviously off his fucking rocker. That he held me personally responsible for his friends turning against him pissed me off and worried me. He had been heading back to my house. Why? Not for anything good, that much I knew. Either the next day or the day after, I called the Violence Free Crisis line at my mother’s suggestion. The advocate suggested I try and find out when he would be released so I could get an order of protection.

 

I called the police station and got the female dispatcher. I asked if he was still incarcerated. The dispatcher asked me if I was a family member.

 

“No. I am his ex-girlfriend. The one in whose house he tried to kill himself.”

 

“We don’t release that information to anyone but family.” the dispatcher informed me.

 

“But he has hurt me before and may try to hurt me or himself again! He tried to stab himself in my house!”

 

What I heard next I still have a hard time believing, but this is what I was told by this dispatcher.

 

“Unless you are family I cannot release that information. Besides, you WERE caught in bed with another man!”

 

“WHAT?!! He’s my EX-boyfriend!” I shouted. I couldn’t believe what that bitch had just said. I hung up the phone in tears. What had that waste of skin told the police? He was my distraught boyfriend come home to find me in bed with another man? Seriously? He hadn’t lived with me in over a MONTH!

 

When I called the crisis line back and relayed the conversation I had with the woman dispatcher my advocate blew a gasket.

 

“SHE SAID WHAT??!!! I’ll take care of this. I’ll call you back.”

 

I don’t’ know what that wonderful woman told that bitch dispatcher but when she returned my call we found out he was going to the state rehab/mental health center in Great Falls for a month for evaluation.

 

I didn’t have a phone but he began calling my parents house. He was so sorry and he was getting help, etc. etc. He had a hang-up about my tattoo, the one I had gotten to cover his name. It is a collage. I told my tattoo artist I wanted a half-Elf woman and a sword or dagger in the collage. I told him to use some artistic license to put something else in it. So what I ended up with is a half-Elf woman’s face, partially obscured by hair. Over the hair on her face is a dagger. To the left of the dagger, coming out of the hair is the head of a snarling demon. The demon was my friends idea, I was 18, what the hell and whatever. Rich called my mother to ask if the demon in the tattoo was supposed to symbolize him.

 

Since the demon was my tattooist’s idea, and this tattooist was the guy that told me about Rich hiding from me at friends houses and he knew it was a freedom gift to myself, it could have been what he had in mind. I don’t know. But I still HAVE that tattoo.

 

Rich talked about getting back together. I made non-committal noises. I still didn’t want to hurt him. I knew he was sick and wanted him to get better. He informed me that before we got back together I had to go get an HIV test and be tested for STDs.

 

I ran into his father in the restaurant. Frank informed me that his son needed healing and I needed to stay away from him since I was the one who had driven him to suicide. Like having parents who raised him telling him he was so smart and could do no wrong or take no responsibility didn’t help get him there. Not to mention the genetic propensity for depression. I couldn’t believe it. Frank was telling me his fucked up son was all my fault too. It was like something Rich himself would have said.

 

Needless to say, I had no interest in getting back together with him. After getting out of Great Falls he came back for awhile and kept a low profile, eventually finding true love and a sugar mama in a cousin of a mutual friend. He and his brother Donny got drunk together, stole their other brother’s car and plowed it into a bunch of trees. Rich had his jaw wired shut. I saw him in the restaurant and to try and prove to him and myself everything was water under the bridge ( I still had nightmares then) I went over to chat with him. Soon his knew girlfriend, Pam, who was about ten years older came in. He began to tell me how wonderful she was. What a miracle what with all her health problems she had. How happy they were together. When I looked at her, it was the strangest thing. She seemed to have this darkness around her. That voice came back again.

“She’ll be dead in three months.”

 

Two and a half months later I ran into her cousin. Pam had died of a sudden heart attack from complications to do with diabetes.

 

I had nightmares about him for about two years. He would be coming to kill me. I knew this was some process of unresolved emotion I needed to work on. At first, in the dreams, I was helpless and at his mercy. As time progressed, I was able to fight him. Then fight him to a draw. Each dream I made more progress. The last dream I ever had of him, The fight ended quickly, and he was naked, cringing. In the dream I told him to leave and never bother me again. I never dreamt of him after that.

 

Sometime after Pam’s death, unable to sponge of someone else, Rich moved to Livingston with his mother. I saw him once years later and it took me a minute to realize who that scruffy, fat guy was. He was bullshitting with some guy he and his mother were having coffee with, trying to tell him his expert opinion on the guys own field of work.

 

I saw him notice me and the look that came across his face was priceless. Like he just took a big bite out of a cat shit sandwich. I suddenly realized that he was way more disturbed by seeing me than I was at seeing him. It occurred to me that the bastard still wanted everything to be my fault! I looked at him, his appearance. The years hadn’t been kind. He was pathetic.

 

He got up at one point to pass by my table. He looked like he had a stick shoved sideways up his ass and the wave he gave me looked more like an epileptic twitch response. I gave him my best condescending smile, vindictive bitch that I am. With the pot-gut, striped shirt and unkempt hair he looked like a fat hair twelve year old.

I went back to reading my book. I never saw him again.

 

Two years ago, his sister-in-law told me they found him dead in the motel room he lived in in Choteau. Heart attack, they say. He was forty-one.

 

A Hard Look Within, Part Three

I dated a couple guys in early high school from a nearby town. I don‘t know if it was because of my antisocial ‘fuck you’ attitude or just the fact that I put off the hard ass vibe, but very few guys in my school asked me out. The ones that did either held absolutely no appeal to me or did so only after I was going out with my older boyfriend. And according to one of my best friends I scared the hell out of people.

 

My social life consisted of five hour coffee marathon’s at the local greasy spoon. Because my sisters had been hell raising partiers my parents over compensated by severely restricting my movements. I only rarely got to stay the night at girlfriends houses, and the few who braved staying at my house got to see first hand my father in sarcastic asshole mode. So it was the coffee shop. Coffee and cigarettes.

 

I met Rich through a mutual group of coffee drinking friends. Witty, older, smart. Black hair and blue eyes. Smoked the same brand. It was by chance I went into the restaurant alone and found him by himself at the counter. I took a seat to talk to him. We talked for three hours. Soon after started seeing each other. He had a job and soon got an apartment. His apartment turned into party central. They only let people in who brought their own beer. People came from other towns to party there. I would come in to wake him up and find strangers passed out on the living room floor. I met GM there and he and I got to be friends. I even had a secret crush on him while I was going out with Rich.

 

Rich had just turned twenty-one. My Mom knew his mother and had known him because she was a substitute teacher at the high school. While my parents didn’t necessarily approve of the relationship, they allowed it because he ‘seemed like a nice kid’. What they didn’t see too much was the complete imbalance of power in that relationship. My immaturity coupled with his ability to manipulate, an slowly awakening mental illness. I had never known about mind games. He soon lost both job and apartment and moved back in to his Mother’s house.

 

Time and again the scenario would unfold. In naïve ignorance and out of desperation for some kind of life, I threw myself mind body and soul into this relationship. Being denied healthy friendships with my own peer group I became completely obsessed with the idea of this relationship and with him. I didn’t understand that he probably didn’t really want me as much as I wanted him. After all, he told me he loved me, we talked about getting married someday and we had sex all the time. He wanted to go hang out with his buddies which I wouldn‘t have had a problem with if he would have kept his promises to me. His friends were my friends as well, but Rich didn’t have a car so I couldn’t go with them. GM and Elmo even came to visit me fairly often and there were times I would go places with them in Elmo‘s beat to shit Dodge Dart. My parents trusted them more than they trusted Rich, I think.

 

What got to me the most was being told by Rich that he would come see me then being constantly stood up. But I was in an emotionally desperate state at this time of my life and refused to cut ties and move on. Clingy doesn’t begin to describe it. I was more obsessed I think. If he told me he would come see me and stood me up I would go to every place I knew him to hang out until I found him. I was trying to force him to be accountable. This probably drove him as nuts as he drove me lying to me all the time! At the same time though, he never moved to break up with me. Never once told me we were through, not even at the end.

 

Another aspect began to emerge. If he told me he would come see me at 7 p.m. he wouldn’t show up until 9. That was how it first started. Then it would be midnight. Then 1 a.m. On school nights. When I confronted him with my anger the way he would twist and manipulate the argument, by the time it reached its end I would be the one apologizing! He made it clear time and again everything was all my fault. He would have me so upset I would be in crying hysterics, hyperventilating, literally pulling my hair out and thinking I was going out of my fucking mind. He never apologized.

 

One incident stands out. I wanted to have a romantic picnic and brought the idea up to him. He said it sounded cool. We made plans for a Saturday. I woke up early and started cooking all his favorite dishes plus desert. I cooked for half the day. I called him and he said he was going to run out to his friend Eric’s with them. Rich didn’t have his own car. Eric lived miles out of town. I asked him when he would be back and reminded him of the picnic. He told me he knew and he would only be gone a little while. Two hours later I called out there. Only a little while more. I called an hour later. And again. And Again. Soon they quit answering the phone. My sister and mother were furious on my behalf. My sister, G was calling him everything but dirty white trash. They had seen all the effort I put in. He finally showed up at 10:30 pm. Full of apologies. It wasn’t his fault. Eric’s Mom didn’t give him a ride. Like a naïve idiot I bought it, so desperate I was for affection and to just have him there.

 

This went on for three years. I was obsessed with making him be honest with me. In the winter time I could track him in the snow around town.

 

There is a morbid, pathetic piece of very dark humor here. I stalked him, yet he never tried to break off the relationship. That was what really confused me. If he would have told me he didn’t want a relationship I would have got it and moved on with life. But he always told me he wanted to be with me and loved me. Then he would avoid me and get angry when I tried to make him be accountable to me.

 

During this time, my one saving grace is a job I got working for a woman named Carellen. In exchange for cleaning horse corrals and stalls she would give me riding lessons. This was my one bright spot of saving grace through those dark times. I even took an after school job, babysitting two boys while their mom went to school. Over the course of the school year I saved every penny to buy my horse Steele for $350.00. A full blood Arabian gelding. Working with the horses was the one time I could just be myself. Be in my body. Working with the horses I was secure in what I was doing. I wasn’t some freaky little fuck up. I was strong and right in what I did there and I was good with horses. I helped break them to ride. I worked them in the arenas. I could go home carrying that horse smell on my clothes, and the part of me that knows how to survive took that into her and held onto it for all she was worth.

 

Rich’s best friend Eric got sick. He had a form of cancer so rare only four or five other people in the whole country had it. He fought it for five months. He died a month after his seventeenth birthday.

 

Eric was the second friend he had lost in the time we had been together. One of his other friends had committed suicide. Rich had been struggling some time with depression. Rich’s father, Frank, had it. In fact, we sat with his father for HOURS at the restaurant, day after day sometimes, listening to Frank go on and on and on about his depression. His medication. How his divorce from Rich’s mother had triggered it. What he had to do every single day to deal with His Depression. It was like a soul sucking litany this man relayed to us. Eventually, Rich’s mother, Nancy moved to Livingston and the house had been foreclosed on. Rich’s siblings either went with his other or moved out of the house. Rich lived in the house for two or three months with no running water and no electricity, not even trying to get a job.

 

For me, high school was going no where. I was still too short of math credits to graduate. I mulled it over and let my parent’s know I was thinking about quitting school. My parents told me if I dropped out I could no longer live in their house.

 

Praise God and hallelujah, I finally found my ticket to freedom! School let out for Christmas vacation my senior year, 1989. I never went back.

 

I found a small one bedroom house renting for $200, a month, utilities included plus $100 deposit. My father, since he had retired with dependants under 18 was receiving $200 a month for me being there. They decided to use that to pay my rent. I got a job working for $400 a month under the table at a local dairy. My parents cashed in some savings bonds of mine my maternal grandmother had purchased for me to buy me a better car.

 

I knew nothing of budgeting or saving money or establishing credit. I didn’t even know about paying bills! Rich moved in with me. After a time, I started badgering him about getting a job. He couldn’t he said, because all the jobs were in Kalispell. He had no ride to Kalispell. Couldn’t get a car because he had no drivers license. Then he got a job at a Kalispell fast food restaurant and went in to Kalispell to live with our friend Tom while he worked. I never saw any of the money.

 

I also didn’t take this as him maybe trying to dump me. He said he still wanted to be with me, still loved me. Still lead me on. That job lasted all of two weeks before he was back. Said he couldn’t handle all the beeping from the French fry machines. I figured he had gotten employment once he could get it again. I found a rental in Kalispell. A one bedroom house for $150.00 a month, I pay utilities. No more excuses for him of not being able to get rides to Kalispell for employment. After only a week or two, he was going back to Columbia Falls where we had just moved from, staying at his dads or whatever. Still telling me he loved me, still using me for sex.

 

I was done. About two weeks before my eighteenth birthday I gave my self two presents. A tattoo to cover up his name on my right forearm and I finally told him to stay away for good. I felt like such an idiot. Another mutual friend of ours, his name was Tom, told me Rich had cheated on me numerous times. Another had enlightened me to his hiding from me and/or sneaking out the back door when I came over. I felt like such a pathetic idiot. I had wanted a fantasy relationship with a manipulative lying cheat.

 

I still hung out with him and his brother on occasion, with friends. One night a couple girlfriends and I ran into him and his younger brother. They came with us as well drove down to the fishing access to do some drinking. On the way out, we spotted a skunk in the road. Rich started yelling at me to run it over. I refused. He got furious. He was screaming at me to run over this poor little animal who had done absolutely nothing! I got furious. I told him to fuck off. This infuriated him even more. His control over me was no more. He couldn’t stand it.

 

My parents were out of town and had told me to stay at their place. We all went back to their house. We hadn’t had that much alcohol, about two wine coolers apiece. One of the girls, Mona was trying to seduce Rich’s brother. The other girl, my best friend Jessica and I decided we wanted to walk to the store for some gum. Then we detoured to another couple of friends house. Jessica decided she needed to get home, it was 4 am. I wasn’t really worried about Rich and his brother being at the house I figured they would leave once Jessica went to get Mona. Wrong.

 

Jessica and Mona came back to tell me that Rich and Donny had gotten in a fistfight in my parents living room after downing a bottle of whiskey of my Dad’s and stealing a bottle of wine and that Donny had puked on the rug. I came back to my parents house then went to their Dad’s apartment to find them. When I got to the building, Rich was passed out up the first flight of stairs with the stolen bottle of wine on the landing in front of him. I roused him and made him get into the house. His brothers were sleeping on the couches. I was furious and was planning on talking to him later but the dumbass kept trying to follow me out the door. So finally, not wanting to wake his dad or brothers arguing with him there I told him to get into the car and we went back to my parents. I was furious. It’s one thing to treat me like shit but don’t fuck with my folks, even if they can be assholes.

 

We started to argue. I told him how dare he and his brother come into my parents house, trash shit and steal from them. I wouldn’t take any of his guilt bullshit. I refused to take responsibility for his actions anymore and I told him so. It was him, NOT me. He couldn’t handle that and he snapped.

 

The next thing I knew I was flying across the room. I leapt up screaming at him to get out as he swung at my face. I thought about my father’s .357 in the bedroom and a voice that could have only been my guardian angel told me, “If you go for the gun he will kill you with it.”

 

I tried to shove him out the door and he tackled me. He sat up, straddling my stomach and began to strangle me. I couldn’t breathe, my throat locked shut by his hands. I tried to scratch his eyes out but only was able to leave a pathetic shallow gash on his right cheek. I began to panic. I knew he was going to kill me. My vision started to spot and blur.

 

I heard the voice again in my head. “Go for his balls.”

 

I reached down around his hands but was only able to get a little. I twisted, pinched and squeezed for all I was worth. A little goes a long way in a case like this. Rich let go of my throat with his right hand, drew back his fist and punched me as hard as he could. The blow landed just above my left eye. It would take over seven months for that bump to disappear. He jumped up and headed out the door. I was in some out of my head state of mind because I saw him going for my car. I couldn’t even think ’get help’ or ’call police’. I was in some visceral state of freak-the-fuck-out. I thought he was going to steal my car. When I ran up to him he grabbed me and I was air born again, landing on all fours in the gravel of the driveway. He didn’t get in the drivers side, he opened the back door where he had been sitting earlier and got his notebooks out, then stomped off, no sign of drunkenness in his walk.

 

I jumped in my car and drove back down to my friend’s house. I left the front door wide open. My mother later showed up in a panic wanting to know what happened. I told her. We didn’t press charges which was just stupid on my part. I really don’t know where my head was then. I was still angry. He could have killed me but I wanted him to feel bad for what he did.

 

I went over to his Dad’s later, I can’t remember why now. Woke him up. He sat up and looked at me, tried to craft a confused look on his face and asked me, “Dearest, what happened last night?”

 

I could tell by the look on his face he remembered everything. He was all apologies. He was so sorry, called me dearest again. I hated him more then than I ever thought possible.

 

 

A Hard Look Within, Part Two

Growing up, my mother was a very faithful church goer and extremely traditional.  Old fashioned we call it.  Marriage before sex.  Don’t talk about sex with the kids, or death and make sure the child knows about God.

In Sunday school we used to learn all about Jesus.  He seemed like a pretty cool guy what with the miracles and all.  He even liked kids!  I liked Jesus.

Then there was God.  My mother told me at age four or five that I had to love God more than my parents.  ‘Cause God said so.  I had to love God more than Jesus.  Jesus was his son.  Parents we supposed to love God more than their children.

In my child’s brain this sounded like bullshit.  Everybody knew Jesus was real, they had pictures for Christ’s sake!  Yet I was supposed to love this invisible God guy, the same guy who was into smiting and Earth flooding and sending plagues and all sorts of horrid stuff more than I was to love my own parents? He didn’t take care of me or buy me birthday presents!  Not in the way any way I understood.  It sounded like a load of horseshit and I wasn’t buying it.  I thought God sounded like a real asshole.

Things would change later and I made my peace with the Creator.  But that was perhaps the starting point of my ‘question everything’ attitude.  I didn’t trust what my parents told me to necessarily be truthful or correct.  Not that they lied to me, it just seemed like there was a serious gap in their information.  Also, my mother’s views, especially at that time walked a very narrow and unforgiving path.  My mother and I have always thought very differently.  She has always been a strict routine follower and I am a go-with-the-flow personality.  I am also very disorganized which is a downturn.

This history set the groundwork for my often mistaken ideas as I got older.  My parents were as I have said depression era children.  My parents are literally old enough to be my grandparents.  I will be thirty-eight this year, Mom will be seventy-nine.  My father would have been eighty-seven this year had he lived this long.

My sisters were ten and thirteen years older than I was.  They grew up in the sixties.  So on one hand I had my mother preaching chastity, straight laced morals and religion and the other my sisters, preaching sex, drugs and rock ’n roll.

I couldn’t have a real conversation with my mother growing up that didn’t somehow involve religious views.  My mother found her sanity with her church-life devotion.  She had married a man she didn’t love, who didn’t love her and he was an asshole.  She had to find something to make it through the forty-eight year misery of a marriage and the church was it.

My sisters both shacked up with different guys.  My eldest sister got married to her high school sweetheart at age nineteen.  It was because she was pregnant but whatever.  They are still together even though I think she drives him batshit.  My middle sister had different boyfriends and live-ins, got married and divorced and has been with the guy she’s with now for several years.

So somehow in my rather confused, budding pubescent brain I got this really fucked up idea that a guy would love you if you had sex with him.  At age thirteen I so wanted a boyfriend and there was a guy I liked who apparently liked all my friends as well.  But he made out with me a few times so that meant he wanted to be with me, right?  He flitted between a few of us.  Of all the talks I had with my mother I don’t think she ever once told me about the capacity for a guy to use a girl for sex.  My father, on the other hand always told me people were just using me, but he said that about all my friends and didn’t get any more detailed than that.  If a girlfriend wanted to stay the night so we could go to a school football game they were ’just using you’!

I honestly don’t think my mother knew the scope that guys would go to use a girl for sex.  She wasn’t’ raised in that generation.  Things were a lot different ’back when’.

At some point I got it into my head at age thirteen that if I had sex with this little bastard he would then be my boyfriend.  I also thought he would like me better than my current rival because she hadn’t done this with him.

Even now the memory of that day and this shit-storm to follow made my stomach heave.

Dad and Mom were both off somewhere.  It was 1984 and Dad had recently retired.  There was a whole bunch of alcohol left upstairs in the attic.  Two of my guy friends and this jerk I was crushing on came over.

He and I went into my room while the other two were, I thought, in the living room.

So here we were, no protection, me willing quite reluctantly to surrender this virginity thing if I could only have a boyfriend.  And what do you know! He loved me!  He said so!  He even told me if it hurt too bad he would stop. Well, it hurt like hell and when I told him to stop he didn’t.  I didn’t think he heard so I yelled louder.  He still didn’t stop.  I went ballistic.  After about three really solid kidney punches and a hefty shove, he stopped.  The other two guys had left.  That night I felt like I had done something very grown up.  Like I had matured more than my friends in the (thankfully) incomplete 20 second fiasco.  I fancied myself a woman, then.

The next day, people at school were asking me if I had really done it with that kid.  The day after that, my father was screaming at me about what a little slut I was as I sat in horrified silence at the dining room table.  The school had called.  The three boys had gotten busted with a bottle of my father’s whiskey at school.  The little bastard I had been with tried to save his ass by telling the school principle he couldn’t possibly have been guilty because while the other two were stealing the booze he had been in the bedroom fucking me.  The whole school was talking about it the next day.  All of it.

“Why you always gotta be so tough?’  my father would scream at me several times over the years.

My smartass mouth would shout one thing but my heart screamed, “Because if I show a chink in my armor you or any number of other heartless bastards is going to rip the heart right out of me and leave me one of the walking dead you fucker!”

A Hard Look Within, Part One

If GM were to read this blog he would claim that I was bashing his family. That I had no right to post any of what he would consider ‘these private family matters’ online for millions of anonymous people to read. Anyone who has grown up in an abusive relationship or been the victim of domestic violence would be able to recognize this. These are the Secrets That Must Be Kept. This is how domestic violence and abuse survive. Breeding in the shadows, unexposed like some virus waiting to be spread. There is an almost superstitious quality in this silence. Keep the silence and that makes the violence less. Keep the silence and it may stop. Keep the silence and it may not come to pass. Keep the silence and it may not be true. Keep the silence and it may go away. Keep the silence and take the reality out of it. Yet violence doesn’t go away. It is not forgotten and it is very real. Violence can fester in that dark place only to later come bursting forth in pustulant foulness, wreaking havoc and physical and emotional destruction.

My father was a man who worked very hard at his job. We had a middle class income. My father never wanted people to think he was cheap and did not believe in saving money. If I asked for a dollar he would tell me he was broke while opening a wallet full of twenty dollar bills. He was my cousin’s favorite uncle. He wanted a son, got three daughters and treated us as if we weren’t worth the flesh on our bones.

My mother was made to deal with the bill collectors. When my sister’s were small, she had to walk downtown with them in the wagon to do her grocery shopping because my father wanted to take the car to work and didn‘t want to car-pool. On the weekends he would drive the seventy-two miles down the lakeshore to stay with his mother and work with his brother. Not for pay, just to ‘help out J’. When we were smaller my mother, sisters and I were drug down there every weekend to stay at my grandmother’s house while my father either worked, or went out drinking with his brother.

My sisters left home as soon as they could so by the time I was five my mother and I stayed home alone, with no transportation, every weekend while Dad left for Uncle J’s. ( Eventually Uncle J, in appreciation for all Dad had done for him, paid off my parent’s house for them. )

We got to see my Mom’s mother and sisters once a year when we went down for the Fourth of July. My mother didn’t have a car of her own until I was ten.

When I was very small, Dad seemed to like my company. He tolerated me anyway. My parents were raised in the Depression era. Mom was forty-one when she had me and Dad was forty-eight. Usually, when I was small, if I did one of the many things kids do to get in trouble my mother would deal out the punishment. Mouth washed out with soap for calling her a Fucker, my favorite word at two, sitting in the chair for what seemed like hours for minor infractions and getting my ass whipped with either a belt, hand or metal spatula when I really pissed her off. I don’t really remember my Dad spanking me but maybe once or twice. I must have been about three or four years old when I met with the type of punishments my father could dish out that weren’t verbal in nature.

We were at the dinner table. My parents always seemed to dish up these huge adult sized portions of everything for me. We had green beans. Green beans were fat and slimy, reminded me of dead caterpillars with their legs hacked off and smelled like rotting vegetation the way my mother boiled them. I had gotten in trouble for trying to get the family dog, a fat beagle named Hilda to eat them. She had the same opinion of them as me. I was whiny. Didn’t want to eat them no way no how. My Father was sitting beside me. I was sitting on a piano stool. An antique one that’s seat unscrewed to get taller or shorter. My father was getting more and more angry at me and I was getting more and more stubborn. Out of the blue he backhanded me so hard in the mouth that both the piano stool and I went over backwards, cracking my head hard against the floor. I was surprised, scared and hurt and as I laid on the floor crying, no one did or said anything except my father who yelled at me that if I didn’t shut up and quit crying he would ‘give me something to cry about’.

Shut up or get something to cry about. So it began. His verbal abuse, name calling and put downs got worse and worse. I was ‘pig-headed’ had a ‘mean streak’ and was a ‘lazy shitass’. I wasn’t the only one who got cut down on a regular basis by my father. My sisters, before they moved out and my mother as well. My mother, who had graduated college was a ‘know it all’ and who was overweight and couldn’t ‘think of anything but her stomach’. Then there was me, who later began to have a weight problem I still have who always had ‘eyes bigger than your stomach’. As I began to get older, things were only worse. The fights my father and I had were always screaming matches. If I showed emotions like frustrated crying or anger I was always punished for it. Sarcastic cynicism grew in me and what started out as anger repressed again and again turned in me to this blinding destructive fury.

Even before my teens I lost all respect for not only my father but also my mother. I looked upon her as a spineless pathetic bitch for never standing up to my father either for me or for herself. When the screaming matches turned to physical blows and my father would punch me in the face my mother would stay in the kitchen and do nothing. I always thought it was because she was afraid for herself. She says it was because she didn’t want to ‘make it worse’ for me. She would never even see if I was alright afterwards and there is still a deep furious anger I have in me because of this. I have not been able to forgive her yet it seems.

At school I was the scary girl with the ‘Fuck You’ attitude dressed head to toe in black with black eyeliner and mascara. I hung out in the parking lot with the rest of the ‘Freaks ‘ smoking Marlboro reds in a box and cutting math class and study hall to go hang out down by the river or at the local coffee shop until it was time to go home.

Screaming matches between my father and myself were constant. During my junior high years he still had me cowed with his violent attacks. But my rage and fury only grew every year. If I cried I was punished more so I bottled it. Even now, the only time I can really let go and have a really good cleansing cry is if I smoke some weed first. I don’t cry much. It turns to anger instead.

He would always ask me, in anger, ‘Why do you gotta be so goddamned mean?’

‘Cuz I learned it all from you!!’ I would spit back.

I don’t know how many times I told him I wished he were dead. He would tell me, ‘When I’m dead you can come shit on my grave.’ I always told him I damned well would.

For some insane reason having to do with a kids self worth or some such shit, I passed eighth grade with straight Fs and was sent on to high school. My first two quarters went well enough in spite of having some upper-class girls spreading bullshit rumors throughout our whole small town school that I was pregnant the first two weeks of my freshman year. But it soon became apparent that school, especially math was not my forte and I knew by my Junior year there was no hope salvaging it unless I repeated a year and there was no way in hell I wanted to do that. Technically I am still on Christmas vacation from 1989.

This relationship with my father not only affected my feelings of self worth, but my ability to succeed in school and in some ways have a successful start in life as an adult. When you grow up being told constantly that you are lazy or can’t do something, when you grow up knowing your parents find you an annoyance and an irritating burden, the ability to become a self sufficient, confident adult becomes extremely difficult. Not only did this constant negative and sometimes violent relationship affect my ability to be healthy in my own emotions, its effects would carry through to every relationship I would attempt to have with men as well. The relationship I had with my father not only left me emotionally battered, it left me emotionally starved and open to victimization even before I left high school.

My first long term relationship was with a man six years older than me. I met him a month before my fifteenth birthday. I was supporting us both by the time I was seventeen. For my eighteenth birthday present to myself I broke up with him. Two weeks later he almost killed me.