A Hard Look Within, Part Eleven

 

I have asked myself how long I will write these, The Looks, as I think of them. As long as it takes is what the answer is, yet I want it to be beneficial.

 

There is mostly a negative connotation with someone who chooses to use marijuana. I believe it is very easy to get sucked into the negative aspect of what I consider to be a very powerful and potentially beneficial medicinal herb. I also believe consistent, daily use, unless the user is in a chronic pain condition, is counterproductive an not helpful in the long run.

 

While my choice to use this plant was beneficial in that it helped me learn to bond with my baby, I was using it to try and numb the emotional pain and desolate feeling of being abandoned by my partner. I was angry. Cain had always, emotionally, been like Spock off Star Trek. Detached and unemotional. He wrote me letters that said he missed me, even held vivid detail of his love for me, yet he had never really used the words, face to face to tell me these things often enough to make me believe them. Most of the time, there seemed to be room in his mind and heart for only one person; him. It seemed to me he wanted to be adored and worshiped without ever returning any. The months of his out of state work turned into a year. I felt like I was dying inside. I wanted attention and affection. I wanted to be held and loved. I was still too young and naïve then to know, even at 22 how empty physical affection can be.

 

There came a time in our relationship that I told Cain I wanted to be able to see other people while he was out of state. I wanted him to see other people as well. It was a completely selfish maneuver on my part in so many ways. But I didn’t know what else to do. There was a guy that I was interested in. I didn’t want to have a relationship, I WANTED Cain, but he wasn’t available. It wasn’t even really about the sex so much as it was about being physically close to someone. I was so lonely, and not strong enough in myself to go out and find healthy alternatives and this is the negative route I chose. I am ashamed of it because I believe I cheapened myself, no to mentioned hurt Cain. I wanted to be Cain’s wife, yet he would never propose. Because I did not have those vows, the long time apart, the fact that Cain seemed content to have and leave it this way, were all contributing factors. What blew me away though, in the end, wasn’t that Cain was jealous or upset about me being with anyone else, what he told me was that he felt jealous because I DID find someone else to be with and he DIDN’T.

 

It wasn’t that I found other men to be with. It was that he didn’t find other women. That put a spear in my heart that would fester.

 

I felt I wasn’t worth enough for him to worry about. He was only concerned for himself. By this time, I had learned a bit of that from him as well. My anger grew.

 

In September of ‘94 my landlord, Chuck informed me that Joan and her husband were going to buy my house for their daughter. The bitch finally got her revenge. Chuck had, at one point, told me he would sell me the house for the cost it took him to move it onto the property. I was stupid and naïve enough I didn’t take him completely seriously and because Cain and I weren’t married I didn’t want to risk losing it if I did go that route. Hindsight, being 20/20 and all…

 

I didn’t take him up on it and Joan did. They gave us thirty days notice to move out. Then Joan tried all her old bullshit with me, such as telling me I had to get rid of my dog because they didn’t allow pets! AFTER they gave us the thirty day notice. I told her too bad. After all, what were they going to do, kick us out?!! Fucking idiots. Then I was subject to even more indignities. They claimed they wanted to come through and ‘get some video’ of the house for their daughter. I let them, thinking they would just do the upstairs. Everything was a mess. Stacks of boxes, mounds of clothes needing to be washed. The basement was completely trashed from the combination of having too much crap and me not being able to give a damn about a completely clean house. I felt so violated and would never again allow a landlord to do that.

 

Cain took time off to come up the last few days, help me load everything into storage and pack both his car and mine to the ceiling. Take our two cats, puppy and pet rat and go. By this time the apprenticeship had moved him from Utah to Denver, Colorado. We locked the door on the house in Montana and were off.

 

I was excited and optimistic. Cain, Carter and I were together and could be a family again!

 

Our first home in Denver? The construction sight trailer the guys used as a meeting place and to have coffee in the mornings. There was a bedroom in back but that was occupied by another apprentice who spent a lot of times and most nights out on the town. We were relegated to sleeping in the living room which was where the guys would normally meet before work. This proved to be very awkward. I was invading their morning coffee spot and they were invading my temporary bedroom! After the first couple of mornings of me sitting there, hair tousled, blinking owlishly at these morning freaks who thought the world should begin before dawn, and them staring, silently back at me, I said ‘To hell with it!’ and just burrowed deeper into my sleeping bag when they came in. I may have even snored. I didn’t care.

 

The trailer had no running water but there was a bag ice machine out back. I melted bags of ice for bath water, dishwater and cooking. The bathing really sucked because we only had a small dishpan to use. Carter was small enough to sit in it but Cain and I took some pretty interesting baths!

 

To demonstrate my sad level of naïveté, one of the times that Cain and I drove downtown to look for a motel to move into that was fairly close to his job site I spotted a sign on one of the buildings. It was a bath house advertising men’s and ladies nights. What a wonderful idea! I thought, and excitedly pointed it out to Cain. The reaction I got was an odd one and I didn’t quite understand why he seemed to think I was making a joke that wasn’t very funny. The next time we drove by it I told him we should go in and check out the prices. I was getting tired of melting bags of ice and a bath sure sounded nice! He again acted like I was telling an un-funny joke and I told him I was serious. He looked at me as if I were the biggest idiot on the face of the planet and informed me it was a gay bathhouse and they weren’t selling ‘those kinds of baths’. I was stunned and felt like the world’s biggest idiot. I thought Denver was a big city with an innovative and safe way for their probably large transient population to clean up. Coming from a small town Montana community we just didn’t have those things where I grew up. I tell you though, after having to melt bags of ice to bathe in I seriously considered my odds for getting into and out of a shower quick enough not to be molested. Cain wouldn’t go for it.

 

It was only about a week and a half before we found a motel called the Niagara House Motel on East Colfax Avenue. We lived there for three months.

 

While Cain was there and we were together, it seemed my life was just on the same path with a different view. I didn’t feel comfortable driving in Denver very far on my own, so Carter and I stayed in the motel room all day, all night, day in and day out. Instead of out onto the porch to check the mail, once a week we would drive the seventeen miles to the post office. Occasionally we went out to eat a restaurant called Healthy Habits, and all-you-can-eat health food buffet. We went to visit a friend of his one time. We would go to the grocery store. The one time I did laundry at the laundry mat on my own with Carter, I got to have the company of a homeless man who kept talking about ’the Zodiac’ and ’the Zodiac says’ this and ’the Zodiac says’ that and all I could think of was the damned and nefarious Zodiac Killer until the poor guy mentioned ’Zodiac’, ’Safeway’ and ’for twenty-five cents’ all in one sentence and i figured out he was talking about the little horoscope scrolls. I bought him a cup of coffee.

 

I was with Cain and still felt empty. I am an emotional person who needs emotional support and looking to Cain for that was like trying to hug a brick wall. I initiated sex with him even if I didn’t want to just so I could feel like he was there with me for a time and not in his own little internal world.

 

I found a pamphlet for the local community college and though that perhaps I could take some classes. They had an excellent Criminology and Forensics program and I felt interest begin to stir. For my birthday Cain bought me a used cello from Celebrity Vintage and Clothing for $100.00. He arranged for me to begin taking lessons once a month. My instructors name was Mary. She told me, on my first lesson, that I would be a quick learner and would pick it up quickly. I was so excited! I loved the voice of the cello and I was really looking forward to learning the instrument.

 

A week after my first cello lesson Cain came home with bad news. He had been fired. Something to do with him taking the extra time off to come help us move down there or something. I don’t know for sure. I am not sure I got the whole story or whole reason. There was nothing he could do about it. He seemed relieved, though. He wasn’t comfortable working with high voltage electricity. He had a fear of it instead of a healthy respect. He shouldn’t have been in the field in the first place. If it hadn’t been for his father’s pressure as well as his need to escape fatherhood, so like his own father had done, he never would have gotten involved in the apprenticeship program.

 

So that was it. Three months and we were going back home to Montana. Until we got on our feet, we would have to live somewhere. I knew Cain’s dad hated me so we would be moving in with my parents for a time.

 

Even though we had been reunited and were moving back to Montana as an intact family, old problems were still there. Old issues were still present. The time and distance we had lived apart had served to place a distant between our hearts. Like watching an old dear friend die a slow and painful death, our life as a family together lived on numbered days.

 

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.