Signs of Healing

Editor’s note:  I have been trying for THREE DAYS to get these pictures on here.  True to my style of organization, they are on here bass-ackwards, so you get to see the pictures ‘after’ and ‘before’ instead of the other way around.  To those of you who actually keep a clean house, it may not seem like the miracle it is.  When you see the ‘before’ pictures, you may have a better understanding.

 

I wanted to see if I could get the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of F’s cabin on here.  I am sort of a techno-idiot for simple things like uploading pictures.  But I feel like it is an important part of the story for people to be able to see what happens when you can stand up for doing the right thing by letting go of anger and animosity and holding peace in your heart.  Even when dealing with someone who is mentally ill.

F is a hoarder.  I really saw the reality of this, not only with the cabin, but when S got his metal filing box out of storage.  He had canceled checks in with his military papers.  Which wouldn’t be odd except the canceled checks were from 1968 on up. Why he felt the need to keep them shall remain a mystery to me.

The ‘cabin’ is a slope roofed one room shack my father-in-law and husband built over fifteen years ago.  It is slowly falling apart and F never tried to keep it up.  S was the one who put new tarpaper on the roof last year to keep it from leaking.

Beds made to military precision, give or take. Floor shoveled clean of the dog shit coated clothes. He threw those down on our burn pile. That’s will smell nice. Guess we won’t be roasting marshmallows this year….

Now, this is what the place looked like the day he left, after we had that two hour palaver the night before. Holy shit, is that floor I see?

Yes, the cans really ARE all gone! Double take! I can’t believe my camera.

Do I detect the tang of Pine-sol in the air? Amazing what a shovel and a little scrubbing can do for that can collection. They hauled them to the dump, too!

This is a view in the front door. You can see my father-in-laws wood cook stove that F used as counter space. There are cans and garbage all in front of it. The floor is coated in dirt, probably dog shit and who knows what else.

The ‘kitchen’ area to the right. Years of food cans and garbage. The linoleum under this all is white, honest.

His heat source and overflowing ash pan for the woodstove. Honestly, I don’t know how he didn’t burn the place down. That’s Cindy Lou sitting in the chair where she had given birth to her pups. S has taken her to live in town now.

Inside to the left. He always made his bed. That’s my dog, Copper, coming in to check out the one that is hiding under the bed. I usually don’t let my dog’s anywhere near this place but he is current on his shots. There is clothes, dirt and most likely dogshit on the floor here too. The bed across has F’s clothes and other crap.

Yet it is real.  I don’t know if you can understand how miraculous this was.  This man, who has never batted and eye at letting not only dogs, but livestock, and I am talking sheep and goats, geese and pigs, in the house to live, eat and shit without ever cleaning it up.  He did this.  He cleaned his house!

This is the same man who would sit in the living room of S’s house over east in a living room that’s rug was soaked so thoroughly with dog urine it squelched with every step, and watch television as the dogs shit on the rug in front of him.

To me, this is evidence that Divinity is at work.  There is a spirit at work here that is stronger than the shit.  This is the miracle that turns shit into black gold.  This is the proof.

S and my father-in-law B seemed a little stunned at F’s  abrupt departure.  I don’t think my mother-in-law quite knew how to deal with the reality. F has been a fixture in her life for over twenty years now.  She never wanted to deal with him, but never made a move to cut him loose either.  This shall forever be a puzzle to me. 

The night GM called to tell her F had gone with his brother, I could hear her voice on the other end of the line.  When she said “Oh.” it sounded higher than her usual speaking voice.  Tremulous.  I wondered.  Did this mean there was a part of her that was actually sorry to see him gone?  Even though this was the man who had told her the mountain wasn’t big enough for the both of them and she should go live with her daughter.  Yet, what was I supposed to do?  I will gladly take on burdens for my family when the cause is just, when the need is real, but I will not  enable someone to use and abuse my family.  I will not allow someone to latch on to us as a drowning victim dragging their savior to the depths.

When I told S he had cleaned to the cabin up,  that he had even used a cleaner (probably even on that one white floor patch!) her mouth actually dropped open.  She was honest to goodness stunned when I told her that.  Said he had never lifted a finger EVER in the twenty-some-odd years they had been together to help her clean.  Not even the animal pens.

I couldn’t explain to her the how or why.  We don’t see things the same way.  I couldn’t explain to her that you can kick someone in the ass and do it with love.  I just don’t think that is the language that they have ever known.  I don’t know if S will ever understand that showing someone you love them doesn’t mean doing everything for them until they are crippled with the inability to do for themselves.  That is not love.  That is something else entirely and it has dark origins, no matter the intent behind it.

After F had left, and in the middle of the night when the large drink of water before bed finally ran its course and woke me, I went outside.  I heard something that I didn’t know I would ever here.  A bull elk bugling.  Our mountain, years and years ago used to have a lot of elk.  GM said he hadn’t seen any for over fifteen years.  I heard it another night, then again last night, just about dusk.  His bugling set the dogs off up at F’s old place where they still stay.  Excited, I went in to tell GM.  He told me he had been watching one of the home movies he recently made with he and our big white dog Fen on it.  He said Fen was howling on the movie.  This annoyed me.  I can tell the difference between and elk bugle and a dog howl for shit’s sake!  I snapped at him a bit.  He got a little mad back and told me angrily that he hadn’t seen elk up here in twenty years.

As we are learning to do now, we went our own ways for a few minutes.  We are trying (slowly) to pick our battles.  When we passed each other again on the trail down to our outhouse I stopped and looked at him.  I knew what I needed to say.

“When you pray for healing to come to a place, when you pray for good things to come back, they do.”

I continued down the path, and he watched me in silence.

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 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.

 

Hard Choices

I didn’t mind not having electricity. Hauling water was the bitch. I cooked and heated our bath water with propane in my little camp trailer.

The problem with living on the same property with Guitar Man’s Dad B was that B not only constantly contradicted or belittled everything GM said, he also seemed to like to argue just to have conflict. He thrived on it.

Then B started making inappropriate comments to me. If I had stayed late at my mother’s house or had to run errands after work and didn’t get home until after dinner, B would ask me if I had been “out tomcatting around.” implying that I had been out picking up men. He always acted as if this were some joke, but there was an underlying seriousness about it that pissed me off. Of course, I always had a ‘fuck you’ sort of reply, but it was constant and wearing.

Because of the twisted family dynamic of “Daddy can do no wrong“, Guitar Man never told him to knock it off. Guitar Man never, then or now, defended me to his father. Like living with a pack of starving wolves, if you were under any sort of attack, you’re on your own.

Guitar Man and I started to argue more. Constantly, it seemed. I knew B was saying things to GM about me, what I had no idea. Making nit picking comments, niggling away at GM about how he should ‘handle’ me, no doubt. Nothing good. Nothing positive ever came from that man’s mouth. B is at once extremely controlling and totally harmless to anyone not family. Outsiders seem to think he is so funny and nice. His family has been taught that ’Dad is just Dad’ and that all of B’s behaviors are acceptable and should just be tolerated. Outsiders never saw him beating his wife when he was drunk. There was a rumor in their small town that for $25 he would let you sleep with his wife. S told me that wasn’t accurate. He’d let them have sex with her for free if he could watch. She told me there were a lot worse things too, but she didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t ask.

So, things were rough at times between Guitar Man and me. There were still many good times though I know these blogs seemed focused all on the negative. I am purging here.

So we lived there, the five of us. That is, until Guitar Man’s youngest sister and her husband left their eastern Montana town and moved out there to stay with B. The whole family went over to help N and T and their three kids move. It was soon clear that neglect was what their parenting was all about. Not glaringly obvious at first. Soon enough.

Two boys and a girl, ages 4, 3 and almost 2. The kids were constantly wearing soaked diapers. On the few occasions I changed them, their little bottoms were covered in rashes and small, bloody sores. Laundry wasn’t a priority for GM’s sister. The kids slept on white sheets gone black with the dirt of the place. I heated water at the very least every other night, mostly every night with the dirt of summer at it’s height to bath myself and my kids. In the three months she was out there N borrowed my plastic tote tub twice to clean her kids up. Three meals a day seemed to be too much effort. Mostly the kids were given things to snack on constantly. Dry cereal. Crackers. Whatever was easy. they were constantly coming to my trailer to ask for food because they were hungry. I washed their hands and faces and fed them.

N’s oldest child was already exhibiting some severe signs of lasting emotional and mental trauma from early abuse and neglect at the hands of his parents . When you looked into his big blue eyes, you saw a child who was so turned inward he could barely see you looking back. Like he was trapped in his own head. (There is no doubt in my mind of some mental genetic disorder as well. Our own son exhibits some of the same symptoms, and so does one of GM’s other sister’s boys. N is the one girl of the family that has exhibited signs of mental illness. Neither her daughter nor mine have yet, but they are also still very young.)

N tuned her kids out with an ability that was rather spooky to watch. As if she didn’t even see or hear them though they could be screaming and fighting right beside her. T was there off and on. I can’t remember now if she was trying to leave him or what had been the deciding factor in the move. He was supposed to be looking for a job but managed to find booze instead.

Their daughter was still in a walker at the time. N seemed to think that the best way to feed a 1 1/2 year old was to give her mostly formula to drink and very little solid food. Later on, after all this, the WIC department turned her in for underfeeding the baby. I came up one time when N wasn’t there and Baby K was in her walker as usual. She was crying so hard and T was trying to give her probably her 5th bottle of formula that day while everyone else ate dinner. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. The baby was yelling and making grabbing motions at the plates of food. The solids N deigned to feed her would equal maybe a tablespoon or two. T was agitated that she wouldn’t be quiet. I took a scoop of mixed veggies and potatoes out of the pot on the stove and put them on her tray. Immediately she started shoveling the food into her little mouth. T seemed amazed. I was furious.

“She just keeps eating!” he said in amazement as I gave her a large second helping.

“She’s hungry, T!” I said, trying to keep my temper. “She’s old enough to be eating solid food EVERY meal! She wants to eat! She needs to eat solid food and not just be fed formula all day! She’s HUNGRY!” I said again as I gave her third helping. “You guys need to feed her!”

Baby K probably ate a whole cup or more of veggies and potatoes. She was finally satisfied and cooing happily in her seat.

Later I tried to have a discussion with Guitar Man about his sister and her husband’s neglect of their children. He took the, ” I can’t do anything to change them.” bullshit stance. Well, it’s not bullshit, you CAN’T change people unwilling to change. But there was an obligation to those kids to see that they were taken care of. I told him as much. He insisted they were taken care of. He also admitted they were not being cared for as they should be. Then I told him what it meant for me to be a mandatory reporter.

Since I worked as a case manager for a childcare assistance agency that was under government funding, I was, by law, obliged to report to the proper authorities any and all abuse and neglect that I observed in any children I had contact with. By law, I told GM, it was my duty to report his sister to Child Protective Services. Not only that, but I felt it was necessary.

The explosion that followed was un-fucking-believable. A lot of it was all just a raging blur of utter shit coming out of his mouth. Veiled threats, how I didn’t want to see what his Dad would do if someone tried to take HIS grandkids away. How it was nobody’s fucking business how they decided to take care of those kids.

I don’t believe, a this time, I had ever seen quite this level of insane fury coming out of Guitar Man’s mouth. It was insane and irrational. The furthest thing from his mind was the health and well being of those kids. Their father had grown up in foster homes, he raged. Look at how criminal and fucked up T was for it. All foster homes were places of neglect and abuse in his eyes. Where every child was raped.

That was the first time I think that I ever felt afraid of him. Afraid of his anger. He turned nothing but his verbal assault on me, yet the rage and vehemence and irrationality of it was terrifying. There was absolutely no reasoning with him.

Against my better judgment, I backed off. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t going to turn his sister in to Child Protective Services, but I needed to find the right time, after things had cooled. Why? Because he had put fear into me. And it infuriates me how he had. Still is in some ways. Fear is insidious. It can crawl inside you and poison the well of your being without you even knowing it.

Then it all came to a head. T spent more time out getting drunk than ever. N ignored her kids as usual and I tried to lessen that by being attentive to them. The older two boys, anyway. The baby was at the constant mercy of her mother and I didn’t go up to B’s cabin if I could help it. I never saw N beat the kids. That would have given them far too much attention. She is the type of abusive parent that tunes them out as completely as she can.

Seeing her behavior and the feel I get from her, there is something mentally unstable in N as well. GM and S put it down to the two times she had, as an infant and a c child, gotten head injuries. One, when her four year old sister, whom S had put in charge of her, ‘allowed’ N as an infant to roll off the Laundromat folding table onto the concrete floor as S was rotating laundry or something. They still blame M, who was FOUR for that accident. Not S, who was the idiot mother who put the baby on a high table then but a distractible toddler in charge of her. On that occasion, a circular portion of N’s skull was fractured and depressed and S had to take her to the hospital. S was outraged when the doctor questioned her about abuse. The other time, N fell from a horse and hit her head on a rock, getting knocked unconscious. To this day, Guitar Man claims N will tell you stories about her life that never happened. N has talked to me about dealing with stress in her life by “just focusing in on my own fantasy world!”. This fantasy world does not include her children. N has told me on two separate occasions that she has just ‘been so distracted’ she ‘completely forgot who those kids were’ and tells me of looking up a them and thinking ‘whose kids are these and where did they come from?’

I have had an interest in psychology and personality disorders though I am in no way a psychologist or able to diagnose personality disorders, I have often wondered about N’s ability to so disassociate from her children as well as her obsessive list taking and note leaving if more than one personality doesn’t exist in her little vapid head.

When N still lived over east of the mountains, she was turned into CPS. She and S both claim it was because the case worker wanted N’s son because he looked like her own little boy. They claimed she stalked N, trying to get Little JJ. N fled to Idaho to stay with an Aunt.

S and B both have conditioned their children in the ‘victim mentality’ system of belief. This means there is an ingrained and deeply held belief that they are and always will be the victims in any situation. That they have done nothing wrong and it is always someone else’s fault or someone else’s actions that have caused the negative repercussions. To admit wrong doing or fault on their part is impossible because to admit fault or even just admit to making a mistake means that they would have to take responsibility for consequence of actions and that is the last thing this family wants.

One night, I got my wake-up slap. Guitar Man and I were in his trailer. It was a Sunday night and we were up late, my two kids were sleeping soundly across the yard in our own trailer. It was June. Suddenly B was at the door with an ax handle in his hand.

“GM, get up there, T is trying to kill N and he’s gonna take the kids!”

At first, we were a bit confused. We hadn’t heard any yelling, but then again, we may not have.

“What the fuck?” was GM’s articulate reply.

“He threw her into the toy box and he says he’s gonna kill her and take the kids come help me!” B wheezed.

GM grabbed his 9mm pistol, checked the clip, then jacked a round into the chamber.

Aw, mother FUCK! I thought as I followed him out the door.

Before we got up the hill, T had torn out of the driveway in their red van. I breathed a sigh of relief. Guitar Man went into B’s house and proceeded to verbally cut loose on his sister, ironically enough, using the very same terms on her I had used to describe to him her treatment of her children. “Neglect”, “endangering the welfare of…” and then a general harangue about even letting her husband come out there or even marrying him in the first place.

I stood outside the cabin, not wanting to be part of this newest drama and knew that there had to be a stop put to this. It was then I heard the van coming back up the road. I met him on the path a few yards form the cabin.

“Leave, T.” I told him. “You need to get the hell out of here.” T wavered at first, he and I had never had any sort of confrontation. He came up the path and I could smell the booze breath before we stood toe to toe.

“I ain’t leaving without my kids!” the drunk asshole said. I heard GM come out of the house behind me.

Dear Lord, fucking help! I prayed. I don’t figure God’s a real stickler for propriety in a pinch.

“You’re not going anywhere with those kids, you’re fucking drunk. GM, is in there and you need to leave.” At this point I had my hands on his chest because he was beginning to do one of those twitchy dog-ready-to-attack maneuvers that guys in the height of insulted testosterone do in the presence of another male.

“He’s got a GUN you FUCKING MORON!” I yelled as T shoved me out of the way, yelling, “A gun? Oh YEAH? You gonna fucking shoot me?” as he stepped up toward the porch.

Guitar Man answered by pointing the 9mm point blank, right between T’s eyes. The muzzle was about a foot from in front of his face. In the brief pause of disbelief the hammer cocking made a statement all it’s own.

“If you try and come in this house or touch those kids or my sister I will fucking kill you.” Guitar Man told him. I could tell by the tight and focused fury that he meant every word he said. But I didn’t want him going to jail for blowing away this stupid piece of shit.

I began to walk up the path behind T, then realized if GM did pull the trigger I could very well take the bullet as it went through his skull as I had no doubt it would do at suck close range. I stepped more to the right of T so GM could see where I was as I walked up behind him.

In the meantime, GM and T were engaged in a verbal exchange bordering on potentially fatal for at least one of them. T claiming his lack of fear at dying, GM informing him he would get that if he chose to try and get in the house again. I could barely hear it for the screaming going on in my own head, most of which was just a blatant none-stop prayer.

Dear-Lord-Jesus-help-me-get-this-drunk-motherfucking-bastard-out-of-here-before-he-gets-his-dumb-ass-killed!

I stepped up on the porch beside them as they stood face to face, Guitar Man about six inches higher than T as T stood on the dirt. I put my arm across the doorframe in between the gun muzzle and T’s face. GM stayed in his frozen stance and I felt a flood of relief. Prayer answered. Things were still touchy but GM wasn’t determined to take this shitheel’s life.

“You need to get the fuck out of here, T, NOW.” I told him between the exchange he and GM were continuing to have. “If you try and get in this house, he will kill you. I know he will. You know it. Now leave. Just fucking go!”

Abruptly, T turned on his heel, stomped to the car and burned out of the driveway. I collapsed against the wall of the house and put my head in my hands, waiting for the nausea to pass. Somewhere in there I may have hugged Guitar Man, glad that we wouldn’t have to explain domestic defense killing to the Sheriff.

Guitar Man went into B’s cabin again, telling his sister to get her shit on, that they were driving to the police station in town to report it. He later told me that the officer he reported to shook his hand. Both for the willingness to defend his sister and her children, but also for having the clear headedness of NOT pulling the trigger as the first response. GM later told me he never would have shot T because he couldn’t see me behind him at all and didn’t want to risk shooting me as well. I knew he wouldn’t risk shooting me and that is why I never feared for my own safety.

I spoke to N and told her she needed to contact the Violence Free Crisis line and arrange to get into a shelter. GM and I weren’t always up there and with the place being so isolated with no phone should T decide to come out when we weren’t there she and the kids could be in serious danger. On a selfish note, I also just wanted her and all her bullshit the fuck off my mountain. I hoped they yanked those kids and got them into some semblance of a sane home.

I went to work Monday morning. Then I made the call I should have made earlier. I filled the CPS case worker in on all the details, up to and including the incident the night before. Because of the whole domestic aspect, they got right on thecae. Since N had pulled her head out of her ass long enough to take my advice and get into the shelter, they told her they would not remove the kids from her custody, but she needed to stay off her Dad’s property and find a place in town where she was capable of better caring for her children. To this day the family thinks it was T that reported her in an effort to get back at her. They don’t know it was me and I won’t be telling them.

While N was in the Safe House, whose location was to remain secret, she had GM and I pick her up at the church near it when she needed a ride somewhere. However, the church was right at the end of the alley and we were able to watch her walk out of the back yard of the second house up the alley, plain as anything.

N not only compromised the location of the Safe House by doing this, she also negated any chance I would ever have of being able to use should I need to.