Homeless with Kids: A Step Up

It has been a very long time since my last post. In that time my world has once again, permanently, shifted.

 On August 19^th, ten years to the day when GM and I first made our relationship ‘official’, I took our children, left the mountain, and moved into a homeless shelter in a town over 30 miles away.

I did this with one days notice to GM and the kids. The kids were thrilled Mommy had found them a place to stay. A ‘repartment’ as Nunkee calls it. GM told me it was the stupidest idea he had ever heard, me taking the kids and leaving a ‘perfectly good’ house. Frankly, I had more than my fair share of it. So had the kids. I had promised them I would get them in town before school started.

 At first, Butterfly was angry and sad to be leaving her friends in our home town. But my choices were very limited, and my temporary job assignment was coming to an end soon. I knew I had to act. Besides, I had promised my kids we wouldn’t be out there another winter.

 I could have moved in to the shelter the day I went to talk to them. I had put my application in for low income housing. Three to four months or longer (a couple people had lived in the low income housing in my hometown 11 and 13 YEARS) waiting list every place I inquired. The shelter was the last resort. It just so happened they had a vacancy. I asked to have one more day to let my kids know and get a chance to say goodbye to their Dad. They agreed to hold the spot for us.

 Bird had his suitcase packed ten minutes after I told them. Of course, I had to empty all the toys out of it and repack it with clothes, which really bummed him out. Clothes are very low on the priority list when you are 8.

 The girls (except Butterfly) were excited to be on the journey. I was grateful and a bit appalled. I never wanted to live in a ‘Homeless Shelter’. We weren’t transients, after all!

 Or were we?

 For the past two years, we had been living in substandard housing that wouldn’t even pass inspection for a workshop much less a residence. In the winter we were forced to crowd into my elderly mother’s cramped residence and take over her living space when the snow kept us out or anytime I was ill or injured, be it the flu or that car wreck.

 No running water. No electricity. Winter nights spent sleeping with my feet out from under the blankets so the numbing cold would wake me every two hours to feed wood to that piece of crap, rusting-from-the-inside-out woodstove when the fire was going out. Waking because my children would have gotten too cold in that thinly insulated camp trailer with the paper thin walls, even with the mounds and mounds of blankets I kept piled on them. Sometimes I would get so tired doing this night after night as GM slept soundly through the night beside me that my body and mind, in sheer exhaustion, would stay asleep even as the last ember died and the cold crept into the cabin through all the air leaks around the tops of the wall, up from the gap in the floor between trailer and addition and through the spaces between the spray foam insulation in the kids end of that camp trailer. I would awake, multiple hours later to numb feet and a dead fire. I would be up for the rest of the night trying to get it warm enough in there.

 Where we had been living was no home. It was no better than a glorified hobo camp.

 Things with GM were just deteriorating. He hadn’t thrown any of his customary hissy-fit, object smashing temper tantrums since that chilly December night I had left him standing on that back road, fifteen miles from town and at least two miles to the highway. But the verbal arguments grew worse and his negative attitude and reactions to the kids was escalating. The man-child, instead of taking responsibility for his actions, owning up and doing what he needed to make changes in himself, became more and more condemning and blaming of not only me but our kids as well. He constantly spoke to them as if he were angry with them and he couldn’t stand them. Not so much in his words, though there was that, but how he spoke to them. In a tone of voice like he hated them. Then he acted like they were the ones being hateful to him.

 About two weeks before we left we were at my Mom’s house. I was taking a long time getting out to the car but he had also made the kids go out there and sit. Suddenly, from inside I am hearing GM screaming at Bird at the top of his lungs.

“DON’T YOU EVER HIT YOUR SISTER LIKE THAT AGAIN! YOU DON“T GET TO HIT THEM EVERYTIME YOU GET PISSED OFF…etc”, with Bird yelling and then three very loud whack noises as GM proceeded to spank Bird while screaming at him not to hit.

 The neighbors called the cops. We had a nice little talk with one of our local detectives. Two days later I get a call from Department of Family Services. I didn’t see what happened, but I heard it and I could feel his rage through the walls of my mother’s house.

 For a few weeks, possibly as long as a month before that incident I had told GM I wanted off the mountain before school started. That we needed to separate because we weren’t working out or more importantly, working for the best interest of our children. That I was done wintering out there.

 When we met in the office of the DFS with GM’s new friend the caseworker, I told her we would be separating. That this was the final straw. She asked GM if he was aware of this and GM looked at her and said,

“This is the first I have heard of it!”

 I looked at him, stunned. “I have been talking about this for WEEKS, GM!” I said, “I told you we (the kids and I) weren’t wintering out there again.”

 Later that night we had yet another huge argument. This time I had ‘thrown him to the wolves’ in there. I was ‘childish’, ‘immature’, and all the usual crap. It was all me, not him and how dare I blame him for everything and not take the blame myself. I was ‘acting like’ I was ‘a saint, and could do no wrong’ while ‘everything he’ did, didn’t do, screwed up, whatever was over exaggerated and part of my ‘overreacting drama.’

 I think I decided once and for all at that moment that I really don’t like this man.

 I am DONE with being accused of wanting to just ‘lay blame/guilt/whatever’ .

DONE with putting my own apathy ahead of my kids most vital and basic needs.

DONE with being accused of being a control freak because I make the family decisions because he doesn’t, can’t or won’t.

DONE with being told how badly I handle money when he won’t take responsibility for it.

DONE with being the disciplinarian when the kids get out of line because he doesn’t have the courage to do it.

DONE with being with a man who puts a higher priority, more time, thought and effort on his medieval reenactment dress-up group activities than he does with finding a happy balance within his own family.

DONE with being the one who has to deal with anything difficult or unpleasant simply because he grabs onto the excuse ‘I can’t because…’ and hangs onto it so tightly he has convinced himself he is just as helpless in this world as his parents told everyone he was growing up.

“GM can’t take care of himself! After all, he got shot over 24 years ago, spent a month in the hospital and maybe could have died!”

 Just done. Not just me, either. The kids were done too. They aren’t done loving their father, but they don’t want to go to his house with him.

 Oh, and that’s my fault too because I spend hours ‘every day‘, apparently, ‘spewing vitriol’ into their heads and brainwashing them to not like being treated like total sub-humans by their father.

 I am done listening to my babies cry when I say we have to go home. They like our tiny one bedroom ‘repartment’ with its full bath and tiny little camp trailer sized sink in the kitchen. You can turn on the tap and water comes out! That’s pretty amazing. The kitchen sink is no bigger than the one in my 15ft camp trailer, but when you turn the faucet on water actually comes out and it‘s not because we hauled if from twelve miles away!

 There is electricity and a combo DVD/VHS player and when we moved in someone had left the original Freaky Friday movie with Jody Foster on VHS there. My kids have memorized the dialogue they’ve watched it so many times.

 Computer time to write is few and far between with the kids coming with me to the library. This night was given to me because my car got a flat tire and we ended up having to stay in Mom’s town at her house. I will post what and when I can.

 I want to write so much more. About the people we have met, the things I have learned. The reason I know why I came here. The blessings that have begun to come into our lives and the positive direction it is all flowing.

 This is a small part. But it is the beginning chapter of a new life for my kids and I. There is no turning back.

New Circles and Changing Habits

After another lengthy silence….it seems strange, writing on here again after my last post.  In the pages that are read life stops but in reality it never takes a break.

After GM and I separated, the kids and I moved in with my 79 year old mother in her tiny two bedroom house.  To say the situation was stressful does not begin to cover it.  I love my mother, yet my mother never really did want children, she did it because that’s what you did after you got married.  I was a late life “oops” that, at her age of 41 left her reeling anew, especially in light of all the hell-bent for partying my two older sisters did.

I didn’t realize what or how I used to cope with living in a house where you were considered to be mostly a pest, until I was again in that situation.  I never realized, until a few weeks ago, that I try to walk silently in that house, and for someone with a very much less than slight frame, manage it quite well.

My mother is not one of the most observant personalities to start with and age hasn’t helped that.  Until the night I stealthed past her in the kitchen to get something as she sat mesmerized by a game of computer solitaire I never realized how hard I tried growing up to make myself invisible.

Meantime, GM and I had been in daily contact.  He was angry after the separation and tried for a week or so to make it all my fault.  I refused to take it.  I have my part, but I am not all at fault.  Oh, I know I provoke him.  I do it on purpose when I allow his comments or accusations to get the better of me.  I feel the razor sharp double edge of my tongue as the sheath comes off and we go to war.

I never went into marriage with the idea that is things went bad we could just get a divorce.  Perhaps some of my parent’s morals rubbed off on me.  However, I refuse to live in a miserable marriage.

My mother put a time limit on school nights for GM to be out of her house.  This was full within her right.  My mother and I had a conversation.  Her stance was “her house, her rules”.  I agreed as far as GM was concerned.  I spoke with her about, yes, it was her house and we needed to live in respect in accordance with this.  There was a major problem, however.  My mother, beyond telling me GM needed to be out by 8 pm on school nights, never really stated what these “rules” were.  I didn’t ask for specifics but went about making sure the dishes were always done, the house got picked up as often as I could organize it, laundry didn’t pile up and I did any and all cleaning projects that came about or were mentioned.  For the most part, my mother took Flexeril and laid in her room with a back ache.  My mother chooses to deal with things by ignoring them until they explode.  Out of sheer stubbornness I didn’t ask her what she wanted.  Also out of sheer business in trying to take care of my kids and keep them from going stir-crazy in a tiny house I knew my mother really didn’t want up living in with her.

It soon became apparent over the weeks that part of what my mother considered under the jurisdiction of “her house, her rules” also meant how I chose to go about raising, disciplining and holding accountable my own children.  Time and again I was told she wasn’t helping with my kids at all.  Not that I expected her too.  I know better.  Why would my mother want to help me raise my own kids when she had resented so much raising her own?  I told her time and again I didn’t want her to try and help with my kids.  I didn’t want her cooking meals.  I told her not to, repeatedly.  As soon as she would try and start a dinner one hand would go to the small of her back and by the time anything was on the table if I was busy elsewhere she would be clutching her spine and rocking back and forth and often abandon the table to go lay on her hot pack.

I told her not to make meals because it put her in too much pain and she snapped at me that it was going to hurt no matter what she did.  So I made sure either myself, or, if I was doing other things, my eldest daughter was starting dinner or breakfast.

According to my mother this put far too much responsibility on my 11 1/2 year old.

I remember too clearly my early years where no responsibilities were assigned to me other than the occasional, “clean your room if you want to have a friend over”.  It wasn’t until I was fifteen that my mother suddenly decided that I needed rules and chores.

Do you have any idea how much additional strife that caused in our family?  You have a kid who has gotten a free ride with no expectations so far and literally, in the course of one week try to impose massive changes on that person and on the whole household for that matter, then wonder why there is constant conflict.

So I decided, that, as a sanity saver for myself, and to keep from doing my children a disservice, they would learn young what it meant to participate in household chores.  It is still a struggle, but my kids know that if they make a mess, they get to clean it up.  If there are dishes or dirty laundry, they get to help or do it.  My eleven year old gets a lot more responsibility because of her age, but the others are coming along as well.

GM and I started counseling.  We are working on repairing things…communicating in ways without anger.  We have both been told to be accountable in ways .  I was told to watch my own negative talk.  He was told to step up as the main disciplinarian instead of letting me do it all.  I recently got a (very) part time job as a tax preparer so I will have a small amount of income at least until the tax season picks up.  We still need another car.  The one we have is absolute oil chugging no muffler piece of crap.  At least we can all ride in it.

Two weeks ago, my mother finally had her blowup.  It was on a Sunday.  Day of rest.  She had gone to church and the kids and I were at her house.  My youngest, Nunkee was being a crabby brat.  So I let the three oldest watch televisions while I laid down with her around 10 am.  I woke up at noon and went out.  The kids said my mother had been but had left the house and when Butterfly asked her where she was going she told her, “I have no idea!”.  My mother’s way of letting us all know she was mad.  I guessed it was because I had dared take a nap with my youngest while the other kids were awake.  For some reason, this makes her angry, if I take a nap.  Other times it doesn’t bother her.  I never know where I stand with this woman.

She came home in the afternoon and didn’t speak to me.  I didn’t bother to initiate conversation because, even though I know she won’t, I feel that is she has an issue she should be grown up about it and come talk to me.  This is my stubborn “go-to-hell” attitude she attributes to the taint of my father’s genes.

Bird took a bath and told me he tried draining his toy on a towel on the stool.  I told him to wipe up the water.  I was actually watching a television program, something I rarely do.  I hadn’t gone into the bathroom yet.

My mother came out of her room to use the bathroom.  The first words she spoke to me that day were screamed, “YOU GET IN HERE AND CLEAN UP THIS GODDAMNED MESS!”

To which I diplomatically and respectfully replied, “Excuse me! WHO THE FUCK WERE YOU JUST TALKING TO LIKE THAT?” and world war three was on.  She was talking to me and I needed to clean up my skids mess,  be responsible for going in right after they used the bathroom to make sure there were no messes, it was my job to clean up his mess because he is just a (7 year old!) kid, etc. etc.  It was ugly.  My son freaked out and hid his head under the pillow on the couch while wailing miserably.  My mother and I exchanged volleys of venom and mutual disrespect and I told her the kids and I would be out of her house that week.  I also used a lot of f-bombs and hatred and was generally a huge asshole.

The irony is, if one of us had chosen to be the more mature one and treated the other respectfully, the whole situation could have been avoided.  The ugly and stubborn truth about me is that I have never respected my mother because I have judged her actions over her words and decided her hypocrisy wasn’t something I would ever respect in her.  I am sure it shows.  I know she has an idea that I don’t respect her even though I try not to show it.  Likewise, she does not respect me.  Realistically, it is better for us to live far, far apart.  My mother wants her peace and quiet.  She doesn’t really want her grandkids around as much as they are.  She does it out of a resentful sense of obligation while at the same time letting me know we are a bother to her and her routine.

I hope to  NEVER make my children feel like unwanted bothers in my life EVER.

So for two days we didn’t speak to each other unless absolutely necessary.  We have never apologized to each other even yet.  And two days later there was another blow up.  This time, I had it out with my eldest sister who called from Oregon.  K and I have actually talked to each other in depth maybe twice in the last ten years.  Once was a fairly recent conversation when I told her about splitting up with GM and the circumstances surrounding it.

K called late two days later.  I couldn’t help overhearing Mom getting more and more upset on the phone.  I finally picked up the extension.  Whether that was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do I don’t know.  I know I am sick of my mother getting angry at me and running to my eldest sister to cry and complain instead of to me.  We had it out about this once before when I was informed by my oldest sister that I was ‘abusing’ my mother because the kids and I were coming to her house to do laundry and bath and we were sometimes staying later than what my mother thought was appropriate for my kids.  I found out my mother had an issue with this through my oldest sister who lives out of state instead of from the woman whose house we were coming into.

Believe me.  It is easy for me to overstep boundaries.  Especially when I have to read someone’s mind or hear it third party to know what those boundaries are.  Frankly, it drives me batshit crazy, but I know it is at least half my fault because, being a selfish bastard, I don’t really want to know what the boundaries are if it involves how she thinks I should be raising my kids.  I am, after all, the result of that parenting and I struggle with it on a daily basis. (Especially that selfish bastard part.)  I really don’t like that, and I am working on changing it…mostly with my kids…I figure my mother and I aren’t really a priority on account of our established pattern.  I figure there still may be hope for me and mine.  I could be totally wrong, but whatever.  This stage of life only allows me so much in the stress capacity….)

So, I picked up that extension to hear my sister speaking of how much I make my kids suffer…and well, enter world war three.

The thing that my sister doesn’t see, doesn’t even want to see is that I am actually, at this stage of life going through a personal development stage that is forcing me to face not only fears but responsibility and accountability issues.  I am holding myself accountable to certain outside mentors.  I know I am where I am at because of all the choices I have made in the past.  There is no one to ‘blame’ but myself.

I also know I am working hard on changing those things while also having to deal with the reality of where I am at.  I don’t need someone coming in with a high and mighty, better-than-though judgmental attitude telling me what they think I need to do.

Oh, my sister informed me I had to move out of my mother’s house.  To which I replied I had already told mom I was moving out and would be out by Friday.

Mom didn’t say anything on the other line.  I didn’t expect her too.  I apologized for busting in on her conversation later but she said she didn’t mind.  I don’t know if that is true or not.  I never really know what is real with my mother.  At this point in life I don’t think I really care to know.  I know she will say one thing and mean another.  I know that she is my mother and there is that maternal love bond there…but as a person, I can’t stand her.  I know the feeling is mutual.

Reality is, it was not a domestic enough situation to warrant going in to a safe house.  The homeless shelters here in this small community are in another town and that would have meant uprooting my kids from their schools since I have no vehicle.

There is a two bedroom trailer of my mother-in-laws on the mountain.  I told GM to ask her how much she wants for it.  The kids and I are moving in there.

I told our counselors I will give it six months to see if GM is really willing to step up and commit to his share of responsibility and accountability.  My negative side doesn’t hold out much hope.  Financial reality states this is where I am at the moment.  Believe it or not, I am too poor for Section 8 housing assistance even if the wait list wasn’t two years out.  I don’t make enough money to qualify for low income housing.  Ironic, isn’t it?

So right now, I am holding on to one thing.  There is one hope for me, for my kids, and hopefully for my husband, and it is through the mentors I have, and in learning self sufficiency and personal development.  I am learning to never give up.  I know that the Great Spirit makes everything happen for a reason and what better way to motivate me to better my situation than by putting me in one that challenges me every single day.

There are days I wonder if I will succeed.  Then I realize I have no choice.  It is for my children that I must succeed.

A very dear, wonderful and generous friend of mine has offered to pay for daycare expenses for Nunkee so she can be out of the neglectful and sickness inducing environment of my mother in laws house.  The daycare provider will cut us a break on Bunny’s attendance cost so soon I hope to be able to have Bunny there as well.    One day I will be able to pay this forward tenfold.

There are days yet, where frustration sets in and nothing seems like it is getting better.  I am learning more about respect for my husband, for crediting him with his small steps like disciplining the kids without screaming at them.  There are steps being taken.  Impatience often wishes they were bigger.  I wish I had refrained from making such a mess of my life so far.  So much time wasted and so far to catch up.  Separate on the same mountain.  That is the way it has to be for now.  The past cannot be changed.  Tomorrow is coming and I have to keep my head up and walk in a good way.  So my children can have a good lead to follow.

As of January 15^th I quit smoking pot.  In order for me to make the steps necessary to change for the better, I have to give this up.  I still believe it has its place as a medicine, but like any medicine, it is easy to misuse.

WalkingThrough the Fog By a Thread

It sits above my brows like a low level drift, thick, impenetrable, sometimes with a low level buzz that keeps me on the edge of irritation at all times and is most likely caused but an overabundance of caffeine sizzling through my bloodstream.  This is the fog in my head. I have been asking myself lately, “What the fuck were you thinking, going back to school in the fall semester instead of waiting for spring?”

I do this to myself periodically. I have some diabolical insane part of me that decides that life isn’t stressful enough trying to live the life of a modern pioneer, with children,  but I must further complicate it by going beyond the bounds of even my own oft times questioned sanity.

Sometimes I think I have two crazy people sharing my brain that are in a constant competition of one-upsmanship.

Then I reflect in a more relaxing moment that I went back to school after a lot of thought and prayer and after truly feeling as if that were the direction I were being guided in.  The challenge is to try and keep on top of it all.

Keeping on top of it is something I aspire to like a crack addict hoping for the next fix.  Problem is I have no supplier and me and organization is not something that goes together.  ‘Keeping on top of it’ implies that I should have (sh)it all together in a tidy pile to be able to surmount it.  Reality shows in fact, that it is in a constant state of cave-in and I am more like an ant scrambling madly up the perpetually sliding sand hill.

My husband has accused me of being a hummingbird, flitting from one thing to another and never finishing.  I do finish things….just not all together or all in the same day.  He doesn’t realize that I have many personality aspects vying for control in my head.  They don’t always agree on what should come first.  So I end up sabotaging myself in quite a few areas and productive turnout is pathetic.

Take my kitchen for example.  My hearth.  The center of health, communion and sustenance for my family.  The place that, traditionally, as a mother, should be warm and peaceful, a place of nourishment for mind, body and spirit.

What I have for a kitchen is a 15 foot camp trailer.  It has two bunks that are used as storage spots.   The regular table broke and I tried having a small coffee table in there.  It serves as a place to pile stuff.  Some useful, some not so.  The same can be said for the seats.  In fact, the seat by the door is piled with boxes from our storage unit and cases of canned goods from the case lot sale at B & B last month.  I have a small propane cookstove barely large enough for a cake pan and not tall enough to brave baking an actual loaf of bread.  I only have an icebox style fridge, so in the summer months there are things I just don’t buy.  Like mayonnaise, butter or milk.  They spoil too quickly.  We get either enriched rice or almond milk, which keeps longer, or powdered milk, which tastes disgusting but works for cooking.  We can’t keep ice long enough in the coolers.  If we buy fresh produce it needs to be eaten within one or two days max to prevent spoilage.  This does not always happen so I always have a gallon of white vinegar on hand to kill off the science experiment that grows inside dark moist coolers when vegetables or dairy products cross over to the other side.

It’s not like I don’t know what I should be doing.  I know there are things I could or should do.  Sometimes I even make lists.  Where I consistently fail is in the practical application.  Often I feel as if I am facing this maelstrom of ‘stuff that needs to be done’ and it hits me in the face as soon as I open my eyes.  I don’t know where to begin.  Or, if I begin, I am easily drawn into the next ‘important thing to do’.

Looking at those pictures of F’s filthy kitchen made me realize the only difference between our housekeeping styles at first glance is that I put all my food cans in a huge laundry hamper outside to take to recycling, and I have mouse poison under the trailer bed to discourage any would be tenant vermin.  Ok, probably there is a lot less animal filth too, though the level of food spillage my children and I seem to generate is horrifying.  Bunny, my now five year old daughter also has a penchant for conducting cupboard recon for the sole purpose of commandeering cereal.  There is now an amazing amount of Count Chocula in the potato and onion bucket from our meager garden harvest.

I have NO PLACE to store anything.  So things get piled on the bunks, on the table, on the counters.  Then it avalanches and I cuss and shuffle it around and try to form new stacks.  I swear I am cleaning the place up, but then I have kids who are hungry RIGHT NOW and will DIE OF STARVATION if they are not fed within ten minutes.  But now I need a cooking pot because we got home too late the previous night to heat the water and do the previous nights dishes and they are all sitting, dirty, in the huge purple wash bin outside.  An I can’t find my frying pan because there is still a bag of canned goods sitting on it from the groceries we bought two or three days ago that I have been meaning to get into the cupboard if only I could reach it because there are two coolers, a shallow pan of hand washing water and half a case of Coca-Cola sitting between me and the teeny tiny little cupboards I have to cram everything to feed six people in for two weeks.

I kick the case of Coca-Cola and curse the company for ever taking the coca out of it, because, having gotten to actually try chewing some coca a former employer brought back from her trip to Peru, I could sure use that kind of caffeine-without-the-jitters-or-irritability energy boost to get this shithole cleaned and I don’t think I am getting to South America anytime soon to lay in my own supply.

This is usually when I leave the trailer, step outside, right into the face of the entire full length trailer house GM used to live in that has completely collapsed, exposing its guts of moldering books, bed frames, clothes, car parts, tufts of hairy insulation, mouse shit, furniture and some appliances mixed with God only knows what else in a musty smelling carnage.  My only bright spot in that view is that there is a boreal toad that lives somewhere in it, possibly under that bed frame pedestal and he croaks briefly throughout the day.  Trailer trash habitat.  Adaptive species amaze me.

Then I go hide in my outhouse.

This is pathetically, one of the only places where I can invoke the “LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE” rights to privacy laws so scarce in a parent’s life.

Back when I lived in a house in civilization with actual running water I would lock myself in for either a library period or a hot bath.  I don’t have the bath luxury now, and the length of library period depends on the weather temperature and whether or not my enzymes are doing their job at odor control.  But for a time, it is a place where I can hide and they can’t come in.  Oh, I do take off up the mountain sometimes, and Boo, my foster dog turned family member will sniff me out every time.  But I can’t just leave the kids like they used to do in the olden days to go out and get wood or work the distant fields.  Not only is this frowned on now days, but modern kids aren’t equipped to deal with things on their own.  In fact, you can bet that as soon as I am out of the house Bunny gets it into her head that all former house rules about safety, respect of others property, and general rules of proper conduct have left on my heels and there will soon emanate from our humble domain such a shrieking, caterwauling, thumping, or worse, ominous and pregnant silence you have ever encountered.  Most times I will return to find my baby, Nunkee, with new war paint either in the medium of marker or biggest sister’s pillaged makeup, objects once high upon the shelves stomped into the floor, every toy box, jewelry box, container, or suitcase upended and scattered, and a five year old Bunny proclaiming in prim report, “Nunkee did it, I saw her!”

Which is usually where my voice maxes out at the sound barrier, children attempt to flee in terror or pick up as quickly as humanly possible, and I stomp back up to rail in vain at the general disarray of my life and kitchen space.

Then I kick that Coca-cola box again.

I know one thing that will help me maintain my sanity.  I can keep writing.  I will be making time every week, possibly more than once (baby steps!) to come into the college library and maintain my thread of communication with myself through this outlet.  That way GM won’t be trying to sneak peeks over my shoulder to read what horrible family secrets I may be spilling and I won’t have to minimize the damned screen every two minutes, breaking my thread of concentration.  That thread is the only way I have of finding my way through the fog.

I know there are few certainties I can count on in this life.  I am certain hanging on for dear life to this thread is my necessity.  My emotional sustenance and survival.  My way of seeing it through and maybe, just maybe having it make sense in the end.  It is my one, unbreakable link to sanity in the chaos.

Or so the voices tell me.

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 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 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 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.