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 Ten

(Editor’s note: This post may seem disjointed and skip around a lot. That is the reality of my day-to-day existence most times. I hope this all makes some sort of sense at the end….)

Sixteen years this September it will be, since my son‘s presence in my life forever changed the paths I had known.  It has been thirteen years since the second most changing spiritual experiences of my life.   Yet in my mind it is still ringing as “Ten years ago…” Because it has taken me thirteen years to realize what those ten years were and it was three years prior to that, with the birth of Carter and the first three years of his life, that the journey of not only self discovery but divine discovery began.

This is the part I fear writing the most because what I wish to write about encompasses a touchy subject that I have a lot of misgivings about.  I am terrified.  That there could be consequences for writing it, that maybe, in light of some of the other shit I have read out there…and I mean shit,  that an idea could be formed about me that isn‘t who I am at all.  But as I have learned from a very brave woman named Crystal at http://www.mcknob.com, sometimes you have to say ‘fuck it’ and expose your tender underbelly all because someone out there somewhere may gain a bit of strength from the wisdom of your own mistakes and be helped by it.

And that by standing up and taking some hits you will be much stronger for it.

Of all the times in recent history this is the time the world needs anchors.  Chain breakers.  Warriors.  People who have learned to face their fears and lay them to rest so that we can build a stronger generation in the children we have nurtured at our breasts and knees.  This, I feel,  is sacred work.

My post-partum depression with Carter never seemed to end.  My days were bleak and held nothing new in them.  I didn’t realize what a miracle I had right before me, squalling, pooping, spitting up, depending, and relying on me. I have a very dear friend who just told me the other night that I am too hard on myself.  She says I am a good Mom.  I sure as hell hope so.  I struggle every day with the voices that try to tell me otherwise.  The voices I grew up with.  The voices that raised me.  The voices that were raised.

Back then I didn’t know how to bond with my baby.  He squalled.  I wasn’t sure he was actually human.  It felt like he was too loud to be a human. Too helpless.  I couldn’t understand how to feel about him.  He was cute.  I liked it when he slept.  He slept through the night by two months old.  Yet my heart didn’t know what to do with this scary little helpless creature.  I just didn’t fucking get it.

The situation with Cain left the always-present anger roiling constantly just under the surface.  Heating up like a pustule waiting to burst.  Only sometimes instead of bursting outward it would implode and that rage would lash back into me, whipping those barbs deep within my own self worth.

A few old friends stopped by.  It was good to see the company.  Big people.  With teeth.  Who could talk.  Who brought marijuana with them.

The me that is right now looks back on the me that was back then and I don’t know weather to love or hate her.  She needed slapped once or twice I think, likely more.  I wonder what the fuck I was thinking?

Then I remember how making those decisions, while some of them were so negative and destructive, some of the ones that would be judged, at first glance, to have the potential for the most destruction ended up being my saving grace.

I have never, when I have smoked marijuana been one who would smoke as much as I could just to see how wasted I could get.  That herb alters my perceptions of reality and I found out early on that if I went ahead and smoked as much as I could I had the potential to not only make myself physically very ill, but my own brain coming up with it’s ‘stoner ideas’ could pretty much send me ‘round the bend.  Also, I found,  if I used it on a daily basis within a month or two I reached burn out, turned into Bitchzilla and decided that shit is just not worth using anymore.  Well, at least until the next time I really felt the need to change my view of life, no matter how temporarily.

My friend left me a marijuana bud half the size of my thumb.  This was like a goldmine to me.   It would last me for five months. Regular smokers would have had it two days.

I realize marijuana is a drug and I do not condone it‘s use in an addictive way.  I also know from personal experience how easy it is to abuse in this manner. Sometimes, and for some, the risks outweigh the benefits.

Yet if it wasn’t for what this plant can do that is good, I would not have learned to bond with my baby, the depression would have deepened in stead of lessening, however temporarily and I believe I could have harmed myself or possibly my baby.

For the first time, I learned to see my baby as my son.  Seeing him as my son made him real to me.  He was a person now, not just a loud little pooping thing.  He was about five months old by this time.  Starting to actually turn from helpless baby to inquisitive infant.  He always had been inquisitive, but before I took up the once a week (sometimes two at first) ritual of smoking a couple puffs, I couldn’t see that.  Somehow that stuff helped me open and eye inside my heart and head that let me see him as a person.

I began to realize the hand and eye gestures meant something, they weren’t mindless flails.  There was purpose behind the intent.  I had not been able to get that those sounds he was making were attempts at engagement and communication.  I found out that I could make him laugh because I found out he liked it when I played with him.  Even then I couldn’t have told you or even really comprehended him  wanting to engage my attention.  Experience, growth and maturity helped light that bulb.

Yet to hear him giggle…that innocent, honest baby giggle made me want to do things to make him happier.  We played games.  We made loud music, with vocals, with his rattles, banging on anything we could find.  I would talk to him and tell him all about the world around him and what to expect and he would stare at me with those huge, cornflower blue eyes, drinking in the sounds of my voice and his own native tongue.

Back then I was just a lonely, inexperienced, ignorant first time Mom looking for a lifeline.  For something to help me make sense of things.  I found it.  For right or wrong, good or bad, in part or whole, I found it.