Wesley’s birth was another one of those before/after events. You know, “before Wes was born, this was this way” or “after Wes was born, this was that way.” I don’t think that I can really put into words what I felt about him. I also think it’s kind of obnoxious when people go on and on about gushy things like what they felt when their babies were first born, but I will just say this: it was amazing.
I felt very comfortable with my new baby boy, and did not have any of the anxiety about being able to care for him that other women experience. I just did it. I did have a lot of anxiety about going out into the world in general, though, and I was terrified someone would take him or make him sick or in some other way harm him.
I was suffering from post-partum depression, but didn’t really make that connection until years later, after my second son was born. I really believed that PPD meant that you wanted to harm your child or be away from your child or something like that, and my main feeling about my baby was that I had to protect him from whatever. I also thought that the extra intensity of my regular depression was just part of the “hormones” of having a baby.
I don’t really remember too much about the first six months of Wesley’s life, really – it is kind of blurry. Again, the same thing happened after my second son was born. I remember that I was terribly overwhelmed, and I am not sure what I was overwhelmed about, but am sure I could make a few guesses. I still had not made any friends in Charleston, and after all of the usual family had come and gone after Wes was born, I was pretty solitary.
The baby’s daddy was still going to school and working full time. I went back to work somewhere in there – the order of events is very vague to me. There were actually a lot of visits from this family and that family, maybe once a month or so, but what I remember about Charleston is being so lonely.
After I started back at work, I missed Wesley so much! Every time I would finish a shift at the gas station, I would get so excited about seeing him again once I got home. I was still riding my bike and working at the gas station, but had switched to mornings so we didn’t have to get a babysitter.
I don’t know – I think its kind of hard to talk about because of how difficult it was just for me to be awake. I remained very depressed, but began to feel more familiar and comfortable about living in Charleston. We were able to get a car with a very generous monetary donation from a family member, and that really helped a lot!
I also had Wesley. I honestly think that baby has saved my life and my sanity in more ways than I could ever recount. I remember a time very clearly when he had been up all day and would not go to sleep and would not stop crying unless I was holding him. I was exhausted, and I was worried something was wrong with him.
At about 4 a.m., I settled down on the couch to try to get some rest, Wesley still in my arms. I remember I looked down at his face, and he looked at me with his big eyes and stared at me. I stared back. He was very content with me holding him, and we stared at each other for a long time.
I had never felt such an overwhelming sense of complete love, acceptance, safety – whatever. It was good, though. It occurred to me that I had been up for almost 24 hours with this baby, and I could still just look at him and be washed over with love and contentment. It was weird – I wasn’t used to contentment, or to such a pure love, but I wasn’t going to do anything to try and make it go away.
The baby’s daddy and I moved back to Atlanta for the 1996 Summer Olympics. We found a ridiculously affordable apartment and settled in. By the time I left him four months later, I had lost 30 pounds, was cleaning obsessively, and would not leave the apartment except to take him to work (he still didn’t have a driver’s license from his previous indiscretions with the law).
Again, I don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t been for Wesley. He was beginning to talk and walk and do all sorts of very cute new things every day. I really believe he is the only thing that kept my feet on the ground, and that was just barely. I literally was waiting for someone to come and take me away – to where, I don’t know, but figured it would involve a straight jacket.
Without getting into too much of the details, I finally left the baby’s daddy and moved back home with my parents. I began working for my dad full time, got a babysitter and health insurance and a regular paycheck, and even a car.
I really liked being around my mom, and really hated being around my dad. Fortunately, he was not at home or at work very often. When he was at home, he would have a very low tolerance for anything I might have to say. A few times, he demanded that I leave his house immediately. He would look to my mom to back him up, and she would say, “I’m not kicking my daughter and my grandson out on the street at 10 at night.”
My mom didn’t defy him often, but by this time he had really begun to be even more undone than ever. She was getting really tired of him, too.
He had always done inconsiderate things, like leave town and not contact anyone until he got home. However, by the time I got back home with my baby, he was doing really weird things like going out of town without even telling anyone, and he had gone to Russia for like four months with hardly any contact at all.
He would take off and say things like, “oh it was so funny – I got arrested for pushing some guy and was in jail for a few days and that’s why I wasn’t able to call.” This was an excuse from both Russia, and from a separate trip to Mexico.
I had grown up in his company and really loved working there. I loved the people and the work and how the warehouse/factory smelled, and really just the familiarity with it all.
Part of my job was to attend a convention in Vegas where his company had a booth every year. The first time I had gone along on this trip had been when I was 16 – he got my mom to take me out and get some suits and heels, and then I basically stood around at the booth for hours a day looking pretty and knowing nothing.
This time around, I was twenty and was involved in a lot more of the planning and carrying out the planning and all of that, so it was a lot funner. On the last day of the convention, my dad left. He told me to make sure everything got home, that I was in charge, that he needed me and knew I could handle it.
Then he disappeared. He had arranged for me to take his room for a night so that I could “take care of everything” (that was a mess, and I am not even going to go into it). When I called home to check on Wesley the next morning, my mom said my dad hadn’t gotten home and she hadn’t heard from him.
I freaked out. I just knew he was dead. I could picture very clearly that he went to play golf on one of those desert courses, hit his ball out in the middle of nowhere (because he sucked at golf), had a heart attack and collapsed and died behind one of those little desert bush things.
I got on the phone in the hotel room and started tracking down his every move – I actually was able to obtain a lot of information on him and what he had been doing. I found out that he had gone out to play golf before he left town, who he played golf with (a guy from Texas – I even spoke with him to see if he had any info), what time he turned in his rental car, and that he had gotten onto his flight out.
But after that, it was like he had vanished off the face of the earth. I was terrified that if I left, his body would be left out in the desert because no one would know he was there, and no one in Vegas would be looking for him. I managed to get an extra night at the hotel on his credit card and continued my investigation.
At about 7 p.m. the following evening, my mom called and said he had just walked in the door. I was furious. I asked her where he had been, did he know how worried I was about him, etc., etc. He wouldn’t tell her or even get on the phone with me.
I took the next flight home, and found out at work the next day that he had told everyone I had stolen his money and stayed extra time in Vegas to party and hang out with some guy I had met there.
I just didn’t know what to do.
We had a fantastic falling out at the Waffle House – he had a clipboard with a list of the ways he believed I was screwing up my life, and I screamed at him, “who the fuck do you think you are?” several times, and he finally just left some money on the table and took off. I then proceeded to have one of the most satisfying and peaceful solitary meals I had ever had, then returned to work.
Ok, it’s time to stop for now. This was all much more exhausting than I had anticipated, though I don’t know why. I mean, I don’t know why I had not anticipated that writing about this would have been this exhausting, because, I mean, duh.
Back to that fantastically inconsequential and easy-to-read romance novel – one of the best ways to get my head back on straight J.
To be continued…
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Part 9
I really did like working at that gas station. One of the things I remember fondly is how there was this one guy who would ask me out whenever he came in. Under different circumstances, this type of behavior would have made me feel terribly uncomfortable, but at that time, I was super-huge pregnant. I was also married.
The guy didn’t really care at all about either one of those things, and even though he had a mullet, I was flattered. I needed the flattery.
I could not believe the transformation of my body throughout that pregnancy. Even before I started doing meth, I was underweight all through high school. I simply was not accustomed to being anything other than a stick. I went from 93 pounds to 180 pounds between March and November.
It was CRAZY.
The first area of my body to quickly transform was my chest. I was super-skinny, and basically wore bras because they kept my nipples from sticking out. By the time I was three months pregnant, I was a C-cup.
I had always been envious of girls with big boobs, and would have assumed that my suddenly sprouting rack would have made me feel good. It didn’t.
First of all, HOLY STRETCHMARKS BATMAN! You may think this is TMI, but I don’t give a shit – there were stretch marks all over my body by the time that baby was born. Literally everything between my ankles and my neck had stretch marks. It was CRAZY.
Second of all, those new appendages hanging off of my chest really took a lot of getting used to. They were always in my way – I couldn’t even open a cabinet to get a bowl or something without feeling like I was fighting my way through a mall at Christmas time.
Also, I began “leaking” (when the mammary glands produce a nice thin, sweet liquid in preparation for the newborn, there will sometimes be a preemptive flow of fluid from the breasts) really early in my pregnancy. I had to wear nursing pads (circular, disposable pads inserted in the bra to protect the clothing from the excreted liquid – maxi pads for the boobs) all the time from about the fifth month.
Although the part of the nursing pads that actually touched my nips was cotton and soft, the backing was plastic to keep the fluid from leaking through. It was summer time, and it was HOT. I thought I knew humidity from growing up in Atlanta, but I was wrong. Humidity right next to the ocean in the southeast is stifling.
By the time I would get home after work and take off my uniform and free my gigantic gourds, they would be all wrinkly and sore from being so hot and not breathing because of the nursing pads.
I could really go more into the description of my changing boobs, but it is starting to make me feel like a freak show again.
Because that’s what I was – a freak show.
For some stupid reason, I had a full-length mirror and would occasionally check the progress of my rapidly growing body. Oh my god. I was traumatized. I felt like a giant mama gorilla.
Ugh.
By the time October had rolled around, I was nearing the end of my bike-riding days and really enjoying the break from the heat.
We had moved into a townhouse in the same complex so that there would be room for the baby. I loved the townhouse – the separation between the two floors made me giddy. I mean, that place was tiny, too, but there were two floors! AND two bathrooms! AND the kitchen and living room were separated by an actual hallway!
Just to clarify, I am not in any way being flippant about that townhouse. I grew up as an upper-middle-class-white girl in an upper-middle-class-white town. My bedroom growing up was almost 2/3 of the size of that first apartment in Charleston. Within one year, I had left the big house in the burbs I had known my whole life, downsized to my car, upsized to the floor in an apartment (with two other people living there) that actually was smaller than my room growing up, upsized again to a bigger apartment (with four other people living there), downsized to that apartment I hated in Charleston, and then got to live in this luxurious townhouse.
It was heavenly. And then I got too big to be able to even get on my bike to go to work, or to go to work at all, and because I didn’t really know anyone or have a car, I was able to get very familiar with that townhouse over the next month.
Sidenote: by the time the 1995 World Series final game occurred, my primary location was on the opened futon downstairs in front of the TV and near the bathroom and kitchen. The baby’s daddy was at work, and I watched the Atlanta Braves – my hometown team – win the World Series for the first time. Well, the first time in Atlanta (they had previously won in 1914 in Boston, and then in 1957 in Milwaukee). I was torn. I had been watching that team since I was a baby, had gone to games every season, loved them when they sucked, rode out the torturous minutes of the final games of the previous three seasons, and there I was, a big blob laid out on a futon by myself, not even living in Georgia, when they won the World Series. Bastards.
Towards the end of my pregnancy, my mind began to slip. I wished and hoped every day to go into labor, starting a month before my due date. Then I got to my due date, and still no baby. I was beginning to actually believe I would always be pregnant - forever. It was not until ten frigging days AFTER my due date that I finally got induced.
I won’t go through all of the details of the delivery, but I did end up having to be fully sedated for an emergency c-section, so I wasn’t there when he was born.
I woke up in a recovery room discovering that I was alone again in my body. I asked about my baby – they said he was over 8 pounds. I was pretty sure they were thinking of a different baby. I couldn’t imagine ever having a baby that big.
I wanted to see him so badly – I had dreamed about the moment I would finally get to see his face. I asked to be moved so I could meet my child. The staff apparently was in the middle of a shift change, and a whole lot of other bullshit, and it was not until five hours after he was born that they even put me in the hospital room.
I sat in the bed staring at the door, and finally, FINALLY, a nurse walked in with my baby. I held my arms out, fully expecting her to hand him over.
Except she didn’t. She wanted me to have a lesson in breast-feeding first. I asked her if I could just see what he looked like. She hadn’t known I hadn’t even met him yet, and quickly put him into my arms.
And there he was – the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I think that may have been the first time in my life I felt so safe loving another human being.
To be continued…
P.S. if you are enjoying my blog, it would be awesome if you clicked the “follow” icon near the top of this page, and also if you passed along the link to anyone else you think might enjoy it, too. Thanks :)
The guy didn’t really care at all about either one of those things, and even though he had a mullet, I was flattered. I needed the flattery.
I could not believe the transformation of my body throughout that pregnancy. Even before I started doing meth, I was underweight all through high school. I simply was not accustomed to being anything other than a stick. I went from 93 pounds to 180 pounds between March and November.
It was CRAZY.
The first area of my body to quickly transform was my chest. I was super-skinny, and basically wore bras because they kept my nipples from sticking out. By the time I was three months pregnant, I was a C-cup.
I had always been envious of girls with big boobs, and would have assumed that my suddenly sprouting rack would have made me feel good. It didn’t.
First of all, HOLY STRETCHMARKS BATMAN! You may think this is TMI, but I don’t give a shit – there were stretch marks all over my body by the time that baby was born. Literally everything between my ankles and my neck had stretch marks. It was CRAZY.
Second of all, those new appendages hanging off of my chest really took a lot of getting used to. They were always in my way – I couldn’t even open a cabinet to get a bowl or something without feeling like I was fighting my way through a mall at Christmas time.
Also, I began “leaking” (when the mammary glands produce a nice thin, sweet liquid in preparation for the newborn, there will sometimes be a preemptive flow of fluid from the breasts) really early in my pregnancy. I had to wear nursing pads (circular, disposable pads inserted in the bra to protect the clothing from the excreted liquid – maxi pads for the boobs) all the time from about the fifth month.
Although the part of the nursing pads that actually touched my nips was cotton and soft, the backing was plastic to keep the fluid from leaking through. It was summer time, and it was HOT. I thought I knew humidity from growing up in Atlanta, but I was wrong. Humidity right next to the ocean in the southeast is stifling.
By the time I would get home after work and take off my uniform and free my gigantic gourds, they would be all wrinkly and sore from being so hot and not breathing because of the nursing pads.
I could really go more into the description of my changing boobs, but it is starting to make me feel like a freak show again.
Because that’s what I was – a freak show.
For some stupid reason, I had a full-length mirror and would occasionally check the progress of my rapidly growing body. Oh my god. I was traumatized. I felt like a giant mama gorilla.
Ugh.
By the time October had rolled around, I was nearing the end of my bike-riding days and really enjoying the break from the heat.
We had moved into a townhouse in the same complex so that there would be room for the baby. I loved the townhouse – the separation between the two floors made me giddy. I mean, that place was tiny, too, but there were two floors! AND two bathrooms! AND the kitchen and living room were separated by an actual hallway!
Just to clarify, I am not in any way being flippant about that townhouse. I grew up as an upper-middle-class-white girl in an upper-middle-class-white town. My bedroom growing up was almost 2/3 of the size of that first apartment in Charleston. Within one year, I had left the big house in the burbs I had known my whole life, downsized to my car, upsized to the floor in an apartment (with two other people living there) that actually was smaller than my room growing up, upsized again to a bigger apartment (with four other people living there), downsized to that apartment I hated in Charleston, and then got to live in this luxurious townhouse.
It was heavenly. And then I got too big to be able to even get on my bike to go to work, or to go to work at all, and because I didn’t really know anyone or have a car, I was able to get very familiar with that townhouse over the next month.
Sidenote: by the time the 1995 World Series final game occurred, my primary location was on the opened futon downstairs in front of the TV and near the bathroom and kitchen. The baby’s daddy was at work, and I watched the Atlanta Braves – my hometown team – win the World Series for the first time. Well, the first time in Atlanta (they had previously won in 1914 in Boston, and then in 1957 in Milwaukee). I was torn. I had been watching that team since I was a baby, had gone to games every season, loved them when they sucked, rode out the torturous minutes of the final games of the previous three seasons, and there I was, a big blob laid out on a futon by myself, not even living in Georgia, when they won the World Series. Bastards.
Towards the end of my pregnancy, my mind began to slip. I wished and hoped every day to go into labor, starting a month before my due date. Then I got to my due date, and still no baby. I was beginning to actually believe I would always be pregnant - forever. It was not until ten frigging days AFTER my due date that I finally got induced.
I won’t go through all of the details of the delivery, but I did end up having to be fully sedated for an emergency c-section, so I wasn’t there when he was born.
I woke up in a recovery room discovering that I was alone again in my body. I asked about my baby – they said he was over 8 pounds. I was pretty sure they were thinking of a different baby. I couldn’t imagine ever having a baby that big.
I wanted to see him so badly – I had dreamed about the moment I would finally get to see his face. I asked to be moved so I could meet my child. The staff apparently was in the middle of a shift change, and a whole lot of other bullshit, and it was not until five hours after he was born that they even put me in the hospital room.
I sat in the bed staring at the door, and finally, FINALLY, a nurse walked in with my baby. I held my arms out, fully expecting her to hand him over.
Except she didn’t. She wanted me to have a lesson in breast-feeding first. I asked her if I could just see what he looked like. She hadn’t known I hadn’t even met him yet, and quickly put him into my arms.
And there he was – the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I think that may have been the first time in my life I felt so safe loving another human being.
To be continued…
P.S. if you are enjoying my blog, it would be awesome if you clicked the “follow” icon near the top of this page, and also if you passed along the link to anyone else you think might enjoy it, too. Thanks :)
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Part 8
Charleston, S.C. is a beautiful city. I was excited to move there. I had visions of myself and my growing belly strolling the beaches at sunset, cooling off in the ocean, reading in the parks, and basically being blissful.
Yeah. Nope.
I will try to get through this part quickly because it still just irritates the shit out of me, and whenever I talk about it, it ends up sounding like a gigantic bitch fest. Here goes:
The day before we were going to start driving from Athens to Charleston, the baby’s daddy decided he should change the oil in my car and check the fluids. I wanted to just take it to Jiffy Lube, but he insisted it would be cheaper if we bought all of the stuff ourselves and he did the work.
As he had never EVER worked on a car before, I was a bit skeptical, but he was insistent. So he did the work, and the next morning we drove my car, stuffed to the gills, out of town with my mom and brother following in a big van with a u haul trailer.
Side note: the reason we were in MY car was that the baby’s daddy had totaled his in a single vehicle DUI accident three months prior.
It was summertime, my car didn’t have a/c, and it also did not have a functioning engine temp indicator. There were some other indicators that also were not functioning, but the temp indicator is the one I remember distinctly because that is the one that would have warned us of the car overheating before it blew up.
It happened right on the border between Georgia and South Carolina, on a boring and desolate stretch of I-20 east. The baby’s daddy was driving, and we suddenly noticed the car started to slow down and make very painful noises. My mom pulled up beside us in the van and my brother leaned out the window yelling that there was smoke coming from the hood, which we had just begun to notice ourselves.
We pulled over and gingerly popped the hood. There was a lot of smoke. There was also a radiator with no radiator cap, or any radiator fluid.
Side note: it didn't even occur to me until years later that this probably would not have happened if I had just taken the car to Jiffy Lube. And that is why it irritates the shit out of me.
We were hopeful – we piled into the van (which was also filled to the gills) and drove to a gas station and got radiator fluid. We drove back to the car and poured it in, waited a few minutes, then tried to start it – nothing.
We went back to the gas station, which happened to also be a service station with a tow truck, and got them to go get the car and bring it in. The tow truck guy said that when he started raising the car to be towed, the recently added radiator fluid came out the tail pipe.
I was too stunned to deal with it, so my mom went to talk to the guy. She said the guy sat across from her at his desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a gun, laid it on the desk, and said, “shoot it,” indicating of course that the car was in similar condition to an old horse with three broken legs. Not that I advocate shooting horses...or cars.
Oh my god. We unloaded the car, left it there, piled into the van, and kept going.
Side note: this is actually quite a good metaphorical example of how I lived my life – and still do, to some extent.
I don’t remember being too terribly upset about the car, other than crying a little bit when we started back out in the van with my mom driving, my brother on a cooler in between the front seats, and me sitting on the baby’s daddy’s lap in the passenger seat. All of the stuff in the car packed the already-full van way beyond capacity, and there was no room left for passengers.
That is how we got all the way to Charleston. At least the van had a/c. At least my mom – my MOM for heaven’s sake – was right behind me, and I didn’t end up stranded straddling the line between Georgia and South Carolina in the scorching heat for hours and hours.
I was also almost five months pregnant at this time, and the puking that had started the day after I found out I was knocked up had not subsided. I was sick all the time. Also, I had to pee all the time. Just further considerations contributing to the appreciation of my mom being right behind us when my car blew up.
To this day, there are few situations I can imagine that would be worse than being stranded on I-20 in June while five months pregnant.
Onward ho!
By the time we got to our tiny new home in Charleston, the shock of the trip and circumstances wore off and things started spinning in my brain. One of the first things unloaded from the u haul was my futon mattress (don’t forget I was only barely 19, and futons were perfectly acceptable – even trendy – pieces of furniture at that time). The futon mattress went onto the floor, and I went onto the futon mattress, and I don’t remember much more, if anything, about arriving in Charleston.
What I remember next is desolation. I hated our apartment – it was so tiny! It had orange-ish, yellowish, brownish carpet. It smelled funny. There were only two rooms – not two bedrooms, two actual rooms. There was only one bathroom, right in the middle of the two rooms.
Our location would have been ok if we’d had a car. It was in an area called West Ashley, and downtown Charleston was a bus ride away. The busses came every hour, and the first few times I tried to ride one, I had to jump off at the next stop because the fumes induced more puking.
I felt terribly isolated and lonely. I really just wanted my mom. The baby’s daddy and I got along really well, probably because we hardly ever saw each other and didn’t know anyone else.
I got a job at a gas station about four blocks from the apartment. The heat really compounded the pregnancy sickness, and walking to work – even that short distance – was very difficult. My mom came to visit and brought my bike that I’d had when I was younger. It was purple. I got a gel seat to accommodate my ridiculously sensitive vag (pronounced "va-j" - ridiculously sensitive from being pregnant), and a white basket to hang on the front.
It was awesome. That bike saved me. It was very flat where we were living, and that made riding a bike quite pleasurable. I rode it until I literally could not get on it anymore, at a little over eight months pregnant.
I got really good at consolidating groceries to fit in the basket. We were eligible for food stamps, so grocery shopping (and just eating in general) was not too stressful. The gas station I worked at was actually in the parking lot of the grocery store, so that was pretty convenient. I was able to make frequent, small trips so that transporting groceries was not a big problem.
I could fit two gallons of milk, or two full paper grocery bags, or one gallon of milk and one full paper grocery bag in the basket at one time. I also had a backpack, but that didn’t help much with groceries. Sometimes I would get overly ambitious about what I could manage to get home.
Once, before a shift at the gas station, I got two full paper grocery bags AND two gallons of milk. I put all of it in the cooler at the gas station, and after I was done working, finagled a decent method of transporting everything. I put the two bags in the basket of my bike, and each gallon of milk went into a large garbage bag and tied to each handle of my bike.
This would probably have been a pretty good solution if I didn’t have to ride with my knees way out to the sides to give myself enough room to pedal around my big baby belly. My knees would alternately hit one of the gallons of milk and it would swing way out, knocking me off balance. I would over-correct and then the other gallon would swing way out.
On this occasion, I was also wearing my kelly-green polyester work uniform, as I had just gotten off of work. My route home included some time riding along the highway, and as cars approached me, I wondered what the people driving thought when they saw me.
I wasn’t too concerned about that, though, especially since I usually closed the gas station by myself at one o’clock in the morning, and we lived in kind of a bad neighborhood, and being alone at that time of night scared the shit out of me. I usually rode home as quickly as possible so no one could, you know, get me.
Those milk jugs swinging all over the place seriously hindered my travel time, though. I comforted my nerves by telling myself that if any one was out looking to attack some one at that time in that area, they would be too distracted by how ridiculous I looked to go after me. I made it home safe, feeling proud of my ingenuity and my ability to survive.
That is actually how I made it through most of that time in Charleston, especially when I was riding that bike to or from work. I would think of how I grew up in an upper-middle class town, and of all of the luxuries I had taken for granted (such as multiple bathrooms in one dwelling), and then think about how having none of those things now did not stop me from getting by.
I would also think about how fortunate I was to be pregnant with, and later the mother of, a perfectly healthy baby, to live in a home that was clean and had air conditioning and doors that locked, to never be hungry, and to have my bike, and to work so close to home. It took A LOT of focusing on things like that to get me through that year.
It was really fucking hard.
There were other things that helped, too. Work was pretty interesting, primarily because we sold Busch beer two for $.99 out of a big tub filled with ice. We also sold six packs of Busch beer for $2.99, but it was a lot harder for many of our customers to come up with $2.99 than $.99 at any given time.
As I mentioned before, we lived in a kind of bad area, which meant there were a lot of low-income housing developments within walking distance of the gas station. There were regular customers who would walk up to the store every night from those neighborhoods, starting at about four in the afternoon.
They would get their two beers for $.99, and then go back home. About an hour later, they would come back and get two more beers, and so on and so forth as the evening progressed. Around 9 p.m., they would start to dwindle off, and were probably nice and toasted at home in bed (or wherever) by the end of my shift.
Sometimes one of the regulars would put a couple of cans of beer in their pockets before bringing a couple of more cans to the register to pay. Of course, they only wanted to pay for the two beers they put on the counter. This really bothered me at first, and I even once tried to confront one of the guys, but figured out relatively quickly that there was really no point.
They were usually pretty shitfaced by the time shoplifting entered their routine. Being shitfaced can sometimes make people prone to unexpected bouts of violence, and even though they were always very nice and conversational and friendly to me, I didn’t really want to push any buttons.
Another reason it wasn’t worth it to try and confront the beer-pocketters was because they were so entertaining. They would walk in and really and truly believe that they were being covert when they pocketed those beers. It was better than television to watch.
Aside from the eight hours of standing, the occasional snooty customer, the constant aching in my back, and the nearly constant fear for my very life and for the life of my unborn child, it was a pretty fun place to work.
To be continued…
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Yeah. Nope.
I will try to get through this part quickly because it still just irritates the shit out of me, and whenever I talk about it, it ends up sounding like a gigantic bitch fest. Here goes:
The day before we were going to start driving from Athens to Charleston, the baby’s daddy decided he should change the oil in my car and check the fluids. I wanted to just take it to Jiffy Lube, but he insisted it would be cheaper if we bought all of the stuff ourselves and he did the work.
As he had never EVER worked on a car before, I was a bit skeptical, but he was insistent. So he did the work, and the next morning we drove my car, stuffed to the gills, out of town with my mom and brother following in a big van with a u haul trailer.
Side note: the reason we were in MY car was that the baby’s daddy had totaled his in a single vehicle DUI accident three months prior.
It was summertime, my car didn’t have a/c, and it also did not have a functioning engine temp indicator. There were some other indicators that also were not functioning, but the temp indicator is the one I remember distinctly because that is the one that would have warned us of the car overheating before it blew up.
It happened right on the border between Georgia and South Carolina, on a boring and desolate stretch of I-20 east. The baby’s daddy was driving, and we suddenly noticed the car started to slow down and make very painful noises. My mom pulled up beside us in the van and my brother leaned out the window yelling that there was smoke coming from the hood, which we had just begun to notice ourselves.
We pulled over and gingerly popped the hood. There was a lot of smoke. There was also a radiator with no radiator cap, or any radiator fluid.
Side note: it didn't even occur to me until years later that this probably would not have happened if I had just taken the car to Jiffy Lube. And that is why it irritates the shit out of me.
We were hopeful – we piled into the van (which was also filled to the gills) and drove to a gas station and got radiator fluid. We drove back to the car and poured it in, waited a few minutes, then tried to start it – nothing.
We went back to the gas station, which happened to also be a service station with a tow truck, and got them to go get the car and bring it in. The tow truck guy said that when he started raising the car to be towed, the recently added radiator fluid came out the tail pipe.
I was too stunned to deal with it, so my mom went to talk to the guy. She said the guy sat across from her at his desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a gun, laid it on the desk, and said, “shoot it,” indicating of course that the car was in similar condition to an old horse with three broken legs. Not that I advocate shooting horses...or cars.
Oh my god. We unloaded the car, left it there, piled into the van, and kept going.
Side note: this is actually quite a good metaphorical example of how I lived my life – and still do, to some extent.
I don’t remember being too terribly upset about the car, other than crying a little bit when we started back out in the van with my mom driving, my brother on a cooler in between the front seats, and me sitting on the baby’s daddy’s lap in the passenger seat. All of the stuff in the car packed the already-full van way beyond capacity, and there was no room left for passengers.
That is how we got all the way to Charleston. At least the van had a/c. At least my mom – my MOM for heaven’s sake – was right behind me, and I didn’t end up stranded straddling the line between Georgia and South Carolina in the scorching heat for hours and hours.
I was also almost five months pregnant at this time, and the puking that had started the day after I found out I was knocked up had not subsided. I was sick all the time. Also, I had to pee all the time. Just further considerations contributing to the appreciation of my mom being right behind us when my car blew up.
To this day, there are few situations I can imagine that would be worse than being stranded on I-20 in June while five months pregnant.
Onward ho!
By the time we got to our tiny new home in Charleston, the shock of the trip and circumstances wore off and things started spinning in my brain. One of the first things unloaded from the u haul was my futon mattress (don’t forget I was only barely 19, and futons were perfectly acceptable – even trendy – pieces of furniture at that time). The futon mattress went onto the floor, and I went onto the futon mattress, and I don’t remember much more, if anything, about arriving in Charleston.
What I remember next is desolation. I hated our apartment – it was so tiny! It had orange-ish, yellowish, brownish carpet. It smelled funny. There were only two rooms – not two bedrooms, two actual rooms. There was only one bathroom, right in the middle of the two rooms.
Our location would have been ok if we’d had a car. It was in an area called West Ashley, and downtown Charleston was a bus ride away. The busses came every hour, and the first few times I tried to ride one, I had to jump off at the next stop because the fumes induced more puking.
I felt terribly isolated and lonely. I really just wanted my mom. The baby’s daddy and I got along really well, probably because we hardly ever saw each other and didn’t know anyone else.
I got a job at a gas station about four blocks from the apartment. The heat really compounded the pregnancy sickness, and walking to work – even that short distance – was very difficult. My mom came to visit and brought my bike that I’d had when I was younger. It was purple. I got a gel seat to accommodate my ridiculously sensitive vag (pronounced "va-j" - ridiculously sensitive from being pregnant), and a white basket to hang on the front.
It was awesome. That bike saved me. It was very flat where we were living, and that made riding a bike quite pleasurable. I rode it until I literally could not get on it anymore, at a little over eight months pregnant.
I got really good at consolidating groceries to fit in the basket. We were eligible for food stamps, so grocery shopping (and just eating in general) was not too stressful. The gas station I worked at was actually in the parking lot of the grocery store, so that was pretty convenient. I was able to make frequent, small trips so that transporting groceries was not a big problem.
I could fit two gallons of milk, or two full paper grocery bags, or one gallon of milk and one full paper grocery bag in the basket at one time. I also had a backpack, but that didn’t help much with groceries. Sometimes I would get overly ambitious about what I could manage to get home.
Once, before a shift at the gas station, I got two full paper grocery bags AND two gallons of milk. I put all of it in the cooler at the gas station, and after I was done working, finagled a decent method of transporting everything. I put the two bags in the basket of my bike, and each gallon of milk went into a large garbage bag and tied to each handle of my bike.
This would probably have been a pretty good solution if I didn’t have to ride with my knees way out to the sides to give myself enough room to pedal around my big baby belly. My knees would alternately hit one of the gallons of milk and it would swing way out, knocking me off balance. I would over-correct and then the other gallon would swing way out.
On this occasion, I was also wearing my kelly-green polyester work uniform, as I had just gotten off of work. My route home included some time riding along the highway, and as cars approached me, I wondered what the people driving thought when they saw me.
I wasn’t too concerned about that, though, especially since I usually closed the gas station by myself at one o’clock in the morning, and we lived in kind of a bad neighborhood, and being alone at that time of night scared the shit out of me. I usually rode home as quickly as possible so no one could, you know, get me.
Those milk jugs swinging all over the place seriously hindered my travel time, though. I comforted my nerves by telling myself that if any one was out looking to attack some one at that time in that area, they would be too distracted by how ridiculous I looked to go after me. I made it home safe, feeling proud of my ingenuity and my ability to survive.
That is actually how I made it through most of that time in Charleston, especially when I was riding that bike to or from work. I would think of how I grew up in an upper-middle class town, and of all of the luxuries I had taken for granted (such as multiple bathrooms in one dwelling), and then think about how having none of those things now did not stop me from getting by.
I would also think about how fortunate I was to be pregnant with, and later the mother of, a perfectly healthy baby, to live in a home that was clean and had air conditioning and doors that locked, to never be hungry, and to have my bike, and to work so close to home. It took A LOT of focusing on things like that to get me through that year.
It was really fucking hard.
There were other things that helped, too. Work was pretty interesting, primarily because we sold Busch beer two for $.99 out of a big tub filled with ice. We also sold six packs of Busch beer for $2.99, but it was a lot harder for many of our customers to come up with $2.99 than $.99 at any given time.
As I mentioned before, we lived in a kind of bad area, which meant there were a lot of low-income housing developments within walking distance of the gas station. There were regular customers who would walk up to the store every night from those neighborhoods, starting at about four in the afternoon.
They would get their two beers for $.99, and then go back home. About an hour later, they would come back and get two more beers, and so on and so forth as the evening progressed. Around 9 p.m., they would start to dwindle off, and were probably nice and toasted at home in bed (or wherever) by the end of my shift.
Sometimes one of the regulars would put a couple of cans of beer in their pockets before bringing a couple of more cans to the register to pay. Of course, they only wanted to pay for the two beers they put on the counter. This really bothered me at first, and I even once tried to confront one of the guys, but figured out relatively quickly that there was really no point.
They were usually pretty shitfaced by the time shoplifting entered their routine. Being shitfaced can sometimes make people prone to unexpected bouts of violence, and even though they were always very nice and conversational and friendly to me, I didn’t really want to push any buttons.
Another reason it wasn’t worth it to try and confront the beer-pocketters was because they were so entertaining. They would walk in and really and truly believe that they were being covert when they pocketed those beers. It was better than television to watch.
Aside from the eight hours of standing, the occasional snooty customer, the constant aching in my back, and the nearly constant fear for my very life and for the life of my unborn child, it was a pretty fun place to work.
To be continued…
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Monday, June 14, 2010
Part 7
Wow.
That is pretty much all I can come up with when I think back on the time of being pregnant and getting married and leaving everything and everyone I ever knew, all at the age of (just barely) 19.
It was ROUGH.
So, I had started living in my car just before I found out I was knocked up. Not long after that, I asked some friends in Athens if I could maybe stay with them for a little bit.
Side note: Athens, Georgia, for those who do not know, is the home of the Georgia Bulldogs!!! It is just under two hours from Peachtree City, where I am from. The University of Georgia is a tradition-riddled Georgia institution of education and football!!! There are cheerleaders and frat boys and beer all over the place!!! I hated it there!!!
I really didn’t like it there, but I was living in my car, and it was cold outside. Athens was the only place I knew people who didn’t live with their parents. So that’s where I went.
I had a friend I had visited there not long before, and I called her up and asked if I could stay at her place. She said, “sure,” but to keep in mind that her entire apartment was about 200 sq. feet, and another friend of ours had also moved in since I had visited.
I was like, whatever – heat, warm water, a real door that locks – I’m there! I had all of my shit in the back of my car, so there wasn’t need for packing or anything. I headed up there pretty easily, and carved out a space for myself on the floor of the tiny living room of the apartment.
I put all of my shit that was in my car into the kitchen cabinets. They were empty – my friends were not into kitchen/cooking type stuff. The kitchen cabinets were the only space in the apartment that was not already being used. It worked out nicely.
I got a job at a gas station in Athens. I liked the people I worked with, I got along with my roommates – it was going well. I hadn’t been doing any meth or anything because I didn’t have any, and my dealer/boyfriend was back in Peachtree City. I was actually pretty content to just sleep a lot at that time, which would make much more sense when I found out I was pregnant.
I was there for about a week and went back down to Peachtree City to visit the dealer/boyfriend. I crashed on the couch at his parents’ house for the night, and I was there when I realized I had not had my period in a while. I started freaking out, and had to go get a pregnancy test immediately. It was like one a.m. or something, and he and I went to the 24-hour grocery and got a test.
I took the test in one of the bathrooms in his parents’ house – that’s where he lived at the time. A little line showed up on the results window of the pee stick, but it was very, very faint. He and I decided that meant it was negative.
He went to sleep – not so much for me. I kept thinking about that faint line. After it got light out, I got up and went out front to my car. I had left all of the packaging and stuff from the preggers test in the car so that his parents wouldn’t find the remnants in their trash and freak out.
I sat in my car and found the giant, tissue-thin piece of paper that folded down to business card size and that contained all of the directions and information about the test. This piece of paper indicated that even the very faintest of lines on the results window indicated a positive result.
I don’t really remember what I did then. I do know I went to a gas station by myself and got another test there – I didn’t have much money and had to get a cheap one, which meant that I basically had to do a science experiment with my pee in order to find out if I actually was pregnant.
I conducted the experiment in the bathroom of the gas station, and there figured out that I was, most certainly, knocked up.
The baby’s daddy was inexplicably delighted with the news. I was just dumbfounded – keep in mind that I was still only 18 and not in the best place a person can be in their life. I did feel, though, that the first order of business would be to get the baby’s daddy’s ass out of town before my dad found out about the whole impregnation-of-his-daughter thing.
When my sister and I were younger, we went on a double date. When the boys arrived to pick us up, my dad had them come into our kitchen and sit down at the counter. Then he took out a very large knife and started talking about “gonads.”
So, yeah – I was pretty sure my dad would kill the baby’s daddy.
The baby’s daddy moved up to Athens with me. We both slept on the floor in the tiny apartment for about a week or so, and then my friend arranged for a bigger place in the complex. We all moved upstairs into a three bedroom, two-bathroom apartment – it was like moving into a mansion!
By the time I was about two months pregnant, my friend, our other friend, me and the baby’s daddy lived in the three bedroom. Then another friend hooked up with one of the first friends, and there it was – two couples and one single all living in this tiny apartment.
We got along so well!!! It was actually quite a nice arrangement. The other girls (the first two friends) would go to class, the baby’s daddy would go to work, and me and my other friend (the new boyfriend of one of the first friends) would wake up around noon and watch Melrose Place re-runs.
I would eat a big bowl of cereal, go puke my guts out, and then my Melrose Place friend would giggle at me. Every day, the same routine – wake up, watch TV, eat, puke, and then get giggled at. It was actually kind of a bonding experience – this guy and I had known each other for a long time before that, and we are still friends today.
I would head off to work at the gas station in the early afternoon, and as it worked out, the five of us hardly ever saw each other. It was rare when all five of us were in the apartment at the same time – this was probably integral to us getting along so well. Regardless, I remember the time fondly – it was kind of a limbo between the realities of getting pregnant and having to grow up and do something about it.
Eventually I told the baby’s daddy that I thought we should get married. I had initially resisted doing this, because I didn’t want to get married just because I was pregnant. However, my religious upbringing brought me around to the conclusion that marriage would be the best thing, if not for us, then for the baby.
He said ok. I called my mom and told her that I was getting married. She said, “why?” I said, “because I’m pregnant.” She said, “I’m going to have to call you back.”
It was one of the single-most awkward moments of my life. It sucked.
So anyway, since I said I thought we should get married, the baby’s daddy was like, ok, and then we got married. It was two weeks to the day after I turned 19, and three weeks to the day after he turned 21. He got accepted to a school in Charleston, S.C., and we packed up our shit and moved.
Whew! I’m tired! To be continued!
That is pretty much all I can come up with when I think back on the time of being pregnant and getting married and leaving everything and everyone I ever knew, all at the age of (just barely) 19.
It was ROUGH.
So, I had started living in my car just before I found out I was knocked up. Not long after that, I asked some friends in Athens if I could maybe stay with them for a little bit.
Side note: Athens, Georgia, for those who do not know, is the home of the Georgia Bulldogs!!! It is just under two hours from Peachtree City, where I am from. The University of Georgia is a tradition-riddled Georgia institution of education and football!!! There are cheerleaders and frat boys and beer all over the place!!! I hated it there!!!
I really didn’t like it there, but I was living in my car, and it was cold outside. Athens was the only place I knew people who didn’t live with their parents. So that’s where I went.
I had a friend I had visited there not long before, and I called her up and asked if I could stay at her place. She said, “sure,” but to keep in mind that her entire apartment was about 200 sq. feet, and another friend of ours had also moved in since I had visited.
I was like, whatever – heat, warm water, a real door that locks – I’m there! I had all of my shit in the back of my car, so there wasn’t need for packing or anything. I headed up there pretty easily, and carved out a space for myself on the floor of the tiny living room of the apartment.
I put all of my shit that was in my car into the kitchen cabinets. They were empty – my friends were not into kitchen/cooking type stuff. The kitchen cabinets were the only space in the apartment that was not already being used. It worked out nicely.
I got a job at a gas station in Athens. I liked the people I worked with, I got along with my roommates – it was going well. I hadn’t been doing any meth or anything because I didn’t have any, and my dealer/boyfriend was back in Peachtree City. I was actually pretty content to just sleep a lot at that time, which would make much more sense when I found out I was pregnant.
I was there for about a week and went back down to Peachtree City to visit the dealer/boyfriend. I crashed on the couch at his parents’ house for the night, and I was there when I realized I had not had my period in a while. I started freaking out, and had to go get a pregnancy test immediately. It was like one a.m. or something, and he and I went to the 24-hour grocery and got a test.
I took the test in one of the bathrooms in his parents’ house – that’s where he lived at the time. A little line showed up on the results window of the pee stick, but it was very, very faint. He and I decided that meant it was negative.
He went to sleep – not so much for me. I kept thinking about that faint line. After it got light out, I got up and went out front to my car. I had left all of the packaging and stuff from the preggers test in the car so that his parents wouldn’t find the remnants in their trash and freak out.
I sat in my car and found the giant, tissue-thin piece of paper that folded down to business card size and that contained all of the directions and information about the test. This piece of paper indicated that even the very faintest of lines on the results window indicated a positive result.
I don’t really remember what I did then. I do know I went to a gas station by myself and got another test there – I didn’t have much money and had to get a cheap one, which meant that I basically had to do a science experiment with my pee in order to find out if I actually was pregnant.
I conducted the experiment in the bathroom of the gas station, and there figured out that I was, most certainly, knocked up.
The baby’s daddy was inexplicably delighted with the news. I was just dumbfounded – keep in mind that I was still only 18 and not in the best place a person can be in their life. I did feel, though, that the first order of business would be to get the baby’s daddy’s ass out of town before my dad found out about the whole impregnation-of-his-daughter thing.
When my sister and I were younger, we went on a double date. When the boys arrived to pick us up, my dad had them come into our kitchen and sit down at the counter. Then he took out a very large knife and started talking about “gonads.”
So, yeah – I was pretty sure my dad would kill the baby’s daddy.
The baby’s daddy moved up to Athens with me. We both slept on the floor in the tiny apartment for about a week or so, and then my friend arranged for a bigger place in the complex. We all moved upstairs into a three bedroom, two-bathroom apartment – it was like moving into a mansion!
By the time I was about two months pregnant, my friend, our other friend, me and the baby’s daddy lived in the three bedroom. Then another friend hooked up with one of the first friends, and there it was – two couples and one single all living in this tiny apartment.
We got along so well!!! It was actually quite a nice arrangement. The other girls (the first two friends) would go to class, the baby’s daddy would go to work, and me and my other friend (the new boyfriend of one of the first friends) would wake up around noon and watch Melrose Place re-runs.
I would eat a big bowl of cereal, go puke my guts out, and then my Melrose Place friend would giggle at me. Every day, the same routine – wake up, watch TV, eat, puke, and then get giggled at. It was actually kind of a bonding experience – this guy and I had known each other for a long time before that, and we are still friends today.
I would head off to work at the gas station in the early afternoon, and as it worked out, the five of us hardly ever saw each other. It was rare when all five of us were in the apartment at the same time – this was probably integral to us getting along so well. Regardless, I remember the time fondly – it was kind of a limbo between the realities of getting pregnant and having to grow up and do something about it.
Eventually I told the baby’s daddy that I thought we should get married. I had initially resisted doing this, because I didn’t want to get married just because I was pregnant. However, my religious upbringing brought me around to the conclusion that marriage would be the best thing, if not for us, then for the baby.
He said ok. I called my mom and told her that I was getting married. She said, “why?” I said, “because I’m pregnant.” She said, “I’m going to have to call you back.”
It was one of the single-most awkward moments of my life. It sucked.
So anyway, since I said I thought we should get married, the baby’s daddy was like, ok, and then we got married. It was two weeks to the day after I turned 19, and three weeks to the day after he turned 21. He got accepted to a school in Charleston, S.C., and we packed up our shit and moved.
Whew! I’m tired! To be continued!
Monday, June 7, 2010
Laying it all out there, Part 6
And now for …how I got into drinking and hard-core drugs, did not graduate from high school, became a giant slut, and lived in my car!
I don’t remember the first time I ever tasted alcohol. My mom drank wine when I was growing up and I really liked the smell, but when I would taste it, it was horrible. Sometimes I would get a little taste of beer, but my dad didn’t drink that often and my mom never drank beer. When my grandma and papa (the Irish catholic ones) were in town, or when we visited them, a little taste of scotch was always possible.
As with the wine, I really loved the smell of beer and of scotch. I loved how my papa smelled – cigarettes and scotch. Well, mostly scotch. I don’t really count these experiences as my first with alcohol. I’m not sure why I don’t, but I don’t need to delve into that part of my psyche at this time.
The first I ever tasted alcohol without any parental (or grandparental) consent or knowledge was around 9th grade – wait, that’s not true either because I remember I would take little swigs of the peppermint schnapps or scotch that my parents had in the back of a cabinet, but never used – except when my grandparents were there. I don’t think I ever took more than one sip per incident because they tasted so bad.
Okay, how about this: the first time I remember drinking and realizing that I had a serious preoccupation with wanting more – the core ingredient to any addiction - was in the 10th grade. I was at a friend’s house without any parents around, and some guys were there, too. We snuck some sips of liquor from her parents’ cabinet.
Then she put it away. I was thinking, what the hell? Why is she already putting it back? But I didn’t say anything because all of the rest of the people seemed to have moved on from the sneaking-nips-of-parents’-alcohol phase of the afternoon. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it, though. I got in a really pissy mood and everything.
I got drunk for the first time somewhere around there, as well, again at someone’s house when their parents were out of town. It was rum. It was disgusting. We were drinking it straight. And I couldn’t stop. I was very aware of trying to be discrete, but I just kept going into the kitchen and finding that bottle and drinking more.
I did the normal stupid shit, like run around showing everyone my bra, and making out with some (older and very scary) chick’s boyfriend, and falling down and biting a hole through my lip. Like I said – the normal shit.
I remember the next day was class pictures, and I had a big scab on my lip. It was gross.
I don’t remember if that was before or after the Superbowl Sunday thing happened with that dude (I’m thinking after), but for the first time I began actively seeking out opportunities to drink. It was very difficult – I would not drink unless I could be out all night. I could not imagine going home under the influence of anything other than nicotine.
Because of that, I had to first convince my parents I was spending the night at a girlfriend’s house, and then actually get a hold of some alcohol. I managed nicely, though.
Looking back, I suppose the alcohol thing progressed rather quickly. The entire purpose for drinking was getting drunk, and that’s what seemed pretty normal at the time. I guess when 16 year olds all get together with some alcohol, they aren’t going to be wasting any time sipping chardonnay and discussing different methods of brewing beer. We didn’t, anyway.
So, all within about a year or so, I went from church-going good girl to drinking, cigarette smoking, fornicating, lying A LOT to my parents, stealing, smoking pot, and doing acid.
Within two years, I found myself seriously contemplating my life situation. This is what it was at that time: I was 18, 93 pounds, a hard-core meth addict, a high school drop out, living in my car, and pregnant with my drug dealer’s baby who happened to be spending weekends serving a jail sentence (the drug dealer, not the baby).
Oh yeah – although my m.o. was to be relatively monogamous, the short-lived “relationships” I had gave me the opportunity to also become a big slut – but only with one boy at a time! Kind of.
I never put anything else up my nose after I found out I was pregnant. People have said that it was really amazing that I was able to quit doing meth like that. Once I was pregnant, it didn't occur to me to NOT quit, and I do not give myself much, if any, credit for that. In fact, I really don’t even like thinking about it.
The only way I can describe it is to say that when I was out there doing all of that really fucked-up horrible shit to my mind and body (not to mention my reputation – just kidding – I still don’t give a shit about that), I absolutely did not give one iota of a flying fuck about myself.
When I found out I was pregnant, suddenly it just wasn’t about me anymore.
Not only that, but again, I was a 93-pound homeless teenaged high school dropout. I was not in the best physical shape. I was actually surprised I could even get pregnant at all – I hadn’t up until then, despite my unprotected promiscuity.
I had actually come to believe that I could not get pregnant because of the surgery I’d had when my ovary was removed. It occurred to me now and then that I could get pregnant, but I didn't. And I did not care.
Actually, that’s not true. I did have a pregnancy scare once, and I was concerned because I did not know who the father could be. It could have been this one guy, who was really decent and nice to me, which totally turned me off, so it also could have been this other guy, who was slimy and creepy and parasitic.
I was worried the parasite could be the father. But then I wasn’t pregnant, so I didn’t have to worry about it any more. Until I actually was pregnant, less than six months later, with my aforementioned drug dealer’s baby.
Side note: I use the word “aforementioned” because it is a nice word to use when I am describing my life in such a detached manner. If I was describing my life during this time in any other kind of manner, this would quickly turn from a blog post to a tome – a really, really, really depressing tome. And nobody likes a tome. Not someone else’s tome, anyway.
That is a lot of information for one post, so I’m going to wrap it up. I didn’t include “how” I became a high school drop out here, though, so I’ll give you a quick rundown. I got behind a semester and then just never went back. There ya go. I did get stellar scores on my G.E.D., though - one of the only lasting benefits of snorting Ritalin.
Oh yeah - how i became homeless: I got into drugs and alienated everyone who cared about me and got kicked out of my parents' house and the only place I had to go was my car. I only had to sleep in it a few times, though, cause I would find a couch at someone's house or something. Sleeping in my car was so scary. Actually, being homeless just sucked all around.
For my next post, I will get into how I dealt with being a pregnant teenaged homeless high school dropout!
To be continued…
I don’t remember the first time I ever tasted alcohol. My mom drank wine when I was growing up and I really liked the smell, but when I would taste it, it was horrible. Sometimes I would get a little taste of beer, but my dad didn’t drink that often and my mom never drank beer. When my grandma and papa (the Irish catholic ones) were in town, or when we visited them, a little taste of scotch was always possible.
As with the wine, I really loved the smell of beer and of scotch. I loved how my papa smelled – cigarettes and scotch. Well, mostly scotch. I don’t really count these experiences as my first with alcohol. I’m not sure why I don’t, but I don’t need to delve into that part of my psyche at this time.
The first I ever tasted alcohol without any parental (or grandparental) consent or knowledge was around 9th grade – wait, that’s not true either because I remember I would take little swigs of the peppermint schnapps or scotch that my parents had in the back of a cabinet, but never used – except when my grandparents were there. I don’t think I ever took more than one sip per incident because they tasted so bad.
Okay, how about this: the first time I remember drinking and realizing that I had a serious preoccupation with wanting more – the core ingredient to any addiction - was in the 10th grade. I was at a friend’s house without any parents around, and some guys were there, too. We snuck some sips of liquor from her parents’ cabinet.
Then she put it away. I was thinking, what the hell? Why is she already putting it back? But I didn’t say anything because all of the rest of the people seemed to have moved on from the sneaking-nips-of-parents’-alcohol phase of the afternoon. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it, though. I got in a really pissy mood and everything.
I got drunk for the first time somewhere around there, as well, again at someone’s house when their parents were out of town. It was rum. It was disgusting. We were drinking it straight. And I couldn’t stop. I was very aware of trying to be discrete, but I just kept going into the kitchen and finding that bottle and drinking more.
I did the normal stupid shit, like run around showing everyone my bra, and making out with some (older and very scary) chick’s boyfriend, and falling down and biting a hole through my lip. Like I said – the normal shit.
I remember the next day was class pictures, and I had a big scab on my lip. It was gross.
I don’t remember if that was before or after the Superbowl Sunday thing happened with that dude (I’m thinking after), but for the first time I began actively seeking out opportunities to drink. It was very difficult – I would not drink unless I could be out all night. I could not imagine going home under the influence of anything other than nicotine.
Because of that, I had to first convince my parents I was spending the night at a girlfriend’s house, and then actually get a hold of some alcohol. I managed nicely, though.
Looking back, I suppose the alcohol thing progressed rather quickly. The entire purpose for drinking was getting drunk, and that’s what seemed pretty normal at the time. I guess when 16 year olds all get together with some alcohol, they aren’t going to be wasting any time sipping chardonnay and discussing different methods of brewing beer. We didn’t, anyway.
So, all within about a year or so, I went from church-going good girl to drinking, cigarette smoking, fornicating, lying A LOT to my parents, stealing, smoking pot, and doing acid.
Within two years, I found myself seriously contemplating my life situation. This is what it was at that time: I was 18, 93 pounds, a hard-core meth addict, a high school drop out, living in my car, and pregnant with my drug dealer’s baby who happened to be spending weekends serving a jail sentence (the drug dealer, not the baby).
Oh yeah – although my m.o. was to be relatively monogamous, the short-lived “relationships” I had gave me the opportunity to also become a big slut – but only with one boy at a time! Kind of.
I never put anything else up my nose after I found out I was pregnant. People have said that it was really amazing that I was able to quit doing meth like that. Once I was pregnant, it didn't occur to me to NOT quit, and I do not give myself much, if any, credit for that. In fact, I really don’t even like thinking about it.
The only way I can describe it is to say that when I was out there doing all of that really fucked-up horrible shit to my mind and body (not to mention my reputation – just kidding – I still don’t give a shit about that), I absolutely did not give one iota of a flying fuck about myself.
When I found out I was pregnant, suddenly it just wasn’t about me anymore.
Not only that, but again, I was a 93-pound homeless teenaged high school dropout. I was not in the best physical shape. I was actually surprised I could even get pregnant at all – I hadn’t up until then, despite my unprotected promiscuity.
I had actually come to believe that I could not get pregnant because of the surgery I’d had when my ovary was removed. It occurred to me now and then that I could get pregnant, but I didn't. And I did not care.
Actually, that’s not true. I did have a pregnancy scare once, and I was concerned because I did not know who the father could be. It could have been this one guy, who was really decent and nice to me, which totally turned me off, so it also could have been this other guy, who was slimy and creepy and parasitic.
I was worried the parasite could be the father. But then I wasn’t pregnant, so I didn’t have to worry about it any more. Until I actually was pregnant, less than six months later, with my aforementioned drug dealer’s baby.
Side note: I use the word “aforementioned” because it is a nice word to use when I am describing my life in such a detached manner. If I was describing my life during this time in any other kind of manner, this would quickly turn from a blog post to a tome – a really, really, really depressing tome. And nobody likes a tome. Not someone else’s tome, anyway.
That is a lot of information for one post, so I’m going to wrap it up. I didn’t include “how” I became a high school drop out here, though, so I’ll give you a quick rundown. I got behind a semester and then just never went back. There ya go. I did get stellar scores on my G.E.D., though - one of the only lasting benefits of snorting Ritalin.
Oh yeah - how i became homeless: I got into drugs and alienated everyone who cared about me and got kicked out of my parents' house and the only place I had to go was my car. I only had to sleep in it a few times, though, cause I would find a couch at someone's house or something. Sleeping in my car was so scary. Actually, being homeless just sucked all around.
For my next post, I will get into how I dealt with being a pregnant teenaged homeless high school dropout!
To be continued…
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Laying it all out there, Part 5
So 10th grade wasn’t so great for me. Not that any of the other grades were exemplary, but 10th grade is a time I can look back on and say, “oh.” I don’t know how to explain that one any better…
I’m going to write about the boyfriend I had in high school for this post. I am very uneasy about it, and I am not sure why. I am just going to call him “the boy.” This is because there are probably people who know him who will read this and I do not feel in any way comfortable just putting his name out there. Also because someone I met in France referred to her boyfriend as “the boy” and I thought it was cute, and then she broke up with him, so, yeah – appropriate. Insensitive? Possibly. But definitely appropriate.
I will begin by giving a brief history of sex ed in my house: babies come from sex, but only in a very mechanical, technical, scientific way. Sex between married people is okay (as in “allowed,” or “not frowned upon”). Sex outside of marriage is dirty and wrong and sinful and horrible.
These are the things that lead to sex: talking on the phone with a boy; holding hands with a boy; being alone with a boy; going to the movies with a boy; touching a boy in any way; allowing a boy to touch me in any way; thinking about having sex; talking about having sex; thinking of sex outside of marriage as anything other than dirty and wrong and sinful - I can get more sarcastic and specific, but I feel I have made my point. Also, that was a very long sentence.
On two occasions my parents actually “sent me away” to keep me from having sex with boys. I’m not kidding. The first time they sent me away was the summer after my freshman year in high school. A very pretty senior had gotten my number, and he and I spoke on the phone a lot. Like “until the sun comes up” a lot.
He really wanted to take me on a date, and my mom said no. He offered to take me AND my mom out on a date, but my mom didn’t go for that either. I felt it was terribly unfair, but I saw my mom’s wisdom in that move probably before I was even 20 years old.
I was sent to a camp for kids with learning disabilities. As I have mentioned in at least one previous post, I had been diagnosed with ADD and was on Ritalin. My brother also got to go to camp with me. I guess he had ADD, too, but I’m thinking it was probably to keep an eye on me there, as well.
I’d like to point out that I was not a big slut at this time – that came later. I was still a good girl with good thoughts and whatnot. Also, my sister never got sent away for any reason. The entire situation was strange. Now I’m thinking about it too much – I’ll just move on.
So I spent that summer at the learning disability camp with my brother, and we danced circles around everyone else there – probably because we didn’t really have such debilitating disabilities. There were several male teachers at the camp, though, who surreptitiously made it known that they were looking forward to the time when I would not be jailbait anymore.
Nothing inappropriate happened. I mean, I only liked one of them back, and there was that pretty senior guy at home, and I was only fourteen years old. (That all seemed to serve as an explanation as to why “nothing inappropriate happened,” but upon rereading, I don’t really think it is sufficient. Fuck it. It’s a blog. MY blog.)
Side note: this is the summer I met Jonny for the first time – some friends and I snuck out of a slumber party in the middle of the night and met up with him and his brother and hung out for a while.
The second time I got sent away was the summer after I started dating “the boy” (ok, from here on out, no quotes, just the boy). We started dating about a month before I turned 16, so it was after all of that crappy shit when I was 15.
I really liked him a lot. He really liked me a lot. It was very sweet and idyllic. He was my first true love. We both knew we were going to eventually have sex with each other, and apparently my parents saw that coming, too. So I got sent off to El Salvador. In Central America. To “work” at an orphanage for malnourished babies.
By “work” I mean that I was told I was going there to help out with the babies, but of course it was to keep me away from the boy. I don’t know why I never thought more of it at the time. I was horrendously naïve – that’s probably why.
I spent, I think, about six weeks in El Salvador. That experience could be the basis for an entire novel, so I’m not going to go much into it. I will say that I was painfully lonely, and I missed the boy so much. I wrote to him every day, and looked for his letters to me every day, but apparently the postal service in El Salvador was not what it was in the U.S., and there were many letters between us that got lost along the way.
He was at the airport when I arrived back home. He drove me home in his new station wagon he’d gotten for his birthday. We had sex for the first time within about a week of that.
I was a virgin.
I don’t really know what to think about that statement: “I was a virgin.” It strikes me deep now to think of everything that happened to me before I consciously and willingly had sex with someone else. At the time, though, I believed that I was a virgin.
I hadn’t had consensual sex with anyone at that point in my life, and I had no conscious memory of the things that had happened since I was a very little girl, and I did not consider what that guy did to me on super bowl Sunday as sex, per se. So that’s sorted out – I was a virgin.
The boy was so ridiculously considerate of that, and of what I was comfortable with physically. The slightest indication of unease would put an immediate halt to everything else we were doing that wasn’t quite sex.
He waited until I was ready, until I told him definitively that I was ready, and that was that. Off to the races.
My 16th year was blissful. Then I turned 17.
Shortly after my 17th birthday, I was rushed to the hospital via ambulance. It turned out I had an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit. They took out my ovary. It was devastating.
The operation catapulted me into a depth of depression I had not experienced since I was very, very young. Relationships fell apart – friendships, and of course, the boy. It was like I was alive for the first time ever, and then snuffed out again. It was bad. Really bad.
Of course there are many more details as to what happened between the boy and I, but I don’t really feel like getting into that. The bottom line was that the surgery triggered that hellacious depression and I was sinking in it and I could look around me and see that no one could help me because they had no idea how bad it was in my mind.
I don’t know when I came out of that depression – it was literally years. It really, really sucked. I’m tired of thinking about this for now.
For my next blog, I will tell you how I got into drinking and hard-core drugs, did not graduate from high school, became a giant slut, and lived in my car! Yay!
I mean, holy jesus. No wonder I don’t like talking about all of this shit – it was horrible!
But my life is not horrible now – far from it…so…there’s a little light for the tunnel.
To be continued…
I’m going to write about the boyfriend I had in high school for this post. I am very uneasy about it, and I am not sure why. I am just going to call him “the boy.” This is because there are probably people who know him who will read this and I do not feel in any way comfortable just putting his name out there. Also because someone I met in France referred to her boyfriend as “the boy” and I thought it was cute, and then she broke up with him, so, yeah – appropriate. Insensitive? Possibly. But definitely appropriate.
I will begin by giving a brief history of sex ed in my house: babies come from sex, but only in a very mechanical, technical, scientific way. Sex between married people is okay (as in “allowed,” or “not frowned upon”). Sex outside of marriage is dirty and wrong and sinful and horrible.
These are the things that lead to sex: talking on the phone with a boy; holding hands with a boy; being alone with a boy; going to the movies with a boy; touching a boy in any way; allowing a boy to touch me in any way; thinking about having sex; talking about having sex; thinking of sex outside of marriage as anything other than dirty and wrong and sinful - I can get more sarcastic and specific, but I feel I have made my point. Also, that was a very long sentence.
On two occasions my parents actually “sent me away” to keep me from having sex with boys. I’m not kidding. The first time they sent me away was the summer after my freshman year in high school. A very pretty senior had gotten my number, and he and I spoke on the phone a lot. Like “until the sun comes up” a lot.
He really wanted to take me on a date, and my mom said no. He offered to take me AND my mom out on a date, but my mom didn’t go for that either. I felt it was terribly unfair, but I saw my mom’s wisdom in that move probably before I was even 20 years old.
I was sent to a camp for kids with learning disabilities. As I have mentioned in at least one previous post, I had been diagnosed with ADD and was on Ritalin. My brother also got to go to camp with me. I guess he had ADD, too, but I’m thinking it was probably to keep an eye on me there, as well.
I’d like to point out that I was not a big slut at this time – that came later. I was still a good girl with good thoughts and whatnot. Also, my sister never got sent away for any reason. The entire situation was strange. Now I’m thinking about it too much – I’ll just move on.
So I spent that summer at the learning disability camp with my brother, and we danced circles around everyone else there – probably because we didn’t really have such debilitating disabilities. There were several male teachers at the camp, though, who surreptitiously made it known that they were looking forward to the time when I would not be jailbait anymore.
Nothing inappropriate happened. I mean, I only liked one of them back, and there was that pretty senior guy at home, and I was only fourteen years old. (That all seemed to serve as an explanation as to why “nothing inappropriate happened,” but upon rereading, I don’t really think it is sufficient. Fuck it. It’s a blog. MY blog.)
Side note: this is the summer I met Jonny for the first time – some friends and I snuck out of a slumber party in the middle of the night and met up with him and his brother and hung out for a while.
The second time I got sent away was the summer after I started dating “the boy” (ok, from here on out, no quotes, just the boy). We started dating about a month before I turned 16, so it was after all of that crappy shit when I was 15.
I really liked him a lot. He really liked me a lot. It was very sweet and idyllic. He was my first true love. We both knew we were going to eventually have sex with each other, and apparently my parents saw that coming, too. So I got sent off to El Salvador. In Central America. To “work” at an orphanage for malnourished babies.
By “work” I mean that I was told I was going there to help out with the babies, but of course it was to keep me away from the boy. I don’t know why I never thought more of it at the time. I was horrendously naïve – that’s probably why.
I spent, I think, about six weeks in El Salvador. That experience could be the basis for an entire novel, so I’m not going to go much into it. I will say that I was painfully lonely, and I missed the boy so much. I wrote to him every day, and looked for his letters to me every day, but apparently the postal service in El Salvador was not what it was in the U.S., and there were many letters between us that got lost along the way.
He was at the airport when I arrived back home. He drove me home in his new station wagon he’d gotten for his birthday. We had sex for the first time within about a week of that.
I was a virgin.
I don’t really know what to think about that statement: “I was a virgin.” It strikes me deep now to think of everything that happened to me before I consciously and willingly had sex with someone else. At the time, though, I believed that I was a virgin.
I hadn’t had consensual sex with anyone at that point in my life, and I had no conscious memory of the things that had happened since I was a very little girl, and I did not consider what that guy did to me on super bowl Sunday as sex, per se. So that’s sorted out – I was a virgin.
The boy was so ridiculously considerate of that, and of what I was comfortable with physically. The slightest indication of unease would put an immediate halt to everything else we were doing that wasn’t quite sex.
He waited until I was ready, until I told him definitively that I was ready, and that was that. Off to the races.
My 16th year was blissful. Then I turned 17.
Shortly after my 17th birthday, I was rushed to the hospital via ambulance. It turned out I had an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit. They took out my ovary. It was devastating.
The operation catapulted me into a depth of depression I had not experienced since I was very, very young. Relationships fell apart – friendships, and of course, the boy. It was like I was alive for the first time ever, and then snuffed out again. It was bad. Really bad.
Of course there are many more details as to what happened between the boy and I, but I don’t really feel like getting into that. The bottom line was that the surgery triggered that hellacious depression and I was sinking in it and I could look around me and see that no one could help me because they had no idea how bad it was in my mind.
I don’t know when I came out of that depression – it was literally years. It really, really sucked. I’m tired of thinking about this for now.
For my next blog, I will tell you how I got into drinking and hard-core drugs, did not graduate from high school, became a giant slut, and lived in my car! Yay!
I mean, holy jesus. No wonder I don’t like talking about all of this shit – it was horrible!
But my life is not horrible now – far from it…so…there’s a little light for the tunnel.
To be continued…
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Laying it all out there, Part 4
Disclaimer: this blog post contains possible mind fucks. Read only after carefully and lovingly considering the state of your mind. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then this doesn't apply - read on!
In the fall of my 15th year I was a sophomore in high school. The Superbowl Sunday incident with that drunk guy had not yet happened. One day I had to check in late to school because…well, I don’t remember, but for some reason. I checked in, went to my locker, and got to class right before the bell rang. I sat down in my usual seat and looked at the people around me.
My friend Amie whispered, “What are you doing?” Then I guess the bell rang, because I do not remember responding to that question or even really thinking about it.
The people around me were familiar, the classroom familiar, the teacher familiar, really nothing out of the ordinary. But then the teacher called me up to the front of the room. He asked me very softly, “Rebecca, aren’t you in my 2nd period class? This is the beginning of 3rd period.”
I didn’t know what was going on. I got really scared. I didn’t know if what was happening was real or not. I remember distinctly the teacher’s voice when he asked me that question – he was a really big guy, very tall, very wide, and I was surprised at how soft and not scary his voice sounded when he spoke to me up there in front of everyone.
I looked back at the other students and saw that they were not the people who were in that class with me, though some of them were my friends, and most of them were familiar. I didn’t know what to do, I was just suddenly aware that I was not supposed to be there at that time.
I blindly went back to my seat - at the back of the room, of course - and gathered my stuff and bolted. Someone asked me if I was all right, but I don’t remember who, or what I said, or if I responded at all.
I tried to think of the class I was supposed to be in, and everything was very muddy in my head, and I just knew I could not be there anymore. I went to the office. I was crying by then, not really knowing why, just feeling scared and like a big freak. I was allowed to use the phone to call home.
My dad answered. This was not right, not the way it was supposed to happen, my mom was the one who was there when I needed to be picked up from somewhere. But my dad answered the phone.
I asked if my mom was there. He said yes, but he wouldn’t let me talk to her. I told him I had to leave – I couldn’t stay at school. He asked me why.
It was a good question – why? What the fuck was going on? I didn’t know, just that I couldn’t stay there.
He came to pick me up. He pulled up to the curb in front of the school. Then I was in the car parked in front of the school and crying and he was telling me I could not go home and that I had to go to school.
After awhile I comprehended that I was not going home, that I was going to have to stay at school. A big cylindrical force came down on me, enclosing me inside of it where I would be safe and I was able to stop feeling scared. I was able to feel nothing.
My dad hugged me and said he loved me, and I hugged him and said I loved him, too. I don’t remember what exactly he had told me in the car, but it felt as though it was some sort of pep rally to get me motivated to fight against the world.
He had always told me how to be strong and fight the world, because the world would hate us and make things hard for us because we were special, better, smarter than anyone else. And I completely believed that. Why wouldn’t I? I had been told nothing different for my entire life by everyone – weird, freak, special, unique – I had been hearing it from all sides since birth.
After that, my dad checked me in and the only other thing I remember about that day was that after being in school and around other people for a couple of hours, I felt much better.
I think I would have lost that entire day to the unfamiliar and dark rooms of my vacuous mind, but something made it stick. I didn’t remember the days before or after that day until 16 years later, but that day always remained on the conscious timeline of my past.
Sometimes when I am trying so hard to grasp what has happened to me, to get some sort of concrete evidence that what my memories are telling me is true, I actually get the concrete evidence. It does not happen often.
Since I first began remembering things a few years ago, I have spent hours and hours searching and searching my mom’s house – the house I grew up in. I have tirelessly spent hours looking in closets and cabinets and desks and drawers and inside the walls and in the attic and in every inch of that fucking house looking for some sort of proof that what was in my head was real.
Sometimes I found things there, but it was when I was cleaning out a closet in my own house that I found, at the bottom of a tiny plastic basket, a folded up piece of pink paper. I don’t know how it got there or how it made it all the way to where I was right there at that time. But it was there. It was the check-in slip my dad signed on that day in the 10th grade when I freaked out.
Concrete. Right there in my hand, in front of my eyes. The fucking check-in slip. A tiny tissue of paper, in my house. MY house, not my mom’s house.
Although I think I have accepted what has happened to me on a very fundamental level, that process has not been easy or quick. When I first started remembering things, I would forget that I had remembered. My mind would slip back to where it had been before. I would try so hard to figure out if I was just crazy, because I would have preferred to be bat shit looney tunes than to have really experienced all of those horrendous things my dad did to me.
Even though I knew it was real, I kept looking for a way for it not to be. But then there is the concrete evidence – the tiny little bits and pieces of my past that have physically survived along with me.
When I find those bits of evidence, the chance that it could have all been a really bad, really fucked up dream is snuffed out. I feel vindicated and devastated at the same time. The balance of the negative and positive emotions is so consistent, so steady – I have never experienced such consistency in my life before than in this balance of the negative and positive feelings about what has happened to me in the past and who I am today.
The balance feels like REALITY. It feels like acceptance. It is terrible and liberating at the same time. The duality is really very mind-boggling, and I have had to learn to just stop thinking about it so much so that I don’t get lost in that concept.
I have a headache. I’m going to watch TV on the internet.
In the fall of my 15th year I was a sophomore in high school. The Superbowl Sunday incident with that drunk guy had not yet happened. One day I had to check in late to school because…well, I don’t remember, but for some reason. I checked in, went to my locker, and got to class right before the bell rang. I sat down in my usual seat and looked at the people around me.
My friend Amie whispered, “What are you doing?” Then I guess the bell rang, because I do not remember responding to that question or even really thinking about it.
The people around me were familiar, the classroom familiar, the teacher familiar, really nothing out of the ordinary. But then the teacher called me up to the front of the room. He asked me very softly, “Rebecca, aren’t you in my 2nd period class? This is the beginning of 3rd period.”
I didn’t know what was going on. I got really scared. I didn’t know if what was happening was real or not. I remember distinctly the teacher’s voice when he asked me that question – he was a really big guy, very tall, very wide, and I was surprised at how soft and not scary his voice sounded when he spoke to me up there in front of everyone.
I looked back at the other students and saw that they were not the people who were in that class with me, though some of them were my friends, and most of them were familiar. I didn’t know what to do, I was just suddenly aware that I was not supposed to be there at that time.
I blindly went back to my seat - at the back of the room, of course - and gathered my stuff and bolted. Someone asked me if I was all right, but I don’t remember who, or what I said, or if I responded at all.
I tried to think of the class I was supposed to be in, and everything was very muddy in my head, and I just knew I could not be there anymore. I went to the office. I was crying by then, not really knowing why, just feeling scared and like a big freak. I was allowed to use the phone to call home.
My dad answered. This was not right, not the way it was supposed to happen, my mom was the one who was there when I needed to be picked up from somewhere. But my dad answered the phone.
I asked if my mom was there. He said yes, but he wouldn’t let me talk to her. I told him I had to leave – I couldn’t stay at school. He asked me why.
It was a good question – why? What the fuck was going on? I didn’t know, just that I couldn’t stay there.
He came to pick me up. He pulled up to the curb in front of the school. Then I was in the car parked in front of the school and crying and he was telling me I could not go home and that I had to go to school.
After awhile I comprehended that I was not going home, that I was going to have to stay at school. A big cylindrical force came down on me, enclosing me inside of it where I would be safe and I was able to stop feeling scared. I was able to feel nothing.
My dad hugged me and said he loved me, and I hugged him and said I loved him, too. I don’t remember what exactly he had told me in the car, but it felt as though it was some sort of pep rally to get me motivated to fight against the world.
He had always told me how to be strong and fight the world, because the world would hate us and make things hard for us because we were special, better, smarter than anyone else. And I completely believed that. Why wouldn’t I? I had been told nothing different for my entire life by everyone – weird, freak, special, unique – I had been hearing it from all sides since birth.
After that, my dad checked me in and the only other thing I remember about that day was that after being in school and around other people for a couple of hours, I felt much better.
I think I would have lost that entire day to the unfamiliar and dark rooms of my vacuous mind, but something made it stick. I didn’t remember the days before or after that day until 16 years later, but that day always remained on the conscious timeline of my past.
Sometimes when I am trying so hard to grasp what has happened to me, to get some sort of concrete evidence that what my memories are telling me is true, I actually get the concrete evidence. It does not happen often.
Since I first began remembering things a few years ago, I have spent hours and hours searching and searching my mom’s house – the house I grew up in. I have tirelessly spent hours looking in closets and cabinets and desks and drawers and inside the walls and in the attic and in every inch of that fucking house looking for some sort of proof that what was in my head was real.
Sometimes I found things there, but it was when I was cleaning out a closet in my own house that I found, at the bottom of a tiny plastic basket, a folded up piece of pink paper. I don’t know how it got there or how it made it all the way to where I was right there at that time. But it was there. It was the check-in slip my dad signed on that day in the 10th grade when I freaked out.
Concrete. Right there in my hand, in front of my eyes. The fucking check-in slip. A tiny tissue of paper, in my house. MY house, not my mom’s house.
Although I think I have accepted what has happened to me on a very fundamental level, that process has not been easy or quick. When I first started remembering things, I would forget that I had remembered. My mind would slip back to where it had been before. I would try so hard to figure out if I was just crazy, because I would have preferred to be bat shit looney tunes than to have really experienced all of those horrendous things my dad did to me.
Even though I knew it was real, I kept looking for a way for it not to be. But then there is the concrete evidence – the tiny little bits and pieces of my past that have physically survived along with me.
When I find those bits of evidence, the chance that it could have all been a really bad, really fucked up dream is snuffed out. I feel vindicated and devastated at the same time. The balance of the negative and positive emotions is so consistent, so steady – I have never experienced such consistency in my life before than in this balance of the negative and positive feelings about what has happened to me in the past and who I am today.
The balance feels like REALITY. It feels like acceptance. It is terrible and liberating at the same time. The duality is really very mind-boggling, and I have had to learn to just stop thinking about it so much so that I don’t get lost in that concept.
I have a headache. I’m going to watch TV on the internet.
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