Some people have noticed that both my site and my Live Journal are not their usual, colourful selves and these people are wondering why. I hadn’t intended to make this post today, but enough people have asked that I figured it should go up as soon as possible.

Let me start out by reassuring anyone thinking it: this has nothing to do with depression. I am not depressed. (Today, anyway.)

When I was diagnosed with bipolar I, the only two people who were surprised by it was me and my step-mother who doesn’t know me very well and who still doesn’t think I’m bipolar. The truth of the matter is, I am probably one of the most bipolar people ever to be born on this Earth and looking back, it’s very obvious that I’ve been bipolar my whole life, not just in mood, but in mannerism.

My ex, Chris, used to say that the thing he loved the most about me was my passion and the thing he hated the most about me…was my passion. About a year ago on Facebook, I did some quiz meme and the last question said something like, “Say something random about yourself” and I wrote, “When I love something, I really really love it. When I hate something, I really really hate it”. Chris replied to that saying it was probably the most true statement he’s ever read on a quiz.

And that’s the thing. There is very little grey area to my life. Things are either black or white, negative or positive. I either love something or I hate something, there is no “like”. A day is either good or bad, there is no in-between. A place is either awesome or awful. Ideas are either genius or stupid. And sometimes, people are too.

When I find a food I like, I eat that food every day until I never want to see that food again and chances are, I’ll never eat it again. When I find a new band, they’re the greatest thing I’ve ever heard and I have to find/buy everything they’ve ever put out. If I hear a song I like, it’s the greatest song I’ve ever heard. (And if I hear one that I don’t like, it’s the worst piece of crap I’ve ever heard.) When I get interested in a subject, I have to learn everything I can about it. I become both obsessed and dismissive easily. I’m afraid of both success and failure because I can’t see that there’s anything in between. Prior to medication, I was either happy or sad, there was no middle ground.

While I actually like some of these traits, I’m not sure it’s healthy to be as polarized as I am on pretty much everything. Blake and I got talking about things the other night and we decided that I need to start letting in a little more grey. Even he & I aren’t totally sure what that means (especially me), except that it’s time to change my way of thinking and being, because how I operate now isn’t serving me as well as it once did.

What Blake and I were talking about specifically is how I never finish anything and why. I finish paintings, so I consider myself more successful as an artist than I do a writer because even though I write every day, nothing of substance has ever been published (I don’t count the Marketing Magazine articles as real publishing even though others might). And the reason nothing of substance has ever been published is because I never finish those projects and I never finish those projects because I fear both success and failure.

The piece of writing I’m working on now – or at least what I was working on – is a really solid idea and could very easily (we think) be published in any number of ways. Where the grey comes in is that I need to stop worrying about what comes after I finish. I need to learn how to worry about that later and just finish. And I realize I’m going completely against my own new philosophy by writing this next part, but after it’s finished, I need to not worry about success or failure because my ideas of both are actually kind of warped. I worry about success because of expectation. If I finish this and it gets published and people like it (and I consider publishing it at all successful)  and talk about it, then people will expect me to write and publish something else and I don’t want that pressure. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s failure. Failure is that it gets published (or it doesn’t and I’m rejected repeatedly), people don’t like it, people criticize it and I want to crawl under a rock. Where’s the grey area there? Because I totally don’t see it. I see the grey area prior to finishing, that I shouldn’t worry about everything I just wrote and should just finish it, but I don’t see the grey in what comes next. Do you?

Plus there’s the fact that I don’t see the point in finishing a piece of writing if no one’s ever going to see it.

Another example of me not seeing the grey is yesterday. Yesterday I did a bunch of things that were positive and I was having a great day and then the dogs got loose and I had to chase them all the way to hell and back. In case you’ve forgotten, I don’t leave my house very often and in telling Blake about the dog incident, I said, “I’m so scarred I may not leave the house for like, two months,” and that’s where he pointed out that I wasn’t seeing the grey. I left the house because  a shitty incident happened, the shitty incident didn’t happen because I left the house.

Now I’m not promising overnight changes here or anything. Like I said, I’m not even totally sure what “seeing the grey” even means because as it stands now, I don’t really see it, so it’s going to take me a while to adopt this new life philosophy but I plan on working on it just to see what happens. No doubt there will be remnants of my bipolar-ness that I won’t want to remove because I like those aspects of myself and hey, a leopard can’t change its spots, but I’m going to try, with Blake’s help and maybe yours too, to figure this shit out and try living a different life to see where that leads me. Who knows? This could be the key to everything or it could be another dead end, but I feel that it’s worth trying.

So that’s what “Shades of Grey” is in reference to. I’m glad you’re all along for the ride.

Website visitors from February 13th-March 15th.
This Steak & Blowjob Day thing is really taking off!

That is what I’m doing right now. It is something I’m exceptionally good at, as I just posted on Twitter. If procrastination was a marketable skill, I’d be rollin’ in cheddar.

Blake is currently at my mom’s boyfriend’s cottage dropping the kids off for March Break and I’m pretty much sitting here waiting for him to come home because I want to watch movies and work on my ACEOs, but we usually watch movies together because…well, because we only watch movies in my office and I’m always in my office and if I’m not watching the TV, I don’t like it on while I’m doing other stuff, so if I watch a movie without Blake, there’s a good chance he’ll never see it unless I liked it enough to watch it twice. (Which is often the case, I love movies, but not always.)

Right now we have Pandorum and The Hurt Locker to watch, plus Friday night’s Caprica, which I can’t watch without him. The Hurt Locker I probably could because it’s a war movie and he doesn’t like those, but I don’t know when he’ll be home and I think it’s too late to start a movie right now because he’d walk in partway through and not be able to pick up what’s going on, necessarily.

SO COMPLICATED, I know.

So instead of doing what I want to be doing, I’m writing a blog post about basically nothing…or at least that’s how I’m going into it.

I was just thinking though, because Blake’s with my mom and John right now, about my mom and John getting married. I have absolutely no idea how their relationship is (which is weird because historically, I would), so I don’t even know if marriage would be a possibility, but for a moment there I had a flash of a summer wedding and in it, I was sitting in a seat in the middle of “the bride’s side”, away from the rest of my family, and I was happy. It’s lame, I know, but I like John and I like his son Chris and I’m really rooting for him and my mom. As I’ve mentioned before, I just like who she is and who she’s become since she’s been with him. And I think she’s been good for him too, from what I understand. He makes art now, really really beautiful art, and from what I’ve been told, that was my mom’s influence. And the best part of him making art is that they sell their art together. For the first time in like EVER, my mom finally has an honest to god partner in crime and I think that’s fucking awesome. With my step-dad and Keith, I could never envision my mother growing old with either of them, and my bio-dad was obviously a bust, but with John I can totally see it and the whole idea of it just makes me so happy I could cry. In fact, I kind of am.

I don’t really talk to my mom that much anymore, not like we used to (we used to talk on the phone for several hours a day, every day), but I wonder about her moods when she’s with John. My mother’s kind of infamous for being self-deprecating and moody and kind of a bitch (I come by it honestly…) and all my life she’s been prone to bouts of intense, crippling depression, but now, at least on the surface, that seems to be less of a problem now that she’s with John.

I’m kind of morbid though. I often worry about my mother dying of cancer, both because it’s in my family but also because she’s been smoking for a bazillion years and her own father died of esophageal (holy crap, I spelled that right on the first try!) cancer due to smoking. Sometimes when I’m just sitting here by myself, I think about taking John aside one day and asking him, “are you going to look after her when she finds out she has cancer?” because I think if the answer to that is no, he needs to go. But I think the answer would be “yes”. He so obviously loves the shit out of my mother that I really do think that, whether they get married or not (since my mother has often said she has no desire to get married again), this is a “forever thing”.

And that makes me happy.

So I’ll stop being sappy about my mother now…I’m sure it’s revolting. It’s just hard to explain how our relationship is. Whether we talk every day or not, whether she’s with someone or not, whether I’m living with her or not, until I got married myself, it’s always felt like my mom & I against the world to some degree or another and it feels good to detach in a positive way, with positive results for both of us. Like I said, it’s hard to explain.

In other news, I guess I should talk publicly about something else that’s happening in my life. Wayne & Judy, our neighbours, and Blake & I, are no longer friends. Due to reasons that I don’t believe should be public knowledge, I started trying to detach myself from them as sort of a New Year’s resolution because I just couldn’t abide by some of the things they were doing anymore and because the relationship was becoming more and more parasitic.

At the end of February, I got fed up with some of the stuff that was happening next door and I unloaded some of it in a protected, friends only post on Live Journal. Unfortunately I came to find that there is at least one person on my Live Journal friends list who doesn’t like me very much and who decided to find Judy’s daughter Ashley on my Facebook friends list (which was public, unbeknownst to me) and paste my post into a message to her. Wayne & Judy happened to be dropping Ashley off in Toronto when this message was sent and Ashley printed them off a copy.

That night Judy came to my house, wouldn’t listen to a word I said and made it quite clear that we were no longer friends. Honestly, I don’t blame her for that, I probably would have felt the same way. She & Wayne have every right to be mad at me for saying some of the things I said, especially when I called them stupid and that I wished they would move, which is what Judy mostly seemed to be upset by.

I took precautions to make sure I didn’t hurt anyone with my post and someone circumvented that in a malicious way that hurt not me, not Blake – because realistically we were trying to detach from Wayne & Judy anyway – but 4 people who were strangers to them and didn’t deserve that: Wayne, Judy, Ashley and inadvertently Judy’s 9 year old daughter Courtney as well.

Yes, I take partial blame for the incident because I was the one who wrote the words and I was the one who added this malicious person whose identity I don’t know to my Live Journal friends list because I used to have a policy where if someone added me, I’d just add them back and that has resulted in a rather large friends list, but one I thought I could trust considering that most of the people who are on it have been on it for several years. It’s been a very rare occurrence over the last several years that I would add anyone new, unless they were vouched for by someone I trust.

Regardless, I put the bulk of the blame on the person who sent Ashley the post because what I did was venting to my friends, which everyone on planet Earth does, whereas what the person did who sent Ashley the post was flat out trying to be malicious toward me, but they ultimately ended up being malicious to 4 people they don’t know from Adam. I went out of my way to try not to hurt anyone, and this person went out of their way to try and hurt someone, not even bothering to think about collateral damage. (Or maybe they did, in which case they’re an even bigger douchebag.)

Since Judy would only let me look at the printout for a few seconds, I’m not even sure if what they saw was what I actually wrote. For all I know, this malicious person threw in a few extra jabs or put other words in my mouth. Since I printed out the post myself so Madison could read it and know what was going on, I know it’s 3 pages long (in Word) and what Judy had in her hand was also 3 pages long. However, Judy’s copy had more text on the 3rd page than I had in the copy I printed out, so I’m really wondering if the person who did this didn’t add some of their own flavour to it. Not being friends with Wayne & Judy anymore, I’ll never know. What I do know, however, is that the person who did this did not include the comments on the post, which would have been the proper, fair thing to do. Had they have done that, Wayne, Judy & Ashley would have seen that there were some damning comments that I disagreed with and thus, didn’t reply to. The only ones I replied to were the ones that concerned a fairly minor matter pertaining to Wayne & Judy and something they were already aware of my opinion on.

As with everything I write, I stand by my words, I don’t regret writing them and I don’t feel guilty that Wayne & Judy read them because I didn’t do anything wrong, the person who sent my post to Ashley did, and I certainly didn’t misrepresent them in any way. If anything, I held back in that post and I’ve been holding back in regards to them for a very long time.

What I do regret is my past policy of being trusting enough to add just about anyone to my Live Journal friends list and that is a mistake I won’t be repeating again. There’s no way to know who the person is who betrayed my trust and if I cut my friends list, chances are I wouldn’t remove the person who did this and that would make for one smug hater, so that’s not what I’m going to do. In fact, I’m not going to do anything but continue to be me and do what I do  and I’ve made my Facebook friends list not public. I suggest everyone else do the same, because really, why should strangers even have access to that list of people anyway? To change yours, go to “Account” on the top right of your Facebook page and play with the privacy settings. You may find that a lot of them, due to Facebook changing some things a few months ago, are not how you had them set originally and you may want to rectify that. Another way to make your Facebook friends list not public is by going to your profile and look at where your friends are displayed. There is a pencil icon there and if you click it, there’s the option to uncheck the part that says “show friends list to everyone” and if you uncheck that, your friends list will be visible only to those already on your friends list.

So that’s currently what’s happening in my life right now, or at least one of the bigger things. It’s unfortunate that Wayne & Judy are in the process of losing their house because their mortgager is selling it out from under them (which I guess can happen when your mortgage is held by a person rather than a bank, depending on your contract – which they broke anyway, but that’s a whole other thing) but I’m glad that they’ll be moving soon, not because of what’s happened between us, but because as I said in the beginning, our relationship with them was becoming more and more parasitic and we were trying to detach from them before all of this blew up anyway.

Truthfully, I think their mortgager is going to have a hard time making any kind of profit on that house as it’s badly in need of some expensive work, like the kitchen needs to be redone pretty much from scratch, but he seems pretty committed to selling so who knows what’s going to happen. Blake & I’s theory is that the mortgager was waiting until the spring to evict Wayne & Judy because we think it might be illegal to evict someone in the winter.  Either way, we’re hoping it happens sooner rather than later because it’s going to make for a really uncomfortable spring & summer when they’re on their deck drinking beer every spare second they have and their deck overlooks both our front yard and back yard, giving us absolutely zero privacy from these people.

Even prior to us becoming friends, I was scared to do anything in my garden in case they started talking to me (which happened constantly) and now I’m back at square one in that regard, unless the mortgager evicts soon.

What else? Well, there’s one thing in the works that I’m not going to write about because apparently there are people out there who would like to sabotage my life, but if/when it happens, you’ll know about it.

I guess the only other news is that last week or the week before, I ordered the seeds for the vegetable garden Blake and I decided we were going to do this year. This house came with a vegetable garden already, which is about 12-14 feet wide by about 4 & a half, maybe 5 feet long. We’d talked about doing veggies before but ultimately it came down to money, time and energy that we didn’t have so we couldn’t do it. The garden, since it’s been unused for the past 5 years, is completely full of weeds and will need at least a day’s worth of digging to become usable and Blake’s committed to helping me do this, so I ordered the seeds and when they come, a lot of them will be started indoors because apparently some of them need to be.

I don’t know anything about growing vegetables or even if we have enough room for everything I ordered, but I figured I’d just approach this like I approached the front yard garden: trial & error. Here’s what I ordered:

Royal Burgundy Beans (2 packets of seeds)
These beans are cool because they’re purple when they’re raw, but they turn green when they’re cooked. They also grow in a bush rather than a vine, so I won’t need to stake them.

Napoli Carrots (1 packet of seeds)
I just picked these ones because they sounded the yummiest when I was looking through the Vesey’s catalogue. I only got one packet of seeds because each packet had something like 1000 seeds or something and I figured 1000 seeds would mean 1000 carrots and we don’t need that many!

Thunder Cucumbers (1 packet of seeds)
Again, I just picked these ones because of the write-up about them in the catalogue. Apparently they’re resistant to most of the things cucumbers have problems with, so that’s mostly why I chose them, but I also chose them because they looked the most like the cucumbers I buy in the store. I’m worried that we won’t have room for these because I’ve seen how cucumbers grow and it seems like they need a lot of room, but I figured I could plant them along the top of the garden and let them grow out onto the 2 feet of grass between the garden and the house and that we could just lift the vines if Blake needed to mow the lawn there.

Simpson Elite Lettuce (2 packets)
We at a lot of salads in the summer and I’ve grown this before, in the front garden. It’s a leaf lettuce and if you want a salad, you just go out to the garden, cut off as much as you need and you’re good to go!

Parade Green Onions (1 packet)
We use green onions a lot, from stir fry to garlic pasta to spaghetti sauce, so I figured I’d try growing them.

Super Sugar Snap Peas (1 seed packet)
These are Madison and I’s favourite but they’re so expensive to get from the grocery store. Growing your own means that they’ll be ready to eat in July and from what I remember about peas, they don’t grow continuously throughout the season, so at least we’ll have all the peas we can eat in July! Madison and I just eat them, pod & all, but they can also be thrown in stir fry too if we get sick of eating them. I think these will need to be staked.

Fat & Sassy Peppers (1 seed packet)
These are just red & green sweet peppers and will need to be started indoors. As long as I cut them up for them, the kids love eating peppers raw and Blake likes to put them in salad, so I figured they would be worth the trouble. (I hate peppers with a passion.) I think these will need to be staked too.

Purple Star Peppers (1 seed packet)
Just sweet peppers that happen to be purple. I thought the kids would get a kick out of them so I figured we’d do half a row of the normal ones above and half a row of these ones. These’ll need to be started indoors as soon as the seeds arrive and will need to be staked as well. (Where do you even buy stakes? The garden centre at Wal*Mart should have those, right?)

Bobcat Tomatoes (1 seed packet)
I picked these because their write up and picture in the catalogue sounded the yummiest. I debated a lot on whether or not to start tomatoes from seed or just to buy plants from the garden centre, but in the end seeds won out because they’re cheaper and I can easily just start them indoors and make my own plants that’ll be ready for planting at the end of May. These will have to be staked too, I’m pretty sure.

Sugary Cherry Tomatoes (1 seed packet)
I love cherry tomatoes in salads, they’re like, my favourite part (well, that and the cheese chunks I throw in salads), so we had to grow these. Again, I could have gotten plants from the garden centre, but seeds were cheaper than plants would be and I have enough room to start the peppers and tomatoes this month so they’ll be ready for planting at the end of May. I’m pretty sure these ones will have to be staked too, once they get big enough, although I grew similar tomatoes last year in pots on my porch and didn’t stake them, so I’m not sure. The ones I grew last year were on a vine, I don’t know how these ones grow.

Luckily, Veseys sends you a growing guide when you order veggie seeds from them and that’ll tell me everything I need to know about all of this stuff. Again, I’m a bit worried about space, but I think with proper planning we should be okay and if all else fails, I can just grow the tomatoes in containers on the porch as long as I fertilize them well. I’ll have to invest in some containers though, as what I have will be too small, except for one pot.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to the veggie garden this year. I love the idea of growing your own food and while we spent $50 on seeds, I know we’ll end up saving a lot of money in the long run from not buying produce at the grocery store.

Annnnnd I was going to start writing about my front yard garden but y’know what? This is really really long and I’ll do that when the seeds for THAT get here.

Have a wonderful Sunday!

Today’s Oprah was a rerun that I’d never seen before, about moms who drive while under the influence of alcohol with kids in the car, more specifically, the 2009 Taconic State Parkway crash where Diane Schuler (36), under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, drove the wrong way on the parkway for 1.7 miles before crashing and killing herself and 7 other people, including her own daughter and three of her nieces. Her husband disputes the toxicology report, believing the accident was caused by a medical issue of some sort and has hired a private investigation firm to clear his wife’s name, but it doesn’t appear as though he’ll be successful.

The show also told the story of another woman from New York who drove drunk with seven 11-year-old girls in the car. She lost control of the car, rolling it several times, critically injuring two of the girls and killing another (the other girls came out of it with minor injuries).

Oprah’s point was that apparently in the US, women driving drunk has risen 30% since 1998, although she offered no real reason as to why.

One of the guests was a woman who was celebrating her two year sobriety after hiding her alcoholism from her husband for well over a year.

The whole episode had my mind spinning as alcoholism is something I’m very sensitive to having grown up with alcoholics and then somehow befriending a few in my adult life. I’ve known and do know the kind that hides it, the kind that tries to hide it and fails and the kind that just doesn’t give a fuck.

My grampa Wes was an alcoholic. He wasn’t technically my grampa, but in my life, he took the place of one. He lived on a farm next door to my grama, where I lived when I was a little kid and where I visited almost every weekend , every PA day, the Xmas holidays and every March Break for the bulk of my childhood. Since she was busy running her store most of the time I either spent my days with my great grama who lived upstairs or at Wes’ house playing with the animals.

The only person it was a secret to that Wes was an alcoholic was me. For the most part I grew up thinking he was just really really fun. I mean, he let me take new kittens and puppies by the box full to my grama’s with me to play with for the day, or let me spend the day in the barn playing with the bunnies or the baby chicks. Or sometimes we’d go to town or go to the corner store, buy junk food and watch “wrasslin’” for the afternoon. It wouldn’t be until I was about 10 or 11 that I understood what an alcoholic was or that he was one.

Oh I knew he drank, but I never thought drinking was a problem. I just thought it was something that adults did, although to be perfectly honest I wasn’t really sure why.

I can’t remember for sure if I was 11 or 12, but Saturday in the summer, Wes and I went to the Stouffville Sales Barns where he purchased a few flats of chicks. (On Saturdays you could go there and farmers would buy and sell animals. You still can.) He put them in the back of his pick-up truck and on our way out of town, he stopped in at what my grama called “the In & Out Store”, which was her name for the liquor store and bought…y’know, to this day I’m not even sure what he drank. Probably whiskey or rye, because I recall it being amber-coloured. Anyway, in Ontario there’s the LCBO, which is the liquor store and The Beer Store, both government run and the only place you can buy alcohol. Wes was a regular at the liquor store and I’d even been with him when he was refused service, so that means I was definitely with him on more than one occasion where he was already drunk when he walked through their doors because that’s why they refuse service (although I didn’t know that at the time). And yes, we had to drive to get there.

Anyway, on this Saturday he bought 3 or 4 flats of chicks and as I said, he put them in the back of his pickup truck, he stopped off at the liquor store and then we went back to his house. When we got there, Wes’ friend George, who was an enabler to the highest degree and who often got Wes drunk and would take advantage of him monetarily, was waiting for us. I went to the barn to play with the bunnies, the chicks were left in the back of the truck, which was parked in the shade of the house, and the men went inside to start drinking.

By the time I came back from the barn, George had left (I didn’t like him, he was smarmy) and Wes was at the kitchen table drinking. When I came inside, I sat on one of the kitchen chairs and we talked about stuff while he got progressively drunker. After he was well plastered, he decided that he’d better get the chicks into the barn, so he stood up and promptly fell damn near flat on his face. I laughed, I was a kid and thought it was funny. I helped him up and helped him get outside where he fell AGAIN, this time right into the lilac bush. And that’s where he stayed because after I tried to help him back up several times and we laughed at his behaviour, he passed out cold and I couldn’t wake him up. I even kicked him as hard as I could right in the ass and he just gave me shit for it, rolled over and stayed passed out.

By now it was the afternoon and the truck was no longer in the shade. I was scared. I was scared that Wes was sick or something and I was scared that the chicks were going to die in the back of the truck and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t lift a flat of chicks by myself and get them in the barn. It would take me forever to take a few at a time and carry them to the coop. (We’re talking like, easily 1000 chicks here.)

In a panic, I called my grama at her store and explained the situation. It was almost closing time for her anyway, so she locked up early and headed over to Wes’ house, which was maybe a 4 minute walk. Together we each took an end of one of the flats of chicks and one by one we took them into the barn where I released them where they were supposed to go and got them water. I remember not knowing what kind of food they should eat so I didn’t feed them, but so many of them were so overheated that I would have to pick them up, splash water on them and put their beaks into the water dish where they’d finally drink. I remember having to go find more water dishes because there were so many chicks and they were all so dehydrated that they were trampling all over each other and making everyone’s water dirty.

Once the chicks were looked after, my grama told me to show her where Wes was, so I brought her over to the lilac bush and she kicked him. I told her I’d tried that. Wes kinda stirred a bit and looked up and my grama said something to him about the chicks being put away, called him a “stupid ass” and then said she was leaving him there. Then we went home where alcoholism was finally explained to me. I’d known what drunk adults were like, but I never knew it could be a problem.

Looking back at my childhood with Wes, I can’t help but think of how truly fucked up it was. My grama would routinely let me get in the truck with him to go up to the store even though he had clearly been drinking. He used to drive up to the store (about a 3 minute drive) not on the road, but on the shoulder and I learned later that the reason he did this was because it was only illegal to drive on the road if you were drunk. I don’t know if that was true at the time or not, but it’s certainly not true now, as my alcoholic neighbour has explained to me several times (more on that in a bit). Everyone knew Wes was drunk a good portion of the time, but they let me hang out with him anyway. I don’t know why that is. (And really, I guess that part doesn’t matter, it never did me any harm except that one scary day with the chicks. The driving part I really question though.)

Wes’ wife, Maggie, was an alcoholic too, but I don’t ever recall her driving and she died when I was about 10 or 11. I don’t know if it was related to her drinking or not, but I’m fairly certain Wes’ death was. Wes died when I was in grade 8, right before my birthday, of a stroke. From what I recall being told, they don’t know if he had a stroke and fell down the stairs or if he fell down the stairs and had a stroke, but his son Mikey found him there, assumed he was drunk and started giving him shit while trying to get him up. Wes being Wes, I’m pretty certain that whatever the case may be, he probably wasn’t sober when the stroke occurred. He was alive when the ambulance came and they took him to a hospital in Toronto. I wasn’t allowed to go see him because my mom didn’t want me remembering him “like that” (I guess he was pretty messed up) but he died a few days later.

My great grama on my grampa’s side was an alcoholic as well, which probably sounds remote to most of you reading this, but keep in mind that my mother had me when she was 15 and as such, I grew up with two of my great gramas. I didn’t learn that my Grama Crittenden was an alcoholic until I was a teenager though because we didn’t really go see her very often but usually when we did, she was drunk. I never really thought anything of it though, because we only really ever saw her at family reunions and at a Crittenden family reunion usually the only people who are actually sober are the kids and sometimes even that’s not the case. I don’t know if my great grama’s partner, Frank, was an alcoholic too, but it seems pretty likely and for sure her late husband was. They don’t know if he drank because he was depressed or if he was depressed because he drank, but either way, he committed suicide by taking a shotgun to his head. My Grama Crittenden lived to be 86, I believe, and died of old age. (Although I think that’s relative; who’s to say how long she might have lived if she wasn’t an alcoholic?)

My step-dad IS an alcoholic. He wasn’t one when I was growing up, it was a gradual thing that happened over time because he was depressed, hated his life and couldn’t find any other way to cope. It started out innocently enough, just a beer here or there, then it became one small drink after work to “unwind”, until finally it became, “no, I can’t drive you to your friends house, I’ve been drinking” (by 7pm) or “no, I can’t pick you up from the party, I’ve had too much to drink”. My step-dad started by only buying a mickey once a week, then a 26er and now from what I understand, he buys the big bottle. I guess the plus side to this is that at least he doesn’t drive? Or at least he didn’t drive after a few drinks as of 6 years ago when I stopped speaking to him, I can’t say for certain if that’s still the case now.

My ex’s father who I used to live with was also an alcoholic and the last I heard, he still was, although he did remain sober for a few years a few years ago when he was driving truck for a living. He was, like my step-dad, a high-functioning alcoholic in that he held down a job, the same job he’d had for 20 years, and didn’t drive drunk, but their family was overburdened by financial trouble, the root of which seemed to be a lot of get rich quick schemes and a lot of beer. Darrell also tended to be a very violent, mean drunk whose behaviour heavily contributed to his wife’s mental breakdown and subsequent diagnosis of schizophrenia (not that he CAUSED the schizophrenia, that’s not possible, but his actions served as the catalyst for it surfacing). When she moved out and was in and out of the hospital because of her illness, Darrell took on boarders to help pay the bills who he would get drunk and harass, both physically and mentally. Then his wife moved back in and he started harassing her more and more until she ended up in the hospital again and her family wouldn’t allow her to go back to him. Then his mentally unstable (yet brilliant) sister, Donna, moved in with her boyfriend and he physically and emotionally harassed both of them too, all while drunk.

It is because of these people (and a few more I won’t tell you about because this is already getting really long) that I rarely drink. I went through a phase in my teens where I drank all the time, mostly because I could (I was unsupervised and had all these adults willing to buy it for me, plus there was one restaurant in town that would serve me if I was with my Aunt) and right after Madison was born, because I’d just turned 19 (legal drinking age here) I went to the bar a whole lot (but didn’t often get drunk, mostly because I couldn’t afford to). And of course when I was working for Scratching Post there was a lot of drinking as well, but I’ve never kept alcohol in my home. At least not on purpose. Sometimes people come over and bring alcohol with them and then leave whatever’s left here, so that’s sometimes in the very highest cupboard above the stove, but more often than not, I’ve dumped it out after people have left unless there’s a lot left in the bottle. There’s one Mike’s Hard Lemonade in my fridge right now that’s been there since at least September, if not before that and it’ll probably stay there until the summer. I get drunk maybe twice a year and I only drink to get drunk because I see no other reason to.

I realize this isn’t necessarily the definition of an alcoholic, but I believe that if you drink every single day and you’re unhappy the days you don’t have alcohol, then you are one. My “alcoholic scale” doesn’t count people who have a glass of wine with dinner or even a beer or maybe even two after work and really, my “scale” isn’t so much a scale at all, but the fact that, having grown up around so many different types of alcohol abusers, I know one when I see one and I’ve seen plenty. And y’know what else? In my experience, the people who get the most offended if you use the word “alcoholic” in reference to them almost always are one. If they aren’t one, they want to know why you think so and are concerned that you feel that way. If they get angry, it’s because they know it’s true and now they know you know it’s true too.

I don’t drink or keep alcohol in my home not because I’m holier than thou and don’t think people should drink, I do it because I know I’m predisposed to having a problem with it due to both nature and nurture and man, I have enough problems.

I said up there somewhere that my neighbour told me that driving on the side of the road wouldn’t save you from a DUI now as it may have when Wes was doing it and the reason he knows this is because of how he got his first DUI. Apparently he was walking home from either a bar or a party, I believe in the winter, and because it was cold and he was so drunk he just wanted to sleep, he got in his car and put the key in the ignition and turned the car on to turn on the heat. Then once the car was warm, he turned it off and fell asleep. He woke up to “tap tap tap” on the driver’s side window and it was a cop. The cop told him to get out of the car and made him do a sobriety test which he obviously failed and because he had the key in the ignition, he was charged with…not DUI, but something in the same vein where the car’s not actually moving but you were close enough that it was a chargeable offense. So if he could be charged with that, without the car even being on or being driven, then my grampa Wes couldn’t get away with driving drunk on the shoulder like he did when I was a kid.

Wayne, my neighbour, told Blake and I repeatedly that if we were ever in a situation like that and a cop tapped on your window, to get out of the car and throw your keys as far as you can because then, according to him, you can’t be charged with anything.

I doubt very much that either Blake or I would ever be in that situation, but every time Wayne’s told us the story, I’ve always thought about Wes driving down the shoulder of the road to avoid a DUI. And then while watching Oprah today, I thought about every alcoholic I’ve ever known and just how lucky I really was that Wes didn’t accidentally kill me and that I didn’t grow up to be one too.

Like I said, I’ve got enough problems.

“With Love”, 6 x 6 inch mixed media on canvas.
Now available on Etsy.

Both Wes and Madison got their report cards today and both of them got almost straight A’s with a couple of B+’s thrown in. (Nothing lower than a B+. Wes got more A’s than Madison.)

This is typical for them, so I wasn’t really surprised, although I was glad to see that Madison’s finally starting to improve on doing homework. Every report card she’s had since grade 2 has always been good, but the teachers always say she needs to work on getting her homework done or handed in on time. This is the 2nd report card in a row where the teacher didn’t say that, so yay Madison!

Also enclosed with both of their report cards was a yellow letter that says:

Dear Parents/Guardians,

This is an invitation to attend the Principal’s Achievement Assembly. Your child is on the Principal’s Achievement list this term and will be receiving a certificate of achievement on March 26, 2010. To get on the list students must score a total of 24 or better on the Learning Skills portion of their Report Card. Due to a large number of students on the list (260) [note: out of about 800 kids] we are having two assemblies.

Gr. 1-3 at 9:00am
Gr. 4-8 at 9:45am

Parents/Guardians are invited to attend. I look forward to seeing you there.

Sincerely,
Principal

I realize that a lot of kids are getting this award, but it’s still cool that both of my kids are among them. In fact, it seems that every time there’s any kind of award at school, one or both of them gets one, so in case it isn’t clear, I’m totally proud of them for always doing their best. I think it’s great that the school has awards like these so kids continue to do their best and to maybe push the ones who aren’t to do better. (Or maybe these awards are totally heinous and only make the kids who don’t get them feel bad…that’s an idea to consider too, I suppose.)

Either way, they did awesome, because they are awesome.

So Monday was my birthday and in honour of that, we at Buttercup decided that I should do an article about what it was like to be raised by a teen mom. I have mixed feelings on this assignment. One, because I’ve already painted my mother in a negative light on Buttercup (which I think she was very upset about) and two, because my childhood really wasn’t sunshine and roses and it’s going to be difficult to bring many positives to this article.

However, this is my assignment and truth be told, the concept was my idea, so here we go.

I was born March 1st, 1979 to my 15 year old mother and my 17 or 18 year old father. My mother’s birthday is at the end of August, meaning that she was actually 14 when she got pregnant and in 1979 that “simply didn’t happen” and when it did, parents forced their girls to abort or sent them away to have the baby and then give it up for adoption. In 1979 my mother was a pariah, they even made her write her high school exams in another room from everyone else, fearing that her visibly pregnant belly would be a bad influence on other students.

I’ve asked both of my parents numerous times how I came to be and while I’ve gotten mixed answers, what it all really seems to boil down to is the fact that neither one of them were given any kind of sexual education either at school or by their parents. At one point my mother told me not to believe my friends when they said you couldn’t get pregnant your first time, which has lead me to believe that perhaps she DID get pregnant her first time, but really, my conception remains largely a mystery.

What’s not a mystery is the years that followed. After I was born, my parents lived together in an apartment above my grandpa’s carpet store and my dad worked as his apprentice, learning the carpet trade. My mother stayed home with me. Around the time I was a little over 1 year old, my parents split up, my mom claiming that my dad had more interest in growing and selling pot than he ever had in me, which, knowing him now is a believable scenario. That’s when my mom and I moved in with her parents and my great grandma, who lived next door, looked after me when my mom went back to high school. I would see my dad again once when I was 3, but never again until I sought him out when I was 13.

During this time, I’m assuming things were okay or at least no one’s ever told me otherwise. What I do remember though, was when I was 3 years old, I was sitting on the floor in my grandmother’s living room watching TV when my mother called down to me from her bedroom saying that she had a present for me. So I went up to her room where she was doing homework and she said to come closer, which I did, and then she spanked me. This is one of my very first memories of my mother and I’ve asked her since why she did that and she said it was a “preventative measure”. She figured because I was quiet I must have been doing something bad and if I wasn’t I was about to so that’s why she spanked me. Nice parenting there, ma.

I know, because I’ve seen the pictures, that not every moment was horrible during my early childhood. I know my mother took me with her to the CNE which is a big fair held in Toronto in the summer and I know she took me with her to friends’ cottages and that there were always a lot of other teenagers around me as a child. And in the pictures I seem happy.

But something else I remember is house parties. I remember my mom and I going to Toronto because she was dating a guy named Cooper and I remember being put to bed early in a strange house and listening, in the dark, to the partying happening downstairs. I remember waking up early and the house being so trashed that when I walked down the hallway to the bathroom, ketchup packets from McDonald’s stuck to my feet and beer bottles full of cigarette butts were everywhere. I don’t remember anyone ever checking on me during these parties. Nice parenting again, ma.

Things didn’t really get bad though, until my mom married my step-dad when I was 5. I think she partially married him so I’d have a dad and when things turned sour between him and her, she took it out on me. In short, my mother became abusive and would remain abusive until I was taken away from her by the Children’s Aid in grade 7 and again in grade 9. She denies to this day that she ever abused me, but whether she can admit it or not, she did and I have the scars, both physical and mental, to prove it. Oh and a Children’s Aid file thicker than the Toronto phone book. When I was 15 I was legally emancipated from her so I could be on student welfare and live on my own as an adult while still attending high school.

But I don’t think I really blame her for that. I’m not mad at her for that. I used to be, I spent a lot of my life hating her for not being the mother I felt I deserved, that I felt every child deserves and our relationship since I was about 11 has always been strained and while things are good right now, I still feel like I have to walk on eggshells around her or World War III is going to break out.

It wasn’t until I had my own daughter though, that I understood the gravity of my mother’s situation. My mother hit me because she was a child herself and was never allowed to develop other methods of coping. In 1979 there were next to zero resources for teen mothers, the parenting course at high school that I took before having my daughter didn’t exist when my mom was having me and my mother had to put up with a lot of shit, namely her loss of childhood and a constant barrage of judgment and name-calling that it’s no wonder that she took out her frustrations on me, the reason for all of that.

What I’m saying is that I don’t forgive her for what she did to me and how she raised me and I never will because it fucked me up for life, but I don’t hare her for it because I’ve done my best to put myself in her shoes and I understand.

I was technically a teen mom myself, getting pregnant at 18 and having my daughter at 19, although my pregnancy was not an accident. But in 1997/1998 there were TONS of resources for teen moms. I had a group run out of the region’s health department bringing me healthy foods every week, like fresh produce, whole wheat bread, chocolate milk and cheese. I had a public health nurse come once a month to go over what was happening inside my body with me and tell me how my baby was growing. I had a church group that ran what was called a “community kitchen” for teen moms teaching the other girls and I how to cook healthy meals, which we made in large batches so everyone got to bring home left-overs, both a fresh dish and something to put in the freezer. An extension of this church group made sure I had gifts and a turkey every Xmas and a ham and an Easter basket for my daughter every Easter. When I threw my daughter’s father out of our apartment for good (long story, which will no doubt be another article) and had to go on welfare to support myself because I was only eligible for a minimum wage job that wouldn’t even cover my daycare expenses, they gave me a daycare subsidy that allowed me to go to a local community college (which they also paid for) so I could do upgrading to my education in order to get into college. When I did get into college, my government subsidized 80% of my daycare costs and gave me student loans that covered tuition AND living expenses. When it came time to put my custody and support arrangement in writing with the courts, my government paid for my lawyer to help me get it done.

Support like this didn’t exist for my mother and because of that, it’s no wonder that she and I have had completely different parenting experiences with completely different outcomes. The only support my mother got was outdated advice from her mother and my great grandmother and the “wisdom” of her teenage friends. I know my mother was on welfare when I was very young and she was still in high school (how weird is it that I was AT my mother’s high school graduation?) and I’m sure there was a social worker involved during that time, but because of how my childhood was, I can’t imagine that social worker was very helpful.

Despite at all though, I love my mother and I appreciate the things she had to give up in order to have me. from what I’ve been told, abortion or adoption were never even considerations and I thank my mother on this, my birthday week, for giving me the life I have. It’s been a bumpy ride, no doubt, but I’m grateful nonetheless.

I don’t know if I ever posted this on my site before, but it’s in my gallery so I must have at some point (or maybe I posted it in Live Journal). This is a list my shrink made me write out in regards to my agoraphobia. All images can be clicked to enlarge.

A normal person doesn’t have a list like this. A normal person can do all of the things on this list. And this list is just the tip of a very large iceberg but it was getting long and I didn’t want to overwhelm my shrink with too many details.

Anyway, I found this in my gallery when I was uploading my sunrise picture so I thought I’d share. Again.

It’s 5am and I’m awake. I went to bed at about 12:30am but woke up about half an hour ago because Lucky was whining to be let out and when I tried to go back to sleep, it was a no go because there’s too much on my mind, namely agoraphobia.

Yesterday or the day before, Blake had a troll on his Cubeless blog and the troll said, “Grab yourself a job instead of claiming agoraphobia of convenience which seems to kick in every time you have to go shopping, but lifts when there’s an art show or a concert you absolutely have to attend because you’re ‘creative’.” And that wasn’t the first time in the last couple of weeks where people questioned my agoraphobia. At a forum I frequent, there’s a thread in a secret forum called “Reasons to feel good” and when our Gogol Bordello tickets came, I posted the picture of me holding them up to the cam in that thread and a couple of people said “wait, don’t you have agoraphobia?”

And that’s the thing. Agoraphobia isn’t a cut & dry thing. It’s different for each person. In my case, I can’t go anywhere by myself and there are certain places, like grocery stores, that I avoid because they give me anxiety to the point of panic attacks whether Blake’s with me or not. And in the case of the grocery store, yes, Blake does the groceries and it’s not so much because I can’t (well, since I haven’t done it so long and have next to zero concept of money anymore it would cause a problem anyway) but it’s simply a case of, “why make it a family outing when Blake can just go in, get what we need and come home”? Since I can’t go by myself, and I don’t have a car even if I could, that’s the way things have to be and the way things are. In case I wasn’t clear, when it comes to groceries, why take 4 people to the store, which over-complicates things, when Blake can just go in, get what we need, not go over budget, not impulse buy, and be home in half the time it would take us if all 4 of us went. Plus, if all 4 of us went, there’s a very good chance that I would have a panic attack and would require medication (Ativan) to first get there and some more to actually stay there.

As for art shows, well, that’s actually a laughable thing. I’ve only ever been to one art show in my life and it was Touched By Fire, which is put on by the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario. If anyone’s going to understand my idiosyncrasies at such an event, it’s going to be those people, or at least that was my logic behind going. Being in the city (Toronto) makes me very very nervous and the night of that art show, I must have taken at least 4 Ativans. But the thing was, I was totally fine at the show and I actually questioned this after the fact the next time I saw my shrink. I wanted to know how come I was totally fine at that show, yet I can’t go to Wal*Mart or even the art supply stores by myself and she said that it’s because at an art show, I have a defined role, I’m an artist, and therefore there’s guidelines as to how to act which are comfortable to me because I can easily play that role for that is what I am. I mean, I wasn’t totally fine at the show, when Gayle Cutler wanted me to do a commission, Blake had to navigate the business end of things because that’s not a role I’m comfortable with. While he did that, I hid in the bathroom. Literally.

And as far as concerts, well gee, the last concert I went to was either System of a Down or Metallica, I can’t remember and both of those shows were at least 7 or 8 years ago. With Metallica, I almost didn’t go because I had a meltdown half an hour before we had to leave. I ended up going to the show in my pajamas after Blake spent 45 minutes talking me into going. With Gogol Bordello, they are my favourite band right now and there are certain experiences where I know I’d have regrets if I didn’t go and this show is one of them because Gogol Bordello doesn’t come to Toronto very often. As I said when I posted the picture of the tickets, I have roughly 2 months to psych myself into going. A normal person wouldn’t have to do that. And even when I do go, I’m going to have to be chowing down clonazepam (klonopin) and Ativan like there’s no tomorrow. I won’t be in the pit. I’ll probably be way at the back, away from people. I’ll also be with Blake and our two best friends so I’ll have like, a circle of protection, which helps. Going to this show is not going to be an easy thing for me at all and actually another aspect of this endeavor is that when I posted the pictures of the concert tickets on that forum that I frequent, one of the members there, whom I’ve known for many years and who lives in Toronto, asked me if I wanted to get a drink and meet up before the show, to which I replied “hellz no” because that is completely outside of my comfort zone, especially when going to the show is going to be hard enough as it is. I am already losing sleep over this show because I don’t know what to wear – and it’s 2 months away.

I don’t know what to wear because where I’m at right now as far as weight loss is that I don’t fit into my “normal” clothes just yet and my “fat clothes” are now too big. Chances are, I’m going to have to buy something to wear to the show and since we’re not particularly made of money that stresses me out.

And as far as meeting this person I know from the forum I frequent well, the thing is, I decided a while back that I wasn’t going to meet people from the internet anymore with very few exceptions and the reason for that is because…I’ve met roughly 200 people from the internet in the last 12 years and during the last several encounters, I’ve realized that people sometimes don’t want to meet me to actually meet me, they want to judge me to see whether I’m the same in person as I am online (which I am) but more than that, they want to be able to tell people that they met me because it gives them cool points or something in our respective circles. I’m a notch on a belt and I’m not cool with that.

The fact of the matter is, I have agoraphobia. It’s not a phobia of convenience as Blake’s troll implied, it just presents itself in a certain way where I can go certain places and do certain things, but quite often those things take a lot of planning, a trip to my shrink, psychiatric medications and a lot of preparation.

I left the house the first week of January to see Avatar. I was supposed to go to a baby shower in Toronto at the end of January but I couldn’t deal with going to a place with a bunch of people I didn’t know so I didn’t go. Seeing Avatar in January was the only time I left my house that month. In the first week of February I went to my doctor to get a new prescription and in the second week of February, I went to my shrink appointment. In the middle of February, I went with Blake to the grocery store for about 5 minutes. And that’s it. I left the house 3 times in February. Now it’s March. I went to the doctor’s tonight to get a pap smear and chances are, that’ll be my only outing for the month of March. A normal person wouldn’t be able to tell you the exact places and the amount of times they left the house in any given month, but I can because it’s such a rare occurrence and since they are such rare occurrences, I mark these outings down on my calendar. Again, a normal person wouldn’t do that.

Last spring, when I took a walk down the Trans-Canada Trail by my house to take pictures, that was the first time in about 6 & a half years that I went anywhere by myself. Last spring I tested my agoraphobic limits with mixed success. When I went to one of the local restaurants to have breakfast all by myself, I was so freaked out by the situation that I didn’t leave the house for a month. Last spring & summer, Lucky and I checked the mail and mailed things in the middle of the night and that was a huge deal. All of these things can easily be searched on this blog under “agoraphobia” for those who are interested.

My agoraphobia is compounded during the fall and winter by Seasonal Affective Disorder. I simply do not leave the house unless I absolutely have to during this time. In the spring & summer, that’s when I go back at it with the immersion therapy, although truth be told, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve mostly given up on that because at this point I have zero motivation for trying to get better. I live in a shitty little town with nothing in it and nowhere to go and I have no car. I don’t think I can get better here. I’m not sure where I could get better exactly, but here ain’t it.

And that’s the thing, which I don’t know if it’s part of the phobia or what, but 95% of the time I’m okay with not leaving the house. I stopped fantasizing about a different life a long time ago.

Also, part of agoraphobia is that quite often, as is the case with me, the person has a hard time letting people in to their homes. It’s not just about leaving one’s home. Having people in my house is a very hard thing for me to do. At Xmas time the neighbours offered to watch my dogs for me so we didn’t have to bring them up North with us, but i couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have people in my home when I wasn’t there. And even when I am here, if people are going to come over, we all make a mad dash for the cleaning supplies because I don’t want people judging me by our home, which isn’t exactly the nicest home to begin with. A babysitter being here so Blake and I can go out? Unheard of. My kids have only been babysat in our home by our friends Alex & Ronny and my mother. When the neighbours watch the kids, the kids go over there. Hiring a babysitter, like a teenager or whatever, simply wouldn’t happen.

I think my agoraphobia started in two ways: 1) I’m pretty sure that whenever I left the house when we lived above my grandma’s furniture store, she came into the apartment and snooped. That made me so mental that I stopped leaving the house so she couldn’t do that and that’s why I can’t have people in my house when I’m not there now. 2) When Blake moved in and had to give back his car, he took over mine and it was just easier for him to get groceries on the way home from work than for me to go do it after he came home and I have access to a car. Since we lived in the middle of nowhere, there was nowhere for me to go, especially without a car. And this lasted years until it became habit and then became phobia.

But long long long before that there were signs that this was just part of my natural state. When I was 15 and living with my boyfriend at the time’s parents, I rarely left the house then too. I would go to check the mail which meant walking about 20 feet from the house and I would do so in my pajamas at 2:30am. Sometimes I’d go to my Aunt’s house in town, which was about a 15 minute walk, but again, I’d only do it at night and most of the time in my pajamas.

I know when I absolutely have to, I can leave the house, kick ass and take names. When Zulu got hit by the car, I didn’t even think about it, I got in the car with the cop who stopped to help, with Zulu in the back seat and I dealt with the vet by myself and went back home with the cop while Blake was on his way to the vet’s to take care of the rest. When it was just Madison and I in our apartment in Uxbridge, I only had a bar fridge and I’d load Madison up in her stroller and we’d do groceries every day. When I was in college, I dealt with Madison going to daycare and drove myself to Toronto every single day because in all of the above scenarios, what choice did I have?

If Blake died tomorrow, I’m fairly confident that we’d all be okay and that I could get shit done. (Don’t get me wrong, Blake dying would suck, but life does go on, bills still have to be paid, kids still have to be driven to school.)

As things stand though, as I said, there’s little motivation for me to get better. There’s nothing in the outside world for me except these rare situations like an art show, a movie or a concert and I do all of the above extremely seldom.

As I said in the beginning, agoraphobia is not a cut & dry thing. It affects everyone differently. Yes, there are similarities in every agoraphobic patient, but they all have to be treated on a case-by-case basis. I’ve just explained how my case presents itself and it is my hope that I won’t have to do it again.