Day 14 – A song that no one would expect you to love
(This was really really hard because I think musically, I’m pretty damn predictable. :o/ But this song goes through my head at least every other day because Sesame Street is the devil.)

Ann Arbor’s Teen Centre, Inc. (Neutral Zone) slipped to #7! Please vote and help bring them back up to at least #3! They need to stay in the top 15 to get funding from The Bank of Ann Arbor!  WE NEED YOUR HELP! It only takes a few clicks and it’s for CHARITY!

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Day 08 – A song that you know all the words to

Day 07 – A song that reminds you of a certain event

So last night, Blake and I started watching this show “Shameless”, on HBO OnDemand. I’d watched the first few episodes of the British version a long time ago and thought it was funny in that “haha Britains are funny” kinda way so I thought I would probably enjoy the American version.

Except I didn’t, really. Well I sort of did, but I watched it in a completely different way, like it was a documentary or something. Before I go any further, here’s the trailer for the show:

William H. Macy as a total fucked up, trailer trashy alcoholic, I mean how could you go wrong, right? But the thing is, the show made me kinda sad. We only watched the first two episodes but they hit so close to home that here I am, thinking about them the next day.

William H. Macy? The dad? That’s Rob’s dad. That household is Rob’s parents’ household after Carole was institutionalized. Don’t know who these people are because you’re new around these parts? Rob is the biological father of my daughter, who I had when I was 19. I started living with Rob’s family when I was 16. Rob’s dad was an alcoholic, still is, Rob’s mom was a bible-banging schizzo-affective disorder lady who was in and out of psychosis. She now lives in a halfway house. Due to them, it was me, Rob and Rob’s brother Jason who basically ran the house and made things livable. Throw in Rob’s crazy Aunt Donna who rented a room from Rob’s dad Darrell, as well as other tenants who rented rooms, all of whom Darrell abused and there’s most of my teenagehood. Oh but we can’t forget my Aunt Heather, who was on welfare for 11 years until they kicked her off and banned her from social services for life for collecting welfare for her kids even though one didn’t even live with her anymore and neither of them were still in school. And then there’s all the people that surrounded her. This Shameless show is so eerily close to how my life used to be that I felt sick watching it the whole time. My brother used to say that Trailer Park Boys reminded him of our childhoods but at least that show as funny whereas this is way more dead on. Like scary dead on.

We stopped watching it at 10pm and went to bed soon after, but the show kept me awake until at least 11:30pm, or not the show, but the memories that resurfaced as a result of watching it. I do plan on watching the rest of the season because I do find the show interesting in how close it is to how I “came of age” but I don’t think I could ever laugh at it because I just don’t find it funny. It’s too tragic to be funny, when you’ve grown up with the reality.

~*SPOILER ALERT*~ In the 2nd episode when William H. Macy goes missing? That really happened to us. Darrell went missing for 3 or 4 days and we called EVERYWHERE trying to find him because it wasn’t like him to not come home and pass out on the couch after having dinner (at 4am) and then on the Tuesday afternoon, he waltzes in with this woman and introduces us to her and tells us that it’s Gordon Lightfoot’s daughter. For days after that, Rob and Jason would ask their dad where he’d been and he would reply with “in Gordon Lightfoot’s daughter!” and they all thought this was the funniest thing in the world. He dated her (can’t remember her name, but she was an alcoholic too) for a few weeks, trying to get money out of her, just as William H. Macy’s character begins to do with Joan Cusack in the show in episode 2, but I guess it wasn;t successful because he stopped hanging out with her after a few weeks. ~*SPOILER OVER*~

But that’s what I mean about how it reminds me of that time in my life and while it’s sort of okay to laugh at it now, I guess, I don’t think I’m there yet or I don’t know if I’ll ever be there yet.

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind today. I’d better get back to work.

So during the Olympics, you probably saw that I posted the video for “Oh…Canada” by a rapper named Classified and I meant to explain why it was so funny (beyond the song itself) and totally forgot, so I’m gonna do it now.

Our beloved government has this rule that all Canadian TV stations broadcast X amount of Canadian content in an effort to preserve our heritage and to get Canadian TV shows (which are often sub-par) airtime. I forget now what the percentage is and couldn’t even guess, but that’s the law of the land and as such, the Canadian government created these “Canadian Heritage Minutes” (or “Moments”, I’m not sure which because people say both) spots that have been played over and over and over for the past 15-20 years, although I haven’t seen one lately and I don’t think they’re making any new ones. Canadian TV stations would play these little commercial length videos because they would count toward their Canadian content percentage.

Classified’s “Oh…Canada” video is a spoof of one of these.  Here’s the “Oh…Canada” video again:

…..and of course the Heritage Moment it’s mainly spoofing (the national anthem one) is the ONLY one that doesn’t appear to be on YouTube. At the end of the video though, he’s spoofing this one, about how we apparently  invented basketball:

There are literally about 40 of these Heritage moments, so I’m only going to post my favourites here and link you to a YouTube channel that has almost all of them (except for that goddamn national anthem one!).

Probably the most famous of them all is the one about Dr. Wilder Penfield, a famous neurosurgeon who cured a woman of epilepsy and was one of the first scientists to map the human brain. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen me reference “burnt toast” and this is why:

That one was made fun of mercilessly by kids in schools everywhere because of the “burnt toast” thing. Mention “burnt toast” to most Canadians over the age of 25 and they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about.

This one is about WWII and the poem “In Flanders Fields“, which is recited every November 11th on Remembrance Day by kids in schools all across the country:

This is the poem:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

- John McCrae

This is also why Canadians wear poppy pins on Remembrance Day. They look like this and this is what Wikipedia has to say about them. They are sold practically everywhere and they’re in boxes with a donation slot so you can take one for free or give a donation and take one. Literally every Canadian wears one on their coat from mid-October until November 11th, even agoraphobes like me who don’t even leave the house.

This Heritage Minute is about Sam Steele, a mountie who patrolled the northwest during the gold rush and this one shows that even back then, the Canadian way of thinking of guns and the American way were vastly different:

This one’s about how our flag came to be:

This is one of my favourites and the person who uploaded it gave a better description of it than I would, so I’ll just paste what s/he said: “The names of women are conspicuously absent from the lists of famous Canadian medical pioneers. During the 19th Century, while male physicians and surgeons were exploring new treatments and innovative medical procedures, Canadian women were struggling for the mere right to practice medicine. For them, acceptance into a medical school was a major achievement. The two women most responsible for breaking down the barriers and advancing medical training for women in Canada were Emily Stowe and Jennie Kidd Trout.”

This one is about the Underground Railroad:

This one is about Winnie the Pooh, who was actually a Canadian bear named for Winnipeg. :o)

And of course there’s one on maple syrup…

This one’s…kinda hard to explain. It’s called “The Peacemaker” and it’s about an Iroquois demon. It’s also one of my favourites because of the last two lines.

This one is my absolute favourite, it’s about Marshal McLuhan. The medium is the message, kids. (Unfortunately this one cuts off a bit of the end. Boooooo.)

This one’s about free health care (congrats to my American friends for making progress in this area last night!).

Anyway, as I said, there’s a bunch, one even starring Dan Akroyd (the Avro Arrow one) and the YouTube playlist of almost all of them is here in case anyone’s interested. I’m so bummed the anthem one doesn’t appear to be on YouTube because that’s the one that prompted this post to begin with, to explain why Classified’s video for “Oh…Canada” is so funny to me. Oh well.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this slice of Canadiana and remember, if you suddenly smell burnt toast, get thee to a hospital!

I know. I make a lot of posts that stem from watching Oprah. The thing is, I’ve been watching Oprah every day since I was about 5 years old and it’s what’s on at 4 o’clock, which is usually when I do most of my painting. Anyway, this post is no different and has been brewing in my brain since last month when Oprah interviewed 4 different child molesters. The interview is here if you care to watch it yourself. I thought it was pretty eye-opening stuff.

What caught me off guard about the interview was the one guy who was only a few years older than his victim and how he groomed her to finally consent to having sex with him. That’s right, consent.  Because that’s what happens, child molesters groom their victims slowly, over time, taking things a step further each time until ideally, the victim consents to what they ultimately want and what struck me about this particular story is that it mimicked that of my own.

I’ve written about this before in my Live Journal but I can’t remember if it was friends only or not. When I was about 5 years old, my cousin, who was about 6 years older than me, slept over with me at my great grandma’s house and we slept in the same bed. I was in love with this cousin and I see now that a large part of that was because he groomed me to love him and it wasn’t love in a platonic way. I thought I was going to grow up and marry him. Well this one night, after many days and nights of things getting slowly to this point, we were in the same bed and he pulled down his pants and asked me to stroke his penis and I did and I was surprised when it got hard because I was 5 and didn’t really know penises could do that. As I stroked his penis, and he instructed me on how to do it properly, he stroked my vagina through my underwear (I was wearing a nightie). Then he stopped but told me to continue and he kind of held me in an embrace with my arm between myself and his chest. That’s when my grandma peeked in on us and thought it was so cute that we were hugging that she actually said “awwwww” out loud. Little did she know what was going on under the covers. She closed the door and went back to the living room where she was sleeping on the couch.

I felt uncomfortable touching my cousin’s penis. No one had ever told me that things like this were wrong, I barely knew were babies came from at that point, but somehow I instinctively knew it was wrong so I said to him, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” and he said okay, let go of me and pulled his pants back up. Then I rolled over and pretended to sleep and he rolled over too and jerked himself off, although I didn’t realize what he was doing until a long time after.

Other things with this cousin happened too, but I’ve repressed those memories. In fact what I just said above was repressed until I was about 22 and it came out in therapy. I’m glad I don’t remember everything that happened except for that night because if I did, I’d probably track him down and kill him because what he did to me set the stage for a lot of other things that have happened in my life.

Shortly after that night, my step-dad started suspecting that something wasn’t right with our relationship and suddenly there was a new rule in place that I was never to be alone with that cousin anymore. He told me years later that he walked in on something at a family gathering, but he would never tell me what it was.

And that’s why the interview Oprah did with these pedophiles kind of shocked me because the one who was only a few years older than his victim was telling my story, only from the other side and if my step-dad hadn’t instituted the rule that I was never to be alone with this cousin, it’s hard to say how far things may have gone.

Later in my life, when I was older, after my parents split up, I was left alone with this cousin again and while he never touched me again, nor me him, he would tell me about explicit sex he either fantasized about or had had himself. I remember one of these conversations quite clearly when I was 11 and again when I was 15. Both times I was extremely uncomfortable with the things he was saying because both times the way he said them were open and suggestive, where if I showed any interest whatsoever in these stories, I’m almost positive he would have molested me again.

People wonder why I abandoned that side of my family and that’s the reason why. If my Aunt, who I love dearly and who I think is the sweetest woman in the world, ever knew what really happened, I don’t know what she’d do. Going to family events after that one repressed memory came to light became impossible because he was there and looking at him, being in the same room as him, made me feel sick to my stomach. So I stopped going to family functions and I took a lot of shit for that from all sides of the family. Finally one day, after being berated for not going to an Xmas event my grandma was hosting, I told her the gist of what he had done to me and she told me I was a liar. Later on she decided to believe me, but it was her opinion that I confront him and she thought I should do so AT THE FUCKING XMAS TABLE IN FRONT OF EVERYONE. The shrink I was seeing at the time (okay, he was a psychologist, not a psychiatrist) thought that was a horrible idea and that my original thoughts of avoidance were probably best. I told my grandma this and she finally shut up, but about 6 months later she had a yard sale where my Aunt (my cousin’s mother, obviously) and my other cousin had things in it and were working it and when I came out to say hi, my Aunt didn’t really talk to me and my cousin was flat out mean to me. This tells me that my grandma probably told my cousin (the cousin who molested me’s older brother) some or all of what I remembered and he didn’t believe me either and that there was a very good chance that he told his mother and that’s why she could barely look at me.

We moved away that summer and I haven’t spoken to anyone on that side of the family since. That was almost 5 years ago and I don’t plan on ever going back, I will not be attending funerals for that side of the family as they happen.

My mom knows about the bits I remember and she has said on the few occasions where we’ve talked about it, “are you sure it wasn’t just ‘kissing cousins’, are you positive?” and for a while I wasn’t sure. I mean, he was definitely old enough to know better but it was hard to say because at the time, he was a kid himself. But he wasn’t a kid when he was being suggestive with me years and years later, the last sexual interaction I had with him, which was just a lot of very suggestive talk, was when I was 15 and fresh out of the psych ward after my second suicide attempt. He would have been 21. You can’t tell me that isn’t old enough to know better and we were alone in a park. If I had said one word that might have suggested to him that I was game for any kind of sexual play, there is no doubt in my mind he would have gone for it. He was testing the waters, just as he was testing the waters a few years prior with the same kind of talk.

And after watching the Oprah interview and really, finally understanding how the grooming process works and hearing this man’s story of his relationship with his victim, there is no doubt in my mind that what my cousin was doing to me, practically my whole life, was trying to groom me the way the man behind bars groomed his victim. The things he said about how it happened bit by bit were almost identical to my cousin and I.

But then, my cousin wasn’t my only molester and for the longest time I thought that maybe I was just a slutty kid or something to have it happen twice (plus a rape when I was 14) but the Oprah interview made me realize that that wasn’t the case. What was the case, is that I was the kind of kid who molesters targeted. They don’t target kids who won’t scream or say “no”. They don’t target kids who have good relationships with their parents. They target kids who are left alone a lot, which I was, and kids who comes from broken homes, which I did. They target kids with low self-esteem, which I had, and they target kids whose parents wouldn’t believe them if they told and mine wouldn’t. In fact with my second molester, my mother has flat out told me that I was a liar.

My second molester was our next door neighbour, Vince, when we lived in the house in Greenbank and he didn’t just molest me, he molested my friend Heather too and the other neighbourhood girls talked about him and told each other to stay away from him.

But he was nice to me, at a time when my parents weren’t, when they were even around. After school I came home to an empty house and I was lonely and bored, so sometimes I’d go over to the workshop in Vince’s backyard to see what he was working on. He made those wooden whirligigs that people put on their lawns, you know the type, they’re of Snoopy or a flamingo and they have legs that spin when it’s windy.

He would give me pop bottles to take back to the store, which was only one house away from mine and that’s how it all started out. Eventually he would only give me the pop bottles if I sat on his lap. And then it escalated to no pop bottles, but spare change to take to the store, but only if he could put it in my pocket himself, either my pants pocket where he’d grope, or my breast pocket where he’d also grope. And finally I would only get the change or pop bottles if I looked at pornographic magazines with him for a few minutes and that’s when I stopped going over there because in my 10 year old head, for some reason that triggered warning bells.

And with Vince, usually I would go over there and be thinking “okay maybe this time he won’t do it,” because sometimes he didn’t. Usually when he did it, I think he’d been drinking.

After he started showing me the magazines, I would only go over to see him only if my mom or my mom’s boyfriend were going over there. When I told my mom years later that he was a kiddie diddler (and he did much worse things to my friend Heather and possibly to other girls too), my mom told me I was full of shit. I don’t know what she believes now, but I would tell this story with my hand on a stack of bibles if I thought it would make a difference.

My cousin set me up. He set me up to be molested by Vince and he set me up for what’s been a lifetime of sexual dysfunction. And again, watching the Oprah interview with these child molesters, the story of Vince and I was in there too and for the first time in my life, I realized that in both cases I was the victim and that I wasn’t to blame. I’ve always said my whole life that I didn’t feel like I was getting the blame, but that was a lie. My family shunned me when it came out about my cousin and my mom called me a liar when it came out about Vince. That’s victim blaming and when other people are blaming you, it’s hard not to start blaming yourself as well, so I did. Until the Oprah interview. Until I understood the mechanics of both of these relationships, if that’s what they are to be called.

Anyway, my point in writing this is not to have a pity party for my loss of innocence, but to say to all the parents out there, watch the interview, see how it all works and then make sure that you have the kind of relationship with your kids that makes them undesirable victims in the first place because that seems to be the key in keeping them safe.

And I guess that’s all I have to say.

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.

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.

For some ungodly reason, I woke up at 6am thinking of ghosts of the pasts. Now it’s almost 7 and I’m unable to go back to sleep, but that’s okay because I’ve got all day to do that – pending the kids let me.

I don’t know why, but I woke up thinking about my dad. My “dad” is not to be confused with Phil. My “dad” is Ken, the man my mother married when I was 5 and the father of my only brother. During the last couple of days, I’ve been thinking about both of them fairly heavily and I keep wondering why that is. I haven’t spoken to my dad since late 2003 and my brother since late 2005. In recent years, my mother’s been reluctant to tell me anything about my brother, so I’ve all but written him off.

For those new to Sunnyland, I’m an only child. I have 3 siblings, but I’m an only child for all intents and purposes. My mom and Ken separated when I was 11 and my brother was 5 and my brother went to live with my dad while I stayed with my mom and thus, we were raised in completely different ways in completely different households with very little overlap until I moved in with my dad briefly when I was 15. And of course my sisters are 26 and 30 years younger than me.

My dad was/is a very bitter man who can hold grudges and hatred in his heart indefinitely. It’s a long story that I’m not going to retell today, but long story short, at the end of my parents’ marriage my mother had an affair and even though their marriage was over long before that happened, my dad remained bitter about that fact until the day I stopped speaking to him and throughout my brother’s entire life, my dad poisoned him against my mother in order to punish her for doing that to him. Or at least that’s what I think his motivation was. Now my brother’s just as fucked up, hateful and bitter as my dad is, especially towards my mother.

When my brother came to stay with me for what was supposed to be a couple of weeks over Xmas in 2005, we talked a lot about the past and I tried to set the record straight about his childhood, but he wouldn’t hear any of it. For example, my mom used to routinely send him letters and packages in the mail when she couldn’t actually go see him and my dad would throw them out. I witnessed this with my own eyes but my brother doesn’t believe me. He thinks my dad is this perfect man who can do no wrong because he raised my brother all on his own, with no help from my mother, or at least that’s his perception. What my brother to this day doesn’t realize is that his entire life, even to this day, his father’s used him as a tool, a weapon, against my mother and nothing more. Oh I have no doubt that Ken loves my brother, as much as he’s capable of love, but as I said before, he’s fed the kid venom since he was a toddler and now my brother’s this fucked up 24-year-old kid with no direction and no life outside of his father, from what I understand.

I stopped speaking to my dad when he didn’t get Wes anything for his first Xmas. When I was giving birth to Wes, my dad called my hospital room moments after Wes was born, I was literally still delivering the placenta, so my mother answered the phone and filled him in on what was going on and for some reason, my dad got mad at ME because I forced him to speak to my mother and didn’t speak to him myself. He held this grudge for almost an entire year, refusing to pick up or hold Wes, which I thought was weird, but I never really thought it was a malicious act until that Xmas when everyone got presents but my son. And then after the presents were opened and my dad started making Xmas dinner, we were all in the kitchen shooting the shit and Wes was on the floor crawling around and pulling himself up on my dad’s leg, my dad completely ignored him and at one point even sort of slid Wes across the floor and away from him with his foot. I played nice for the rest of the day but inside I was seething and that was the last time I saw or spoke to  my dad.

I have a theory on why my dad behaved this way toward my son and I think it goes deeper than just being pissed off that my mother answered the phone while I was in the middle of giving birth. You see, when I found out I was pregnant with Wes, this woman my dad got involved with – against my advice – was about to give birth to my dad’s 2nd son whose name I don’t even know.

Her name was Janet and she was only a  few years older than me, known to be one of the town’s biggest sluts and I’m not the kind of person who uses that term as a negative in many instances, but in Janet’s case, it fit. She would go to the local bars, pick guys up, go back to their places, sleep with them and then steal the money from their wallets before taking off like a thief in the night. And this isn’t just rumour, I know this to be fact because Janet used to be my Aunt Heather’s best friend, my Aunt Heather being my dad’s sister, and Janet lived with her for a while at the same time I was living there as well, and Janet used to brag about stealing these men’s money. It was like a second income for her. When she’d find a “rich” one, she’d become his girlfriend long enough for him to buy her things and pay some of her bills, but when the honeymoon period ended, so would teh relationship and she’d move onto the next guy.

Until one day she found herself a man who she thought would take care of her forever. I don’t remember his name, but he had a good job and drove a nice truck and Janet decided she was going to get her hooks into him so she got pregnant. And again, this isn’t just rumour, this is fact. She got pregnant on purpose to trap this man, I was there when she was telling my Aunt Heather all about it. But Janet got a little more than she bargained for in this man, what she didn’t know was that he had a very expensive coke habit and when her daughter was born, he wasn’t even there for it because he was coked out of his mind on their couch. Long story short, the relationship didn’t work out, so Janet went on welfare and laid low with her daughter while she got her shit together and her figure back.

Enter my dad.

My dad has worked at Toshiba, in the warehouse, for eleventy billion years and as a result he gets a lot of vacation days and makes a fair amount of money. And he’d always had a crush on Janet.

I was there, at the coffee shop, the night it all began between my dad & Janet. The flirting was enough to make a person puke. My Aunt Heather was there too and was equally disgusted by the two of them because she knew how Janet was and she didn’t want Janet to get her hooks into my dad. When they started dating, my Aunt Heather and I stopped speaking to either of them for a few months but they didn’t care, they said “fuck you, we’ll do what we want” and even though both of us warned my dad that she’d try & get pregnant to trap him, he didn’t listen. But lo & behold, that’s exactly what happened and when we found out Janet was pregnant, we both rushed to my dad’s side to support him. The relationship was all but over by the time she conceived so the paternity of the child has always been somewhat in question by everyone but my dad, but he never went for the paternity test and ever since the baby was born, he’s been paying $350/month in child support for a child he’s only even seen once. (Things in that regard could be different now, but knowing my dad, I kinda doubt it.)

I think that baby Wes reminded my dad too much of the child he conceived with Janet and he took his anger and frustration out on us for lack of anywhere else to channel it.

During that time, he became even more bitter toward women and painted them all as evil whores, not even making an exception for me, his daughter. All the time, if we disagreed on something, he’d tell me I was just like my mother and he said it with such disgust it was like I was covered in shit simply for having a vagina. To this day, I’ve never met a bigger misogynist and I hang out on one of the most misogynistic forums on the whole internet. Those boys have nothing on Ken and the attitudes I grew up with.

Another reason our relationship began to cool is that one day my dad got a little drunk and called me up to confess things to me that a daughter should probably never know about her dad. Let me preface this part of the story by telling you that my dad and I have always been very open about sex. When I lost my virginity (on his couch), he was the first person I told. When I realized that I couldn’t have an orgasm from sex, he and I discussed the million ways and positions to make it happen. (It never did.)

Well, this one night he called me up and the first thing he told me was that he’d been drinking and then the conversation became this fucked up confessional that I couldn’t tear myself away from. Among the things he told me was that he had this recurring dream about being sexually dominated by another man and sucking his dick and that he wanted to make this dream a reality. I suggested he go to a gay bar and find a guy to hook up with, I even volunteered to go with him to do this, but before we finished that part of the conversation, he was telling me that if he laid on his back in just the right way, with his legs and feet up against the wall, he could suck his own dick and that he liked the taste of his own semen. As I was digesting this little fun fact, he started telling me about how sometimes he would go to the produce section of the grocery store and buy mini cucumbers which he’d take him and put in his ass while he jerked off. I told him toys were safer and he said cucumbers were cheaper and he could throw away the evidence afterward so my brother would never find anything while snooping. After telling me all of this, he told me that if I ever told anyone any of this, he’d deny it all and I’d look stupid, so for the longest time I never told anyone but Blake.

But when my brother was here in 2005 and telling me how he hoped to grow up to be half the man his dad was, I told him about the whole conversation. He of course, called me a liar at first, but then I pointed out that Ken has never been happy with women, any women, and has been perpetually single for most of his life. Isn’t that a little weird for a heterosexual man? And then my brother said that Ken hates gays and I said that’s even more proof that he’s closeted, so many closeted men claim to hate gays and say all kinds of derogatory things towards them to overcompensate for their own feelings. My brother admitted that my theory held a bit of weight but then he said he’d love his dad if he was gay or straight anyway so the conversation didn’t matter, which I agreed with and that was the end of it…until we woke up the next day and my brother blasted me for trying to tarnish his dad’s “good name” by making up lies about him. (As if I could even make up something like that!)

That’s when my brother forbid me from calling Ken my dad anymore. He said, “he’s my dad, not yours, quit saying he is” and that hurt. In all the years my dad and I had fought each other my whole life, the one thing that was never ever said by either of us was “you’re not my dad!” or “you’re not even my daughter!” That was a line we just never crossed and my brother that day crossed it.

Then he started getting racist and violent, punching my walls and calling me a “nigger”, so I grabbed the phone and threatened to call the cops if he didn’t pack his shit up and get the fuck out of my house. At the time I had two handsets for our phone, so I handed him one and said he’d better arrange for a ride because his shit was going to be out in the snow in the next few minutes, so he called a friend, packed his shit up and as he was leaving he apologized for getting violent and scaring my kids and said he’d be back one day. He promised he’d be back. That was the last time I saw him.

I used to ask my mom if she’d heard from my brother and what he was up to and she used to tell me (he was usually unemployed, had a trashy girlfriend, living with Ken and trying to get money out of my mom) but more and more the updates have become less and less, like she’s reluctant to tell me what he’s doing, like it’s none of my business. So I don’t ask anymore.

I’m an only child. *shrug*

Now why the hell this was all in my head at 6 o’clock in the fucking morning is beyond me but I’m glad it’s now been purged and I don’t have to think about them for another year. Maybe since things tend to go down with my family around Xmas, I tend to think about this stuff around this time of year, I dunno.

I worry constantly about the deathbed confessional. Ken is not a healthy man and he’s halfway through his 50s, his own dad died of cancer in his mid-60s. I worry about my brother having to take care of him and watch him die all alone. I worry that I’m going to get a call one day, and I know I will, that Ken is dying and that he may want to see me. I play the scenario in my head all the time as to what I’m gong to do when that time comes. If Ken wants to see me and I don’t go, my brother will never forgive me…but do I care? If Ken doesn’t want to see me, should I go to the funeral? I figure I probably shouldn’t. When the time comes, will I be upset? Will I have regrets? Will he? I think about these things all the time. In fact, I think similar things about my grandmother and aunts & uncles that I no longer speak to all the time too, but this post isn’t about them.

Really what I wonder about the most is…when does life stop being something you have to survive and become something else? For me life has always been about survival and now that it’s not, I feel a little bit lost. Maybe that’s why my brain wanders into the painful past so often, it’s what I know and there’s comfort in that. This life I live now where most of my needs are taken care of, I have all the time in the world to do practically anything I want and everything’s going to be okay? I don’t so much know how to live that life.

But I’m working on figuring it out. One day I’ll find my niche.

And I think this post is done.