Small Towns

So Jack and I started dating when I was 16 and he was 15, yes, I was a bit older than him, I met him at school, but he didn’t go to my school, his bus transferred at my school and we met in the smoking area.

Shortly after we met, we started dating and I dropped out of school, our relationship was amazing, he was my first true love, and we were inseparable, we were together as long as we could be, every waking moment, and pretty much all our weekends together too.

Things were still rough at home, in fact, my parents, well, let’s be clear, my mother wanted to move to a new house – she would get bored every few years, so they bought this great big house in Whitby, which is 2 towns east of Pickering, in the same region, but miles away from where Jack lived, so of course, this was disastrous.

Jack and I managed through the move, in fact, I enrolled in highschool in Whitby and things were looking up, but about a month after that, all hell broke loose at home, my mother and I got into it, and it ended with her slamming my hand in the sliding door, as she was trying to push me out, yup, she was kicking me out.  So at this time, I moved to Jack’s town and dropped out of school once more.

I lived in the house across the street from Jack, the lady that lived there, had a little boy,  and she let me move in as they had an extra room, she also had another tenant and they were really great people, however, they had a bit of a drug issue, so I spent a lot of time watching her little boy, this is how I paid for my keep, in fact, there were times that she would leave and she didn’t come back for a few days.  I did love kids, and so, it was fine, and he was looked after and fed, and told stories and really loved, but looking back, neither of us should have been put in that situation.  Anyway, I lived there for quite a while, and Jack and I were still going strong.

When I was 17, I managed to get myself into a government run program where you went to the program, and basically learned some skills, mostly social and interpersonal, and they would put you in a job placement, where you could learn about a field that you were interested in, so for example, if you wanted to be a veterinarian, then they would place you in an Animal Hospital so that you could learn, and possibly get motivated enough to go back to school.  In my case, I lived in a very small town, I didn’t drive, and I couldn’t get a ride into Pickering everyday for work, so my placement was a full  service gas station, but it was great, after the 12 week program was over, my boss kept me on.

After I got the job at the station the lady that let me stay there was moving out, so I had to find some place to move to in town, well it was a small town, so rather quickly, I found out that I could move in with the people who lived across from the only store in town.  It was a 7 minute walk from where I was.  I was able to pay room and board, I got a room in the house and learned very quickly that they were infested with cockroaches.  Before moving my stuff in I got two cans of spray, sprayed my room, and bought a roach motel.  I sprayed my room every 2 weeks, like clockwork.  Through the 6 months or so that I lived there, there was never any cockroaches in my roach motel…Thank goodness.  The house was so gross and so infested that the roaches lived in the display in the microwave, so sometimes you couldn’t tell what time it was.  You didn’t normally see them all day, but when you got up in the morning and turned on the light you could see them all scatter, still gives me the creeps to this day.

I knew I needed to get out of there, and working at the gas station had many benefits, there were a ton of people that I could talk to about places for rent.  So I found out that this farm house would be coming available and it would only cost $600/m for rent, it had a wood stove, and some electric heating, but they tell me the bills were relatively low, so I figured I could swing it.  On moving day, they weren’t ready for me, so they said I could put my stuff up in the barn and it would be safe there, for two weeks till they were ready to move, I hadn’t given them money yet, so it was good, and then because I wasn’t going back to the roaches, I stayed with Jack’s aunt, she also lived in the same town.  After 2 weeks and not hearing anything, I went back to see them, and as it turns out, they weren’t going to move, so I lost the house, but really in hindsight, I don’t know if I could have afforded it, and the really good thing was that my stuff stayed in this barn, and it was getting colder, and so if there were any roaches in my stuff, which I was sure there weren’t but if they were in with my stuff, then they were gone after sitting in that cold barn for a couple of weeks.  I never found any evidence of cockroaches in my stuff.

I ended up moving in with Jack’s aunt full time.  They are an awesome family, all of Jack’s family are really awesome people, and I am still very close with them to this day.  Jack’s cousin also lived there, she was only 12 when I met her, and to this day, she is my baby sister, we don’t see each other as often as I would like, but we are in each other’s hearts.

I’m going to jump back a bit, the summer when I was 17, I decided to play hookie from work one day, everyone was having fun, going to the swimming hole, and I had to work, they had put me on evenings at this time, so I worked 1-9 over that summer, which really sucked.  Anyway, Jack had a car that was going to be his once he got his license, he put on old plates, and stuck the battery charger in the back seat (just in case) and the plan was driving to the swimming hole while his parents were at work, and come home before they did and no one would be none the wiser, we get in he puts the key in the ignition and starts to reverse.

Me:  Put your seatbelt on

Jack:  Nah, I don’t drive with that

Me:  Put your seatbelt on, or we don’t go

Jack:  If we get pulled over we are screwed anyway

Me:  Yes, but if we get pulled for your seatbelt that would be really dumb

Jack:  don’t worry about it

Me: (I pull the keys from the ignition) Put your seatbelt on

So he did.  So the swimming hole is a whole 10 minutes away – if that, and it is down a gravel road, so we are driving along and Jack decides to do a couple of fish tails, and then loses control of the car, our buddy was also in the back seat, we all thought that it would just hit the ditch, but nope, it must have hit exactly perfect for us to flip the car 3 times.  Jack’s head hits the wind shield, and his hand takes out the side mirror.  He flies back in his seat, and I believe that he is dead.  I look back at our buddy who is in the back seat trying to dodge the battery charger that is being thrown around.  It was very scary.  I had Jack’s blood on my bathing suit.  Amazingly, the car lands on its wheels, and is rolling through this field.  Jack comes to, and gets out the car, we are all out of the car, and Jack is trying to pull the plates off the car, succeeds, and we run across the field to another friends place and we stay there for a while.  A long while, his parents are going to be so mad.  I’m glad that he wore that seatbelt.

Jack and I are still doing great, through all the moves, the accident and everything.  By this time, I am now 18, working full time at the gas station, been moved around and seen a lot more of the real world than I expected.

One day while at work, my dad came in to get gas, and he says, do you know where your mother is?  I glance through the back window of his station wagon, and say no.  He says Israel.  She left to go look for God.  This is around the time that I found out I was pregnant.

 

Teenage Angst

By the time I got to my teenage years, I hated my mother.  She was still crazy, and most of time she just wasn’t very nice.  When I was growing up, I was very shy, so I didn’t have a lot of friends, and my best friend at the time, was a year younger than me.  One day, when I was 12, I came home from school, it was an ordinary day, I went to the bathroom and realized that I got my period, however, I didn’t know what was actually happening, they didn’t prepare us at my school, and my mother never told me anything, and I didn’t hear it from any of my friends.  My mother had her own ensuite and I never went there or looked in her garbage, so I was totally unaware of this horrible event that had befallen me.  The only saving grace was that it didn’t happen at school and I was wearing darker pants.  I called my mom at work in a panic, and my mother being the wonderful person she is started laughing, like hysterically, she couldn’t catch her breath, I was holding the phone with toilet paper stuffed in my underwear, sure that I was dying, and my mother, was laughing her ass off…Wow…She tells me that there are sanitary napkins in the laundry room in a large garbage bag, apparently my dad would take them from the school he worked at, but that is a whole other story….put one in my underwear and she would talk to me when she got home.  All she said when she got home was that this was normal, I was growing up, and it was called…my period.  I would say, this is probably where my moodiness would come in to play, and this really clashed with my mothers craziness.

We moved from this house the summer that I was turning 14.  And we moved to a new town, in a new region.  Really, it was about 15-20 minutes away by car, but I didn’t drive, and of course, you tell your best friend you will still visit and write, but you don’t, so that was that.

My mother got a job in the local mall, she was a hairdresser by trade, and did her schooling in Europe, so she could easily get work over the years.  She also lost this job because she would get her clients into the barber chair, and start talking about God, and being a born again Christian, and quoting the bible, well, it would make her clients very uncomfortable and she did eventually lose her job.

I did start to open up, and became more outgoing, and made friends, and I wasn’t the greatest kid, I would smoke, drink, skip school, I spent a lot of time at the mall my mom worked at – it was a big mall, and if it were during school hours, I would avoid her part of the mall so she wouldn’t see me, there was a time or two I was in the food court, smoking when she came to get her lunch, and I was sneaky, and never got caught.

My father was still working nights, and so, I would leave for several nights and not tell either of them where I was staying or what I was doing, I admit, I wasn’t the best child, sometimes, we had these conversations:

Mother:  Where are you going?

Me:  Out.

Mother:  When will you be home?

Me:  Later

Yeah, I was a peach.

Through my teen years, my mother would call me demon spawn, the devil’s own daughter, harlot, she actually called me harlot all my life, I thought it was a Hungarian word, I didn’t know until I was at a bush party when I was 15 and a girl called another girl a harlot, and I asked if she was Hungarian, how embarrassing, that was when I found out my mother had been calling me a whore for as long as I can remember.

My mother got a new job as an administrative assistant at an elevator company.  Shortly there after she announced to my father and I that she was in love with her boss, and they would be moving forward with a relationship.  Her boss, was a happily married man, and not even the least bit interested in my mother.

During that time, my dad, started looking at other houses in Pickering, and I was really excited, it was going to just be me and my dad, and we were moving and she was going to be gone, this was great.  Too bad it didn’t happen.  My mother got worse and worse, she was just mean, and of course she lost her job again.  She decided she was going to be an artist, she wrote a book, and basically just stayed at home water colouring and oil painting.  Oh and the violin, that was also a fun time, she was very bad at playing the violin.

Around this time, I also started to resent my father, he didn’t leave my mother, he was never there, and I had plenty of teenage angst to go around for everyone.

When I was 15 I moved in with a friend, and her mom took me in as a foster child, so she got assistance for having me there, it was nice, I enjoyed my time there, I felt like I had a family, I had a sister and a brother, and my foster mom had a boyfriend, and he was great, they treated me well.  However, all the pets, including my cat that I moved with me, had fleas, and they all slept on my bed with me.  I got many, many flea bites, and was very allergic to the flea bites, mostly on my legs, but they were terrible.  On my 16th birthday, my foster family took me out to a Mexican restaurant, they had a foil balloon that said sweet sixteen, my foster sister bought me the latest Jon Bon Jovi tape – Blaze of Glory – the Young Guns soundtrack – released on my birthday, it was amazing.  Such a difference from my home, my mother asked if I would visit, so I did, I won’t lie, part of me wanted my gift.  But I was the fool, I got a card, and the card said, “If you were a better daughter, we might have put money in this card.”  They invited me over for that?  Wow, it was a 45 minute walk and they did nothing for me.  I can tell you, I wasn’t the greatest kid, but why call me over, to do that.

So, shortly after that, things fell apart with my foster family, I believe that I overstayed my welcome, I spent a few nights with another friend and then I moved back home.  By now, I had met the father of my first 2 babies, let’s call him Jack, short for Jackass, he’s not that bad, but we’ll go with it,  I was burning bridges everywhere, my friends turned against me when we started dating, I had been seeing someone else, but then went home with Jack, it was purely innocent, we did a lot of talking, and nothing happened, we did click, but I decided to end it with the first guy before I started anything with Jack, my friends on the other hand thought that I was a cheater and a liar, and they all stopped talking to me, that lasted a few years, which really just pushed me and Jack together, I also decided to drop out of school.  Yup, everything was turning up roses.

Thus begins the era of Jack.  More on that next time, I thought I could get out all my teenage years, turns out, a lot happened.