Final Year, Part One
My Final Year
I was afraid of being free and even more terrified of staying. I knew nothing of the real world. I never held a job, banked, or even had a clue how to do those things. You see, I hadn’t learn to wash a dish correctly, or clean the floor perfectly. Until I did, I could not learn more. Mama told me. “If you can’t do the simplest things, how will you do more complicated things, like work?”. My freedom was so close, and so frightening. I could smell it, and touch it. I wanted it so bad, and I feared it. I did not know how to survive. I knew the day, when it came, and if it came, would go like this.
“You are 19. Get your lazy ass out now. No, you are not taking your clothes, I paid for them. It’s not my problem you have no money. Maybe you should have learned to wash a dish properly. Perhaps you could lay on your back and earn money. You’d only have to spread your legs.”
That is how mama talked to me. Filthy like that. All the time. I knew she would say that when I was 19 because she had done it many times before. Made me sleep in the porch by the garbage can, because “Pigs love to wallow in filth and garbage. Like you. You should feel at home.” How many times I slept in the porch of the yellow house on Fletcher Road.
Grade 12. Freedom. I just his moment had a moment of knowing what that meant to mama. I think it scared the literal crap out of her. She may not be able to control me. If that is the truth, and I think it may be, the rest makes sense. She had to destroy my credibility. She knew I was the brave one. The truth teller. She had to either break or destroy me.
Sept to November 1971 were some of the most terror filled days of my life. The beatings were horrendous, and some left me incoherent, curled in a ball, somewhere in a place I can’t describe. The weapons, the humiliation, the embarrassment, the fear was never ending. If it wasn’t me, if was my siblings. I was never in my right mind. I ran away, and I ran again. I wrote a letter to our doctor asking for help. I wrote a suicide note and mama found it. She wanted to know which bridge I would like to be driven to. She made me sleep at the foot of her bed on the floor. I ran again to some one time friends of my mom. He was an auxiliary RCMP officer. The were godparents to some of my siblings. I begged for help. They tried. Then a crazy story of mama being sick and in St. Pauls. She had a brain tumor and was dying. I went to St. Paul’s to see her. I don’t know why, because I really wished her dead, but she was my mama, and daughters always love their mamas.
I always fell for it. Whatever “it” was, I fell for it. I wanted to believe she was telling the truth. I wanted her to know I cared. That I loved her. That she mattered. Oh, mama knew I that I thought I was never coming home again. She knew she had pushed that envelope a little far but she always had more tricks. I go to see her, prepared to not listen to her and not fall for whatever she says.
Silly girl. Seventeen years and I never learned. She cried. She hugged me. She said she was scared. She said she needed me. My little brother and sister cry for me all the time. She would die soon and I was their big sister. Oh my fucking heaven if was perfect. I loved my siblings so much and would have done anything to rescue them. Of course I’d go home. Big sis to the rescue. Everyone would know just how much I loved them. I gave up my freedom for them. I went back to hell.
Mama came home right away and the trouble starts. How dare I talk, blab, tell secrets. The threats, knocking my teeth out, teaching me a lesson, and literally “knocking” sense in to me. I am led to believe her tumor is made worse by stress and I have caused her so much stress. She takes pains to point out each time I failed, and just how worthless I was. It came down to “It’s your fault I’m dying. How does that make you feel? It should make you proud, because you worked hard enough for it.” It was constant badgering, beating, belittling, bombardment, battling, brutality….
Then mama started with “If I were you I wouldn’t want to live.” Or “How can you even bear to walk around knowing what you’ve done to me.” Or, “You must be pretty proud of yourself knowing you killed your mother.” I became exhausted. The physical pain of the beatings, and the constant fear became too much, and I attempted suicide. I had no previous thought or planning when it actually happened. I just opened the cupboard and saw mama’s pills and took them all. And I went to school.
How I was found and what happened is a miracle and will be told another day, but someone, or something decided this was not my time. I did not mean to survive and had actually gone it to the bush where I knew I would not be found. I wouldn’t have been, but one of my siblings had a feeling. The rest will stay in my heart for a while.
I am in the hospital and begging them not to send me home. Please, please, please don’t send me home. In the meantime, mama shows up at the hospital, and she is a patient!! On the same floor as me. She sees me and goes in to this theatrical, hysterical act “OH MY GOD!! What are you doing here. We’ve been so worried. You know all about my brain tumor and how dangerous it is. The worry has put me here. Why do you keep doing this?”
I’m losing my mind. I’m not sure how it all came about, but the pastor of the church I was going to, he and his wife said I could come and live with them. I was so thankful.
On one of the appointments with the doc, he told me he could send me somewhere for an assessment and they would help me, and I wouldn’t have to go home again. First I needed to have a “Mental Health Assessment.” It didn’t matter to me. I knew I was okay. I needed to get out of where I was or I would die. I needed out. I said yes.
Yes. Freedom.
Life is strange. You pray for things, and when they come, they are not the packages you prayed for. Underneath the wrapping is something other than what the gift appears.
Grade 12. Freedom was only an illusion.
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