When she was finally born, she came out sleeping. She didn’t cry until they spanked her to wake her up; she was drowsy from all the drugs that I was given. She was a turkey, weighing almost a full ten pounds. When it was time for her to be handed over to her to her adoptive parents, she was whisked into the arms of her new mother while I looked away and the doctors went to work to put me back together.
The day after she was born, I was finally able to move around. It was early in the morning, before visiting time, when I decided to have a good look at this little wonder that I helped create. I slowly walked out of my room and down the long hallway to the nursery, where I stared at her through the window until the nurse waved me in. She must not have been notified that this was an adoption case and told me I could bring her to my room. I wheeled her to my room in her little glass basinet, unwrapped her like a present and held her face to mine, breathing in her sweet baby breath. I smoothed her full head of soft brown hair and gave her a gentle kiss on the forehead, because I knew it would be the only time I would ever get to hold her. It was my hello and my goodbye all at once, in a single moment that would last a lifetime. It was the hardest goodbye that I’ve ever had to say. I whispered, “I love you” into her tiny little ear, shaped just like mine, and welcomed her into the world.
The most difficult choice I have ever had to make was to wheel her back down the empty hospital corridor and back into the nursery to let her go, into the hands of someone else to raise. This gift, this mirror image of myself, was not mine to keep. She was going to a family that I trusted would love her as much as I would, and I loved her more than anything I had ever loved before. I had no expectation to love her, to have such a strong sense of protection over her, but I felt an instinctive maternal love. That morning, I felt the grief of what it is like to lose a loved one, but at that time in my life I knew in my heart that this was what I had to do even though I was at war with myself. It took all the strength within me to turn against my own nature and believe that this was what was best — maybe it was not what was best for me, but I felt that it was best for her and that was all that mattered. It was the most selfless thing I have ever done and will ever do.
As I was wheeling her back to the nursery, her new mother walked through the doors to the ward and saw me with her. She stared at me for a few seconds, and I could see the confusion and hurt on her face as she turned back around and hurried out the hospital doors and through the long corridor.
A few hours later, her lawyer came into my hospital room and asked if I had changed my mind. I sat staring out the window. I could hardly hear anything that she was saying — my world was silenced — but I knew what she came there for. I’m sure the lawyer was used to this type of thing happening all the time, and she must have prepared her clients for the possibility of me changing my mind. After she was done her spiel, I reassured her that I had not changed my mind, nodding slightly to hide my sadness when she asked, “Are you sure?”
When it was time for the baby to leave the hospital, I said my goodbyes to her new parents. My family came, and they had a chance to hold her. I’m sure that they were also feeling sadness; it was like losing a family member. A grieving was taking place without death, only a longing for things to be different. I didn’t hold her again, even though the opportunity was there.
When she left the hospital to go to her new home, to her new beginning, I was left with an empty void. My family asked me if I was okay before they left my side. I pretended I was fine, but I didn’t move for a long time. I just stared at the little grey television that was hanging from the wall above my bed in the hospital room, where they kept me for a few more days. I could only wonder if this empty feeling was going to last for the rest of my life. If it was, I didn’t think I could make it through the days.
I prayed that the missing piece of my heart would heal one day. I gave myself full permission to accept the decision I had made and to not regret it, but the depression found a way to creep in. I felt that it was easier to not talk about her unless I initiated the conversation. After she left, I forgot how to smile, I forgot how to laugh, for a long time. With time, I knew that my empty heart would mend, I just didn’t know when. I constantly reminded myself that I did the right thing. Even though I wasn’t looking after my child, I was now a mother.
***
AFTER HAVING THE BABY, I SUFFERED from anxiety. I wasn’t the same anymore. I felt like I didn’t know who I was. I distanced myself from my friends and family and I didn’t want to go out in public if I could help it. I kept away from social situations and large crowds. I felt like something was wrong with me. I was afraid and standoffish. When things got really bad, I would panic and think that I was dying. I didn’t know what my triggers were; I didn’t even know what a trigger was. Out of the blue, I would start feeling like I couldn’t breathe, or like I was as small as an ant in the corner of the room. It was similar to how I felt when I was in the shelter in the city after running away; that same strong feeling swept over me and I felt like I couldn’t concentrate on anything.
I felt the need to flee whenever I was in an uncomfortable situation but, after a while, I felt like I was just running from myself. I knew I was having panic and anxiety attacks, but I didn’t know how to cope with them. All I knew was that the feeling would slowly pass. Now that I’m older, I’ve learned how to manage my anxiety and talk myself out of my fears. I have learned to acknowledge the fear. I have come to accept that I don’t know what is going to happen next. I allow myself to enter my fears and tell myself that what I am feeling is not as bad as I think it is, and my irrational thoughts begin to have less and less power over me.
The fast transition from being a teenager to an adult had a tremendous effect on me, and the anxiety I developed was a sign that I wasn’t on the right path. It was a sign that something in my life needed to change. I couldn’t keep going the way I was going. Many people with anxiety try to mask their feelings by drinking, but that only makes it worse. When I was younger, I didn’t know any better and that was exactly what I did.
The next few years, I struggled to find myself and slid back into my old habits. I was still an out-of-control teenager growing up in a small, isolated northern town. One weekend, a friend of mine was getting beat up outside of the arcade and I jumped in to try to protect her because she was small and outnumbered. One of the girls in the group jumped on my back, punching me from behind while I wriggled and threw my arms around, attempting to throw her off me. I finally backed her into a wall until she loosened her grip on me, giving me enough time to grab my friend by the hand and run for it. We booted it from the arcade, past the mall, past the Gold Range, all the way to my grandma’s house behind the bowling alley.
My friend and I were out of breath by the time we got to my grandma’s house. We ran inside and locked the door behind us. The pack of girls were hot on our trail and banged on the windows to get us to come out. My grandma — bless her heart — kicked me and my friend out of the house and said, “Go see what they want.” She didn’t want anyone breaking her windows. She was literally throwing me to the wolves. I slowly walked outside of the house to where the girls were there waiting for me in a classic gang formation. I walked into the circle, and the leader of the pack came up close to my face and spared me when she whispered, “You have five seconds to get back inside your house before you die!” I hailed her pity on me and, after they left, my grandma let us back in the house. She had been watching the drama unfold from the window, ready to call the police. She taught me a hard lesson in bravery that day.
Before that night, I was always getting into fights. I know what it feels like to be boot-kicked in the face and thrown down the stairs by simply underestimating a person’s strength. I had my fair share of scraps in my teen years, but the one I will never forget is when I was sticking up for a friend outside of the Gold Range who was about to get beat up by a big, tough Dene girl known for beating up the boys. S
he punched my friend in the face for no reason, and I told her to back off and leave him alone. So, she turned her attention to me and started chasing me around vehicles while I tried to kick her and run away at the same time. She grabbed hold of one of my legs and took me down, sitting on me in the middle of the street, grabbing handfuls of my hair and trying to smash my head into the ground. I had to put my hand behind my head so she wouldn’t crack my skull open. No one was strong enough to pull her off me, until a friend of mine saw what was happening and broke it up before the police came.
Where I come from, the girls are tough and know how to scrap. Maybe it’s because we learn, from an early age, that we have to protect ourselves — because if we don’t, who will?
Chapter 8
YEARS LATER, AT A RANDOM HOUSE PARTY, I was being picked on by a girl that was disagreeing with everything I said until a guy named Jeremy piped up out of nowhere and started defending me by making fun of her. I thanked him, and he asked me for my number, but I was seeing someone at the time, so I didn’t let him have it. A few weeks later, he showed up at my doorstep. My papa answered the door and came to my room saying, “Some big-eyed boy is here to see you.” When I went to the door, I was surprised to see that it was Jeremy. “I had to ask around town who you were,” he said. “Want to come to a party?” I was already in my pajamas so I turned down the offer, but I was so flattered that he went out of his way to find out who I was. So, I got a pen, wrote my number on his hand and told him to call me. He never did.
The next time I seen him, I asked, “Why didn’t you call me?” He said, “I would have, but your number smudged off my hand.” After that, he showed up at my place after he took home the gold medal at a weekend hockey tournament. He was a good hockey player and I couldn’t help but be impressed that he wanted me to share in the glory, so I ended up sneaking him into my room and letting him stay the night.
I had a part-time job at the local newspaper around that time, and I was given absolute freedom to write about whatever I wanted. I wrote about things that I was interested in and, when I needed people to interview for a story, I approached my friends and family. I admit I was somewhat of a unadventurous reporter, but the way I saw it, at least I had a job that I didn’t mind because I got to do something that I loved: write. I also got to play around in the dark room and develop my own photos, which was another outlet for me to express my creativity. The randomness of my articles included anything from interviewing my stepdad on his car-washing business to interviewing my grandma on her sewing. No life or death reporting or chasing down leads on the latest crime; I kept it close to home.
The reporting gig provided me with the money that I needed to save up for a car. I figured it was about time that I bought myself a car with my savings from work, since my papa never drove me anywhere; in fact, he used to make me walk through blizzards and whiteouts to get to school each morning when I was younger.
My papa was a cranky old fellow. He loved me, but he was always irritable with me and didn’t know how to show his affection. The closest he got to showing he cared was when he would get angry at me if I did something wrong, voicing his disappointment by yelling at me. He must have turned out that way because of his life growing up. He never spoke about his family, but my mom told me that he had to walk for miles in his torn-up shoes to his little school house on the outskirts of his hometown.
When my papa did drive me anywhere in his town car, he was very particular about how I got in and out of the car. We were not allowed to slam the door; that was a big thing with him. And he would smoke, boy would he smoke. He smoked me right out. My papa was a chain smoker, so much so that when his ashtray got full, he would ash his cigarette in the bottom of his rolled-up jeans. He had a special ashtray in his car, the kind with the soft, checkered, beanbag bottom, and he would light one cigarette up after the other while I sat in the back seat on child lock, unable to roll down the window myself. When I said, “Papa, can you please roll down the window?” he would only roll the window down a tiny smidgen, just enough for me to reach the crack in the window so that I could purse my lips out as far as they could go and suck in fresh air for my survival. Those were the days before anyone knew anything about second-hand smoke, but I’m sure he wouldn’t have listened to “all that nonsense” anyway.
I already had my learner’s licence so, as soon as I turned sixteen, I was the first person in line at the vehicle registry to get my licence. I failed my first test by no fault of my own. The examiner told me to pass a vehicle while I was driving in a school zone. I didn’t think twice about the speed limit and zoomed ahead to pass the vehicle beside me in the other lane. He said, “Okay, the test is over. Drive back to headquarters,” and I thought to myself, “Wow, that was quick; he must have known what a skilled driver I am,” but then he went on to explain how I had failed. The second time I took the test, I was asked to parallel park. I failed at parallel parking, but when we got back to headquarters I poured on the tears, saying, “I promise that I will never ever parallel park as long as I live.” I think the driver examiner felt sorry for me, because I managed to get my licence that day.
When I finally got my licence, I put the money I earned from working at the paper toward a 1982, wine-coloured Thunderbird for a steal of a deal. And, just like that, I had my freedom and it felt ten times better than zooming down hills on my bike or walking in circles around town from the arcade to the mall. I was the only person in my crowd of friends that had wheels. I loved my old, beat-up, rusty Thunderbird. My friends and I would drive around aimlessly for hours, blaring tunes out of the cassette tape player. But everything has a shelf life, and my car happened to have a very short one. It lasted a little over a month. One day, when I was turning left on a green light on Main Street, it suddenly died on me and some passers-by helped push it to the side of the road.
***
IN THE NORTH, BAR AGE IS NINETEEN. So, when I hit that prime number, you can bet your boots I was a bar star. I had been waiting for years to be able to get into the bar. I was never able to sneak in when I was underage, because everyone knew my family. My best friend Kristen and I had the time of our lives in the bar. We were the dancing queens; we owned the dance floor. Kristen and I met around the same time I met Brad. I was jealous of her when I first met her because I thought that Brad liked her. I soon found out that she wasn’t interested in him, so we hit it off.
As young adults, Kristen and I had a lot in common. We could be ourselves around each other. We would sing into our hairbrushes to bad eighties music in her bedroom, rollerblade to the beach in the summer, read up on our horoscopes and try to meet each other in our dreams. We were both tired of living at home and thought that we were ready to live on our own. We rented a two-bedroom apartment together but realized quickly how different it was to live on our own and how each of us liked to have our own space. Even though we had been inseparable, being roommates didn’t work for us. Kristen was reserved and quiet. She liked her space to be a place where she could have her down time, but during that time I was — let’s face it — still a party animal and always wanted to have people over.
On Kristen’s twentieth birthday we went out dancing, and I found myself in the middle of a war between two guys fighting to take me out for dinner. One of those guys was Jeremy. Jeremy and I hadn’t exactly set it in stone that we were seeing each other. We had only hung out a couple of times, and things weren’t serious. A cute guy at the bar, who meant well, was trying to ask me out and take me for pizza. Jeremy must have overheard because he shoved the poor guy onto a pool table, holding him by his shirt collar and saying, “pizza smizza” with a serious look on his face. Jeremy invited himself back to my place after the bar, and we sat together and talked for hours. He wanted to stay but I told him that probably wasn’t a good idea. Getting Jeremy to leave was difficult. I had to be mean and hold the door open for him to show him the way out. I didn’t consider that it was super cold that night an
d that he may not have had anywhere to go. In the morning, I was worried about him and could only imagine him lying frozen in a snowbank, so I called around to make sure he was okay. His friends must have passed on the message that I was worried about him, because he was soon back at my apartment like a lost puppy and there was no getting rid of him after that.
Jeremy was the funniest guy I had ever met. He could make anyone laugh. He was always the life of the party wherever we went — scratch that, he was the party. Jeremy started hanging out at the apartment daily, but Kristen wasn’t too fond of having him around because all we did was drink. Kristen and I inevitably ended up going our separate ways. We remained best friends but realized we were both living completely different lives. I ended up moving a few doors down the hall into a one-bedroom with Jeremy.
Things were great at first; we managed to dress up our little apartment and play house. I even had a computer. We had our fun but still managed our responsibilities like mature grown-ups. Jeremy took care of me on my twentieth birthday when I got too drunk in the bar and broke the heel off my four-inch stilettos. He had to carry me out because I was a mess and couldn’t walk. He carried me home, tucked me into bed and went back to the fun.
At that time, I was enrolled in nursing school at the local college, and Jeremy was working as a labourer. I didn’t take my studies too seriously and dropped out of nursing school halfway through. My excuse was that I didn’t like the thought of having to give needles or see blood, so nursing was out of the question for me. However, I do give the utmost respect to nurses. It has got to be one of the hardest jobs there is.
Northern Wildflower Page 7
