Alright, here we go…
When I was about 5 years old I had what could be described as a normal life, the only real anamoly I knew of was my brother wasn’t always around, I found out later that he had ADHD and was super destructive. He spent a lot of time in and out of boys homes.
Around 7 I realized my parents were both drug addicts and alcoholics, my mother was also the type to sleep with men to get said things, but that comes in in the next bit.
At 8, my mother had run off with some guy, my dad was hammered, and somehow managed to find them. He beat them both nearly to death. At this point I was sent to my aunts to live as my dad was in prison, and my mother was in the hospital/rehab. Said aunt was married to a man named Dan, who hated my dad. So soon after I had moved in, he gave me to the Childrens Aid and I was put in foster care. I was sent to live with the amish.
Mennanites to be exact. As a tech loving kid this was like hell for me for the first month. I was there 9 months in all, and honestly, after that first month I settled in, learned how to farm and find fun, and ate like a king on the daily, so it wasn’t so bad. They were very kind as you can imagine, and I appreciated how well they treated me.
After the 9 months my dad got out of jail and came and got me, he had found a little shack on the outskirts of town (Pembroke at the time) and we lived there for a while. Little did I know my dad was planning to follow my mom to the city she had moved to. My brother moved in with us and it was alright with just us 3, very little food and not much to do, but it wasn’t that bad.
Fast forward a bit and my dad drops the news, we’re moving.
Now to segue away for a little, as a child I was very gifted, I was supposed to skip grades (I didn’t, because I didn’t want to leave my friends) I was the top of the gifted kids class too (Which was a lot of tests and puzzles and logic solving) and was basically set to be and do whatever I wanted.
So, against a LOT of protesting from me about leaving my friends and school, we move to Cornwall. We have a little apartment on a shitty street, and I’m thrown into a new school in the middle of 3rd grade. At this point I stopped caring about school, as with any kid being taken away from their home I ended up depressed.
This went on for some time, my parents would get back together for a bit, try to kill each other, mom would end up in the hospital or the psych ward and dad would spend a few days in jail. I didn’t eat much, as he spent most of his days and ALL of his money drinking.
Eventually, my mom met a decent guy and my dad let it be somewhat, until they moved in across the fucking street.
At this point, the 3 of them spent every waking moment on drugs or hammered. Getting into huge scraps that my now 12 year old self had to break up an unimaginable number of times.
Managed to scrape by middle school and got to high school. Ended up not going to the one I wanted to go to and was again separated from most of my friends. Not that it mattered in the end, as I spent most days asleep in class thanks to being woken up at all hours of the night by my dad’s blasting music and his requests for me to make him food.
This caused me to be treated by my teachers as a troublemaker who didn’t care and was just wasting their time, and so, I quit school and spent all my time taking care of my dad to make sure he didn’t die from alcohol poisoning in his sleep and so on. I did this for about 4 years, so at around 17, I met a girl named Angela.
My first real girlfriend. We got along well enough, and my dad took that as a cue to leave the city without me, going after my mom again. Telling me Anji would take care of me now and he was gone. (there’s more details in the 12-17 bracket but I’ll share those as you pose questions). It certainly wasn’t a perfect relationship. I had trouble finding work and was trying to go back to school, she worked mostly retail part time, we made ends meet but just barely.
Her mother hated me and made sure I knew it, and it turns out she was cheating on me most of the time anyway, so that was nice. We were together 4 years. At the end of our relationship, when everything was a fight and had gone right to hell, one night she ran off to her friends house and called the cops.
She told them I had attacked her, choked her, and basically beat her. And how wonderful that was, not a mark on her, cops knocking on the door to our apartment, here to arrest me. I had been watching TV at the time and didn’t think anything of it, as I hadn’t DONE anything to warrent the cops wanting to arrest me.
But arrest me they did. I went without a fight, obviously. And they put me in the drunk tank because the holding cells were full at the time. This was late on a Friday night.
Nobody came to get me. So in the morning, after they had taken my shoe laces and all my belongings. (I used my socks as a pillow to sleep on the concrete slab, wouldn’t recommend it.) they told me that I was going to be shipped off to the Ottawa prison as they had nowhere to keep me and nobody had come to bail me out.
So, in full on convict chains, hands to ankles I’m sent to the Ottawa Pen, upon arrival the guards there read over my arrest report and decide they’re gonna kick my ass for being a woman beater. So that was fun, I end up in the area they call the pumpkin patch, everyone in orange jumpsuits and the like, big area with cells up top. I keep to myself, away from the drug dealers and car theives. I’m eventually told I’m being sent back to Cornwall to stand before the judge and try to make bail.
So off we go, full chains again, to Cornwall. My turn comes up, I had been talking to my brother who said he was coming to bail me out, he never showed up. Turns out he was arrested too recently and couldn’t do it anyway. So I make a call to a friend, John, to help me, as I’d saved his ass a few times. He comes and bails me out, under the judge ordered condition that I live at his place and report in on the regular until my trial.
I can’t imagine how long this is with every detail, christ.
So I do that, during this time, and some time before, I had been talking to a girl online in a game, as friends of course, until all this had happened. And she suggested we meet. She was from here. So while waiting for the trial, she came down to Ottawa, and I headed up there for the weekend, and we got along famously.
It was at that point I decided I was done with Cornwall and was going to move here to be with her. (This is a HUGE mistake)
Trial comes around, I get a female judge, I’m told by duty council that it would be best if I plead guilty and that she would likely give me a slap on the wrist and send me on my way. Oh boy, that was a bad idea. This woman threw the book at me. 5 years probation, weapons ban, anger management, the works. She said she was making an example of me.
Me, who never laid a hand on Angela, but didn’t think a lawyer would throw me under the bus either.
So, that’s all said and done and now I’m officially a criminal! For the next 7 years anyway.
I followed through with my move and lived with Jenny here in her mom’s house. Her mom didn’t live there, it was just her and her brother, her mother had moved to a place very near Cornwall to be with some guy and being that Jenny is pure italian she just lived like a princess in this 400k house.
Everything was always paid for or handed to her, I thought things were gonna go well. But eventually her mom moved back for a bit and the shit hit the fan in every regard. Her mother was an absolute terror to Jenny and I. And eventually, about a year and a half in, we moved out. We lived a bunch of places, I busted my ass to try to maintain the lifestyle she was used to, and it cost me thousands of dollars in debt. I just wanted to make her happy. Eventually, she got pregnant, we weren’t trying, or at least we weren’t as far as I knew, but there’s another story there.
We end up moving back to the big house, her mom is gone again, all seems to be ok. I missed a detail, the day I found out Jenny was pregnant, that very same night I got a call saying my mom had died. So that was nice, my step-dad (Garfield) decided to tell me in detail how it went down, so that burned into my head forever, but I was going to be a dad and I was happy about that so I guess it kinda balanced out.
Not really, but hey, what can you do.
So at that point I’m down to one parent I can’t find. I wanted to let him know he was going to be a grandfather. Thought maybe that would help him stop the drinking and give him purpose now that my mom was gone, I was very wrong, my mothers death was simply a catalyst for him to take it up a notch.
September 28th, 2007, Gabe is born. 26 hours of labor ending in a C-section. He’s born with jaundice and has to be kept in the NICU for about a week, so we live at the hospital for that time. (Forgot a detail, he was preemie, caused by Jenny’s mother causing Jenny to become hysterical from emotional abuse, and her water broke that night. Fun!)
There’s a ton of pics of him all over my facebook, I’ll share it if you care to look later.
And now I’m tired of typing. But if you can believe it, it gets worse from here.
Part 2 tomorrow.
Loading comments...