Abandoned.

The relationship between my Mom and Dale was always fraught with agony, violence, manipulation, and heartache.  My Mom was certainly a victim of Dale’s savage tendencies, but he was a victim of her manipulative personality and coercive ranting.  People always want to paint a picture of their mothers as saints, but my Mom was nothing close to that.  Her mental health was always in a terrible place, and when alcohol got poured on top of it, it made for a miserable experience for everyone around her.

Along with being an abusive boyfriend, and a drunk who regularly got behind the wheel, Dale was also a thief - and not of anything exciting or worthwhile (it’s not like we were living like Henry Hill in Goodfellas).  He would steal snowmobiles to go joyriding, he’d swipe tools from worksites, get gas without paying for it, steal beer from liquor stores - petty stuff that was just kind of pathetic.  But, when he would go on these mini crime sprees with my Mom around, her wandering thoughts would turn to psychosis that launched her and Dale into an alternate reality that would make them think the cops were after him and that we were on the run.  As a result, I would be woken in the middle of the night and told that we had to leave whatever shithole apartment or house we were living in at the time, our stuff would be thrown into garbage bags and boxes, and loaded into the back of Dale’s truck, and then we’d be on the move again.  Now, if we had actually been on the run, then the police who were after us must have been the stupidest mother fuckers on the planet, because these two morons left a trail of clues to our whereabouts and we’d mostly end up bouncing between just a few places.  Between the time I was in Kindergarten and Grade 2, we must have moved about 20 times; sometimes between cities, and then other times we’d just move to some other spot in the town we were living in.  We’d go from Quesnel (a small lumber town where I was born) to Vernon (a small scenic city surrounded by lakes), then back to Quesnel, over to Calgary, back to Vernon, then to Grindrod (a small town near Vernon), back to Vernon, back over to Quesnel…even just thinking about it now makes me dizzy.

It was soon after one of my Mom’s suicide attempts that we moved back to Quesnel, and things started taking yet another terrible turn.  My Mom was desperate, and she had convinced Dale that he was wanted by the police again.  Maybe it was for assaulting her or one of his stupid theft sprees (that I’m quite certain the cops didn’t give a fuck about), but together these two had concocted an idea that if they didn’t leave Quesnel now, he was going to jail.  Love (even the love of a mentally ill woman and a lowlife man) can make people do things that maybe they wouldn’t normally do if they were thinking straight.  In this instance, instead of waking my sister and me up when they bounced out of town in the night, they left us behind.  We got dropped at my Aunt’s house, while those two set out to get away from the cops and find their footing.

My Mom and Dale had left us behind before; sometimes for a few days while they went off on a bender; and other times it was for a week or more while they did God knows what.  When they left before, we’d go days without eating anything substantial.  I remember being so hungry once that when they finally came back (and continued to drink at the people’s house they left us at), that I ran out to the car and saw a box of mandarin oranges there.  The hunger was so intense that I tried to eat one of the oranges whole and almost choked to death.  I still remember vomiting up the orange whole because it had gotten lodged in my throat - and it was just by some miracle that I was somehow able to get it out.  

This time though, it was different.  They took us to my Aunt’s house (and they didn’t have any money for food either) and they needed us gone.  We weren’t going to school, we didn’t have our clothes, we couldn’t brush our teeth because we didn’t have toothbrushes, and it was quite clear that my Mom wasn’t coming back.  Somehow, my Aunt got a hold of my Dad - who was living his own alcoholic life up North - and she told him that he had to come and get us.  I knew my Dad a bit, but I really only saw him once a year.  When he showed up, I didn’t really have a choice of what to do.  He just packed us up, put us into his truck, and took us up to Prince George, where he was working at the time.  

And so began one of the strangest next few months of my life.