A Very Scared Woman.

My Mom never really had a chance at a good life.  Born to a teenage bride, Mom was the oldest of four kids, who grew up in a household where there was never a shortage of beer, smoke, and late-night parties. Her parents weren’t bad people - they were just poor, and since they were living paycheque to paycheque, it meant that the kids were more of a curse than a blessing. And while spiking their financial troubles with an unhealthy dose of drink helped to soften repeated blows of poverty that struck the family, it did little to keep the marriage between my grandparents together.

That’s when Walter came into the picture. A big money maker with three kids of his own, Walter and my Grandma soon married, adding another kid into the mix along the way. Even with the big money that Walter brought in, stretching it to feed what was now a family of ten put a strain on them all.  Whether it was the monetary burden or the unwanted sexual advances a drunken Walter would make on his now step-daughters - my Grandma wanted my Mom and her sister out of the house. Fast. 

In Grade 9, Mom dropped out of school and started working as a nanny. After helping to raise her brothers and sisters, it was work she knew well - and it got her away from the beastly stepfather who hungered for her young body. The work was hard, and the pay was terrible, but Mom got enough to pay for her newly developed nicotine habit, buy herself some clothes, and of course pay the rent that Walter now charged her to live under his roof.  To let loose, sometimes Mom would go out and have some drinks.  But one of those early nights out would change her life forever.  While she was out, Mom started to get a headache, and she asked her friend for an aspirin.  What she didn’t know was that he had handed her an aspirin laced with LSD, and when those drugs took effect, Mom had the bad trip of a lifetime.  On her walk home, the pavement beneath her feet opened up and started eating her legs, as the buildings around her laughed.  It was all in Mom’s mind, but she didn’t understand what was happening.  The world was spinning, the ground was rumbling, her body was shaking, and Mom thought she was going to die.  By the time she got home, Mom was in hysterics.  My Grandma and Mom’s siblings thought she was drunk, and their way of helping was to laugh and tell her to sleep it off.  I don’t know if Mom was mentally ill before this happened, but afterwards, she became paranoid of everything around her.  Later, when she would become addicted to various prescription pills, I remember Mom looking over every pill meticulously, checking to see if anything was out of the norm - if anything was there that shouldn’t be. 

Now seen as damaged goods by her family, it was my Grandma’s mission to marry Mom off.  So, when Dad came into the picture my Grandma saw her golden ticket.  

My Dad was a tall, good-looking guy who made steady money driving machinery and working out in the bush, but he had problems of his own.  One of nine kids, my Dad grew up in Northern British Columbia, where life was pretty hard - and he didn’t make it any easier on himself with his choices.  Smoking by the age of 9, and an elementary school dropout by the age of 10, my Dad went to work early and got to drinking soon after that.  Dad always had a wild streak in him, and that led to constant brawling and a refusal to back down. He got into so many fights that the town where he lived filed a court order that said he had to leave town or they’d throw him in jail!  It was like some wild west movie where the Sheriff walks the villain to the city limits and sends him on his way.  That was my Dad. 

Not surprisingly, the constant drinking and fighting caused my Dad to fall into a pretty rough crowd, and these morons decided it would be a good idea to rob a place.  Their robbery wasn’t some well-articulated plan or a scene from Heat, though.  These idiots broke into a gas station, stole a bunch of cigarettes and some cash, and went onto planning their next big score.  Too bad for them, they left enough evidence behind that the police came straight to my Dad, and being the good street soldier that he was, he took the blame for it all.  Since he was so well-known to police because of his constant fighting, and he had broken his court order and returned to his hometown, the judge was in no mood for messing around.  He sentenced my Dad to a couple of years in a federal prison.

“Raymond, I know this won’t be the last time I see you.  You’re the kind of guy who is going to spend his entire life behind bars.”

And that was that.  My Dad was going to prison.

I don’t know what happened in there - my Dad never talked about it much - but something inside that prison scared Dad straight.  It’s not like he came out of prison a changed man or some kind of angel, but the robbing and fighting stopped.  When he met my Mom, my Dad was twenty-one and she was sixteen; he wasn’t ready for marriage.  But my Grandma had other plans.  My Dad was a friend of my Grandma's brother, and since my Dad could make a decent living and she wanted my Mom the hell out of the house, she decided that this was what was going to happen.  It was a coercive plan that neither of my parents wanted. 

The proposal - if you can call it that - is never going to make a top ten list of most romantic moments the world has ever seen, and seems more like human trafficking than a union of star-crossed lovers.

My Mom, Dad, and Grandma were driving through town together when my Grandma popped the question after a few weeks of dating:

“So, Ray, are you going to marry this girl or what?”

My Dad, felt awkward and didn’t know what to say.

“I guess so, Mona.”  

“Okay then!  We’re planning a wedding!”

And that was that.  My Mom didn’t have a say in any of it, and my Dad didn’t want it - but now these two were getting ready to walk down the aisle.  Within a few months they were married and living in a trailer - my Mom, a seventeen-year-old high school dropout, and my Dad a twenty-two-year-old ex-con. 

Marital bliss escaped them from the beginning.  My Dad would go out drinking and sleeping with any woman who was even willing to look his way, while my Mom sat at home wondering how the hell she ended up here.  Maybe because she already had something brewing in her brain from the whole LSD inducement, or perhaps mental illness was hereditary…but the nasty situation my Dad was putting her in wasn’t making things any better.  Every time she learned of a new infidelity, her mental health would suffer another setback, slowly pushing her sanity to the edge. 

Within a few months, my Mom had her breaking point, suffering a total nervous breakdown and was initially diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.  The doctors gave my Dad and my Grandma the great idea of putting my Mom into a mental hospital.  Good idea, right?  Wrong.  At the mental hospital, they were testing the latest in mind control therapies - electroshock treatments!  Unluckily for my Mom, a young, married, childless woman was the perfect specimen to see how hard they can zap someone and how horribly they can screw up that person’s entire life.  If you’ve seen the Jack Nicholson movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, then you know that the electro-shock treatments are moronic and sadistic. Patients were strapped to a table where doctors infused their brains with 120 volts a pop, putting a piece of rubber in their mouths so they wouldn’t bite their own tongues off.  They called it science.

Well, after a few months of that heavenly experience, my Mom came home a new woman.  Catatonic, afraid, unsure of what to do, and completely obedient to whatever anyone wanted from her.  

Fast forward a few years, and first came my sister, and then three years later, I arrived.  My Dad stuck with my Mom for nearly seven years, finally separating just after my first birthday.  By that time, my Mom was drinking more (and gaining some temporary bravado). Although she was mentally ill with a damaged brain from so much electricity, she still had a fire inside of her and wanted out. She was sick of my Dad’s cheating and made a plan to leave. With no money, no education, no prospects for advancement in life, all she knew was that she could get a welfare cheque and some money from my Dad, and she was going to make up for the time she had lost as a kept woman. My Mom was out to get her revenge against my Dad, her Mom, and the world by finding any party she could, and accepting the attention that a pretty young woman can get at the bar. 

Unfortunately for her (and eventually for me) she met Dale.