Campfyre Stories

So anyone who reads the blog knows the rest of the story.  Anyone reading this who doesn’t either know me or read my blog, why are you reading this?  It’s not all that interesting.

There was the health stuff, starting with the fiasco and ending with a good doctor and a valid diagnosis.  Most of the problems I’ve encountered, like insomnia, depression, etc. has been related to that and is getting much, MUCH better. 

I still love the company I work for and the job I do, but there still isn’t enough to keep me busy and I still don’t enjoy the physical location and feel completely isolated when I’m onsite there.  For as many years as I’ve worked at this company as a contractor, for as many sites and as many departments as I’ve worked in, I have never been treated as indifferently as I am here.

So what have I learned from this little experiment?  Not much that I didn’t already know.  The farther back I went, the more revealing it was, but the more recent stuff I’ve gone over. 

I come back to the same place I started, which is wondering how to fix the social situation and the feeling of stagnation.  The places I’ve always turned to for socialization, work and the internet, have failed me, but I don’t have very many ideas on where else to go.  I’m not much of a joiner and having looked up meetup groups and other activity sort of groups, they all look like they want people to commit.  I really can’t do that sight unseen, and I’m not particularly interested in committing to a group when there may only be one person I want to connect with.

I need to find a way to meet people that doesn’t involve making nice with the people I’m not interested in, and I need to do it in a ways that is free or cheap, since I’m not in a financial place to make a significant investment at the moment.  The biggest problem is that the things I’m actually interested in doing, the group activities I might participate in, they don’t seem to exist in this area.

I’ve gotten some self-satisfaction from the process of writing things up, but I didn’t have to go through the whole thing.  I could have stopped much earlier, but I feel like I needed to complete it for myself.  Now I have and it hasn’t helped nearly as much as I hoped it would.  Oh well.

At least I’ve finished.

My contract ended in the accounting department, but they liked me there.  No one really wanted to see me go and they knew I had no real prospects at the moment, so they shifted me into another open accounting position.  Where my previous position had mostly been IT support with a little bit of accounting, the new position was purely accounting.  I was making the same amount, but I was in way over my head.  Somehow I managed to pull it off and do it well, but it wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, what I wanted to be doing.  It was the people, more than anything else, that made the job bearable.

Spawn and I were getting our household set up right for us.  We were getting our schedule together and figuring out how things were going to work.  I would leave for work around 7 or 7:30 and get home at night around 6:30.  Nights that I had Spawn, I would come home and immediately start making dinner.  Movie night was still happening, but it was tough for me to make it on time.  Princess had started going to my house and waiting for me there.  Things were starting to smooth out.

And then my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer.  Two weeks after his diagnosis, he was in the emergency room and we thought he was dying, but he pulled through.  Life had gone from "smoothing out" to complete and utter chaos.  Family was coming to visit and coming to stay, long-lost friends were coming out of the woodwork.  Everyone wanted to show their support for dad and I was the point person for contact.  I missed a lot of work because of the holidays and because of the health scares of my dad.  My managers were all very understanding, but I didn’t get vacation, sick or bereavement pay, so every day I wasn’t in the office was another day I didn’t get paid.  Having so recently been homeless, I was worried beyond belief that all the additional expenses combined with the lessened income were going to push me right back over the edge and that, this time, I might not be able to get back on my feet.

My friends came to visit me, the ones from out of state, the ones I needed to support me to whose shoulders I needed to cry on.  I sent out periodic updates to a handful of people who were under orders to then pass the information along.  I was barely keeping myself together, but I was still having to take care of the rest of my family who were all falling apart more than I.  I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t fall apart more than I did.  I think it has a lot to do with me and Dad not having unfinished business and my understanding that he had lived longer (at 51 years old) than he would have had he not had a family.

My dad was stretched thin.  I don’t know if there’s a better way to put that or a good way to explain it.  It was almost like he had lived past his expiration date and that every additional day was costing him something he couldn’t really afford.  He wasn’t ready to go and he fought it every step of the way, but it was pretty clear that he didn’t have a lot of time left.

I think I knew what was going on earlier and more thoroughly than the rest of the family.  The day before my dad wound up in the ER and on the ventilator, I broke down at dinner with Princess and started crying and crying about how my dad was going to die.  She was shocked, since it was only a short time since he had even been diagnosed, but the next day, it looked a lot more likely.  When someone called me to tell me that the doctors had said that it could be a couple of months, it could be a couple of weeks, I wasn’t at all surprised to find out.  I knew that Dad was wearing out and just tried to appreciate all the time I had with him.

He moved in with me shortly after New Year’s and Spawn, again, went to stay with his dad full time.  This was hard on him because he really doesn’t enjoy his brother at all, but while he was resentful when I, though my own stupidity, lost our home, he was much more understanding and gave up his room willingly.  He had come a long way and I think this was a key point in his maturing and becoming a much more pleasant person.

The process of death took its toll on all of us, but in different ways.  For me it was the draining process of hosting people and coordinating visits.  For Chaos is was becoming my father’s caretaker and trying to tie up the loose ends that they had.  For RC2 it was losing his father, for mom it was losing her oldest friend and all the stories and facts that he held on to.  For friends and family, it was coming to terms with losing someone dear to them. 

Dad was delirious the night before he died.  He called out for his girlfriend, he asked what time it was and chanted numbers all night long.  It would have been funny if we didn’t know what was going on.  Chaos was there for him while I tried, and failed, to sleep.  It was clear that he wasn’t long for the world and my brother and I called the hospice nurse in a panic.  By the time she got there, he was gone and his family was on their way.  Together we cried and mourned.  My aunt Sage had brought the herb sage to burn in the room he had died in.  We performed a cleansing ritual, but his spirit wasn’t lingering.  Spawn was an integral part of the ceremony and I think that Sage really wanted to reassure him that his room was spiritually safe and cleansed.

I took another week off of work, though I couldn’t really afford it.  There was too much that needed to be done, people to be notified, memorials to plan, people to coordinate, his things to be sorted through.

The day after dad died, I had a job interview.  I had been wanting to work for this particular company for a very long time and they had wanted me, but didn’t have a position I would fit in.  The manager, who I had met several times before and really liked, was coming to town and wanted to take some of his former employees out and meet with me at the same time.  We would be going to a local bar for drinks and socialization.  My father would have approved.  I wasn’t in deep mourning, having done a significant part of my mourning already, and desperately needed a break from everything else going on.  It was good that I did, too, because it led to working at the company I’m at now, a company I really appreciate and enjoy.

So the rest of the week was more of the same and the memorial came off well, as did the second memorial fundraiser a few days later.  My friends turned out for me, some at the service, some at the benefit, but they all came out to support me.  Again, I felt that, even in the midst of personal tragedy, things were starting to look up.

I started my new job in early February and, though there’s never enough work to actually keep me busy, it was much closer to what I wanted to be doing than accounting ever was.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a social circle at that location.  Sure, people liked me fine, but I couldn’t find the type of people I could have lunch with or who I could talk to for any length of time.  Work had, for so long, been a social outlet for me, but now it wasn’t.  The building I was working in was much less comfortable than my previous building and was as far away as it could get.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, many of my friends were leaving.  Friends were moving out of state or down to the city and before I knew it my social circle had dwindled to only a handful of people left.  I still haven’t been able to fill those gaps and have actually kept in touch with very few of those who have moved on.

I started working as a contractor at a multinational conglomerate and the job was exactly what I wanted to be doing.  It was difficult to get to without a car, but I made it work, taking the bus most of the way and a taxi for the last bit.

I was working with people who, for the most part, were my age, and this was the first time I had experienced that.  Over time I met the various guys and wrangled myself invitations to join their team-building activities, like bowling, poker, etc.  And I really liked these folks.  Some of them had gone to college together and were fraternity brothers, but not all.  I found I had things in common with almost all of them, though not always the same thing.

Not only did I love my job, I was loving the people I was working with.  Everything seemed to be falling into place.  I was making good money, and was happy in most aspects of my life.  I took a bigger apartment, two doors down from where I had lived for the previous 5 years.  It was more expensive, but I could easily afford it.  Or so I thought.

Because shortly after I moved to my new apartment, my contract ended.  They had already extended it several times, but they had run out of money.  This was a real blow to me.  Less than a month went by before I was given another contract at the same facility, but due to personal issues that I didn’t even know were happening behind my back, I lost that contract right after Christmas of 2005.  And couldn’t find more work…

I sent out resume after resume, applied for job after job.  I registered with temp agencies, not just for IT contracting work, but for ANYTHING, but nothing came.  I looked online, in newspapers, I asked everyone I could if they had any leads, but there was nothing out there for me.  I just didn’t look good enough on paper to even get interviews.

Here and there I would get a one day or two day contract, and every one of those that came through, I took, but they were few and far between.  Because I had been unemployed earlier in the year, my unemployment didn’t last as long as I needed it to, and I rapidly found myself in debt with my landlord.  In July I finally found work.  Temporary work.  Work in accounting, but work nonetheless.  I went to my landlord to explain that I had work and would be able to catch up right away, that I had a chunk of the money that I owed him and wanted to make a good faith payment, but he was done and told me I needed to leave.

Meanwhile, Dragonmaker’s girlfriend had gotten pregnant.  This wasn’t really a problem except that he and I weren’t actually divorced.  When we split, I told him that I had no plans to remarry and that if he wanted a divorce, he could damn well get off his ass and do the work.  Since this had been a major sticking point in the marriage, I may have been relatiating to some extent.  The closer we got to the due date, the more he felt it needed to happen, but he still didn’t actually DO IT.  I know that the intention was that we be divorced before his next child was born, but that didn’t actually happen.  In fact, it wasn’t until he, still legally married to me, started a family with someone else, that the fact of our still being legally married actively pissed me the fuck off.  I was very angry for several months.  Not that Dragonmaker had moved on so fully, but that he had done so without tying up the loose ends.  It was two months after his son was born that our divorce became legal, making me officially a stepmother for two full months.  He wasn’t even the one to do the legwork.  It was his (then) girlfriend (now wife) who actually made it happen.

Everything was changing for everyone around me.  Mom (et. al.) had recently moved out of the huge house they had lived in for over a decade and moved into an apartment.  It was so much smaller, and was housing so many people that there simply wasn’t enough room for another person.  I coulsn’t stay there.  Everyone else I knew was either far away from where I worked and not on a bus route or would be far too inconvenienced by me staying there.  I didn’t ask anyone.  I decided I was just going to deal with it on my own.  I didn’t know how, but I figured it would eventually all work out.

I was just starting a new job and my plan was to live in a motel until I could find an apartment.  My former landlord hadn’t taken my good faith payment, so I was most of the way to first month and security deposit.  Spawn was living with his dad until I could find a place.  That, to me, was the most heartbreaking part.  I had worked so hard to repair my relationship with Spawn.  During my unemployment, I had been meeting him at school and walking him home, during which time we got to know each other better than we ever had before.  Previously, he would never tell me about school, but now, with everything still fresh in his mind, he was downright eager to tell me about his day.  Now, though, I was losing ALL my time with my son.

Ed found out about my plan to stay in a motel and decided that wasn’t ok with him.  He had an extra bedroom in his apartment and we worked at the same facility.  He also lived on a bus route that would take me into work if I needed it, so I was going to stay with him.  I spent every weekend looking for an apartment, but it wasn’t easy to find a place that fit my budget, was on a bus route and actually wanted to rent to me.  I put in a large number of applications, but they didn’t even call my references.  To this day, I don’t know why, but it’s for the best, since I did eventually find the place where I live now, which is well located and excellently priced.  There are some things that I wish I could change about it, but they are minor things.  I’m happy here, at least for a while.

Ok, so I had a job that was ok, but had a very specific end-date, and I had a place to live that I could afford.  Things were getting back on track.  I had Spawn again, back at our 50% split.  This was excellent for me, and only ok for Spawn, since Dragonmaker was, by this time, trying to set up house with his soon-to-be-wife and new son, he was starting middle school, which was a terrible time for him, and he was in a lot of flux.  I was starting to feel, however, that things were starting to look up and that brighter days were ahead.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

My brother, Chaos, had gotten arrested when he was 17 and after a long road of court and jail and my mother’s intervention, he wound up in an 18 month rehab program.  He had gotten out shortly after we moved back to Albany and was also living at my mother’s.  Somehow, I got talked into getting an apartment with my brother.  Spawn was with me officially half the time, but realistically less than that, so he got stuck not having a room of his own, as Chaos and I were sharing a two bedroom.

It started out fine, as things with that brother tend to do.  He had a steady job and made sure to pay his portion of the rent and bills when I asked him to.  He ate my food, but would bring (steal) food home from work.  It wasn’t too long, though, before he stopped bringing home food and started only bringing home beer and liquor, leaving me in change of buying *all* the food.  I wouldn’t have minded if I was only feeding me and Spawn, but Chaos and his friends were still eating my food, and, in Chaos’ mind, the beer (which I didn’t drink at all) and liquor (which I didn’t really drink, either) more than compensated for the food they were eating.

It wasn’t long after that that he stopped paying rent and bills.

He also got himself a girlfriend that I couldn’t stand.  If it had just been a personality issue, I could have dealt with it, but she had absolutely NO respect for me or for my home.  She would dye her hair in my bathroom and then leave dyed, wet towels on the floor and a bathtub filled with dye that she had made no effort to clean up.  She stole from me, she was always there, always in the way and I couldn’t deal with it.  They had to go and I threw Chaos out.

And Spawn got his own room.

Meanwhile, I had become thoroughly jaded with working as a secretary/administrative assistant and decided that I was going to find work in IT.  I quit my job in February ’01 and started new work in April.  It was, essentially, a paid apprenticeship in a small state government/education facility.  I loved the job, was getting paid more than I ever had before and finally felt like my life was really on track.  I was also meeting wonderful people through work and developing relationships that existed outside of work as well as in.  This was where I met another of my very good friends, Princess.

Spawn and I got a chance to work on our relationship.  I had been pretty removed from him during the whole Joe fiasco, but Dragonmaker had been so clingy and Spawn didn’t really seem interested in me very much, so it mostly worked out, except for my guilt.  But things had drastically changed at this point.  Dragonmaker had a girlfriend and didn’t have nearly as much time for Spawn anymore.  He checked out to a certain extent.  His girlfriend was a single mother with a baby girl who had taken in her teenage niece(?), cousin(?), who often looked after Spawn.  Now that his dad didn’t have the same level of attention available for him, he was more than willing to turn to me for that.

I was a lot happier.  I had figured things out in a lot of different places and was in a good space to try to fix my relationship with my kid.  He, at 7/8 years old, was not a very pleasant person to be around.  He was mouthy and rude and a smartass and just insufferable.  Now he was ill-behaved in public and better behaved when it was just me and him.  It didn’t seem to be a cry for attention, since he was already getting attention, it was more like a slow, whining tantrum and an unwillingness to live with his personal choices, since he was as likely, if not more likely, to become surly and obnoxious doing something HE decided to do, but turned out to be less interesting than he expected.

To make things worse, he was a thoroughly unpunishable child.  Time outs didn’t work, since  he would misbehave in situations where it just wasn’t possible to put him in time out.  Sending him to his room didn’t work, since he would play with his toys.  Taking things away didn’t work, because there was always something else to occupy him.  Even if everything was taken from him, he would lie on his bed and daydream, not concerning himself with whatever had been taken.

Only once did I successfully punish him and he had gone completely overboard.  We had gone to a baseball game, which was a birthday present for Princess.  He was surly on the ride down and, at some point, decided that he didn’t want to be there.  He was rude and obnoxious and made the entire trip amazingly terrible for all of us.  When we got home, I lost it.  I ranted and yelled for hours about how his behavior was unacceptable and how he was getting NOTHING from me for the next month (which, by the custody arragement really meant two weeks in practical terms).  When I yelled myself out, I told him that he now had the opportunity to say WHATEVER he wanted to me.  He was in so much trouble that there wasn’t anything he could say to get in more trouble.  He could swear, he could call me names, whatever he wanted. 

He declined and went off feeling terrible.  He came back to me later and apologized, telling me that he appreciated me and loved me and that none of his friends parents would ever give their child the chance to say whatever they wanted.  He seemed repetant, but I stuck to my guns.

It didn’t really help in the long term, except that he never again misbehaved to that point.  I like to think he learned *something*.

If nothing else, we started on a new journey of our relationship.  He started to retain the broader life lessons that I was trying to teach him.  He learned that when things go bad you can either cry about it, which won’t change the situation, or try to find the fun or the humor or the good.  He started finding that you can’t always change your circumstances, but you can make the best of them.

It was also during this time that Spawn’s life changed drastically.  He wasn’t doing well in the school we had started him in.  He wasn’t taking on his academics and was choosing to waste his days playing all the time.  He was a smart kid and I didn’t want to see him stagnate, so, when he was 9, Dragonmaker and I decided to put him in public school.  We gave him a choice.  He could either start school in 4th grade, which he should be in judging by age and where he would be one of the youngest in his class or, since he had never been in a public school before, he could start 3rd grade, have an easier time with his schoolwork and be more able to focus on socialization.  He would also be one of the oldest in his class, which might be a good thing, since he had always related better to younger kids than older kids.  He chose to go into 3rd grade and did well.  Two months into the school year, he got accepted into a magnet school – the School of Humanities.  Dragonmaker and I strongly urged him to take this opportunity and made it clear that he would not get a chance like this again.  He decided to go ahead and go to the School of Humanities, which was a really excellent decision.

After almost 3 years of working my "apprenticeship", my department needed to cut staff by a third.  We were told that 10 people would be let go and that they would get a severence package of 2 weeks of vacation pay for every year they had worked there, health insurance for 3 months (?), our vacation time payout and we would be able to collect unemployment.  They were asking for volunteers to be let go and, since I had been getting more and more frustrated with the lack of advancement potential and the stagnation of my learning, I volunteered.

For several months I tried to work for myself, but I really hated having to call and harass pe
ople for payment.  Working for myself was really not for me.  The only bright side of this was that I was working as a moderator for The Sims Online.  For two months, this was a paying gig and then I helped to facilitate the transition to a volunteer-run forum.  The combination of my severence package, what little I made from consulting and unemployment got me through those lean times.

I got contacted by a consulting company offering me a job toward the end of 2004.  They had a position for a System Administrator and I had the qualifications they were looking for.  They offered me twice what I had been making at my last job.  I didn’t even have to think about it.  I said yes and started within a week of accepting.

The problem was that neither Dragonmaker nor I made enough money to afford to keep two separate households.  To that end we decided that we would find a reasonably-priced three bedroom apartment and still combine our incomes.  This was kind of a mistake.  While it made things more affordable, neither of us really wound up having our own space and I often felt trapped and unwelcome in my home, especially on nights that were designated mine with Spawn. 

Ever since I had gone to Boston, Spawn had become a Daddy’s boy.  If Dragonmaker was home during the time Spawn was supposed to be with me, Spawn would gravitate to him and mostly ignore me.  He may have felt abandoned when I left, but now I felt abandoned by him.  It was the beginning of a negative cycle between the two of us, while he and his father got closer and closer.

Dragonmaker, I think, was lonely.  How could he be otherwise?  I had left my family to be with him and to join his world, but he had left the only area he had ever known to…  split with his wife.  Spawn was his primary connection and he doted on him.  I was jealous.  I had been away from the area for a long time and didn’t really have much in the way of friends in the area.

I turned to the internet. 

Keep in mind that this was 1997/98, so the internet was still fairly new.  Everything was free, not just free to try, but FREE.  Maybe there were some restrictions, that you needed to be a member to access, or that there were a handful of features that you had to pay for, but in most situations, the fees were small and they didn’t really restrict usage.  Any site that wanted to succeed, at that point, coudln’t charge, at least not *too* much, because there would be another site ready to pick up everything you offered and do it cheaper, or free.  Chat rooms were topic-specific, very popular and less filled with trolls.  DIY sites were popular and email accounts gave you 2MB storage space.

I haunted a couple of chat rooms until I realized that I wasn’t going to really make any connections there, then I moved on to internet dating sites.  That was much more interesting, since these were people who were actively looking to meet people.  I had already started shedding the weight I had gained during my marriage, but I was still pretty heavy.  This was a problem for very few people.  Again, this was the beginning of the internet.  The people who were on the internet dating sites back then didn’t have unreasonable expectations.  Few, if any, of the guys expected to meet women who looked like supermodels or who wore a size 2.  I think that fat scorn was much less prevalent back then, but also, these people were exploring the new frontier of cyberspace.  Girls who look like they belong in a calendar simply weren’t the cyber pioneering type.

I met a lot of guys, but there was no real spark.  I went on several dates, chatted regularly with a bunch of people, but nothing ever really clicked.  And then I met Joe.

If I had been older, or more experienced in the ways of men and dating, I might have seen the signs and run away – FAST, but I was young and stupid and really didn’t know myself well enough, let alone other people.

I might as well call Joe a hobo.  He traveled the country, visiting people he knew, looking for couches to sleep on.  I know now that he would go wherever bad feelings were least, or sometimes most forgotten, and stay until he wore out his welcome.  No.  I’m being far too kind.  "Wore out his welcome" isn’t accurate.  He would stay until he burned all his bridges and, essentially, got himself run out of town.

We met, started hanging out, started sleeping together and, when Dragonmaker moved out, Joe moved in.  I needed a roommate and he promised that he would find work.  He found some work, every now and again, but only ever enough to keep him in weed and cigarettes and to keep me from throwing him out.

I’m not going to go into the details of the year long "relationship" that we had, but he took significant advantage of me, using me for everything he possibly could.  The entire relationship was emotionally and mentally abusive (in both directions) and finally ended for good when he tried to choke me for attempting to take my computer and move it into my new apartment.

However, as bad as the overall experience was, Joe did affect my life in some really positive ways.

He is the person responsible for my handle "FyreGoddess".  He introduced me to a wonderful group of people who were an important part of my life for many years and, specifically, to my best friend, Girl.  He inspired me to get back to my music and to songwriting and to really pursue it.  He helped me to see that I was interested in computers as more than just a hobby and started me thinking about how to make it a career.  He taught me lessons about dealing with other people and seeing their motivations.

I actually learned a lot from him.  Every time he thought he was hurting me by telling me "You’re just like your mother" in his nastiest tone, I would realize that being exactly like one’s mother was HIS fear, not mine, and he was trying to hurt me with his pain.  Every time he tried to "hold up a mirror", he was really just telling me what was killing him.  All of a sudden I had this insight that the things we hate about other people are really the things we hate about ourselves, but don’t change.

Once Joe was gone, I started changing things about myself that I didn’t like.  I let go of some of the hate that I had been sitting on for ages, I started relating differently to people.  I was becoming a better person from it.

But, I have to go back for a minute.  I wasn’t making enough money to afford a three-bedroom on my own.  Despite promises after promises, Joe wasn’t contributing.  He had invited a friend of his to come live with us, but the money there wasn’t enough to make up for what Joe wasn’t paying and it came as no surprise that we eventually got evicted.  Actually, no.  To avoid getting evicted because of his sorry ass, I skipped out.  Joe and his friend went and got an apartment together somewhere else and I worked out a deal with the landlords to take care of things over the long term.

I moved in with my mother for 2 months, which was HELL for me.  I also decided that owning a car was way more hassle and expense than I wanted to deal with, so I sold my car and didn’t replace it.

When Dragonmaker had moved out of the apartment we shared, he moved in with my mother and her household.  The house they lived in had long been a communal living situation and Dragonmaker liked the setup.  It was also good for Spawn who had other adults around as well as my little brother, who is only 3 years older than him.

So it was that I found myself, not just moving into my mother’s house, but moving into the house where my ex-husband lived.

It was not good.  However, it didn’t last long.  I was looking for an apartment and found one to share with my brother.

Before I move forward, I want to take a minute to talk about Spawn and what he was like as a child.

Well, as an infant, he was colicky.  He screamed almost incessantly, which made things hard.  He started sleeping through the night at 3 months old, thanks to the trick of wrapping a ticking clock in a blanket and using it as his prop.  That was, at least, something, but when he was awake he was hell on wheels, and that never actually changed.

He only crawled for a week before he started walking, but he had long since learned to pull himself up on furniture and scoot around most of the living room, and then, when he did start walking, it wasn’t long before he started to RUN.  He ran everywhere and it was very difficult.  He would run into streets, run away from us in stores, beeline for whatever it was he wasn’t supposed to have.  Spawn was a leashed child at a very early age.  He didn’t want to be confined to a stroller, and we didn’t really want to confine him, but in crowded situations, he would take off at the slightest hint of inattention, and, as any parent knows, no one can be fully attentive all the time.

I know that a lot of people, parents and non-parents alike, disagree with leashes on children, however, I think that few of those people have experienced the terror of a small child running off toward potential danger on as regular a basis as Spawn would.  Further, a majority of the parents who put down those of us who leash our children use items like strollers and playpens to physically confine their children.  Personally, I think it’s more of a learning experience for a child to have a measure of freedom and to understand the limits of that freedom than to deny them the freedom to go (limitedly) where they want and to pen them up or strap them in.  We used a stroller when Spawn was little, but once he was walking well, he didn’t want to be confined.  Anyone who claims that their strapped down child is better behaved than a child on a leash is full of shit.  If your strollered child were as well behaved as you claim, he or she would be wandering around and not stepping outside of a defined area.  What a leash does for a small child is to actively define the extent of their freedom, but at least they *have* that freedom to begin with.

In public (such as shopping, dinners out, gatherings, anywhere he would encounter strange adults), he was an extraordinarily well behaved child.  He was the sort of kid that we could take to decent restaurants and he was well behaved.  He spoke eloquently, largely because he was socialized around adults, specifically, adults who didn’t talk down to him.  I am also a word nerd and am prone to using $5 words regularly.  When Spawn was 2 or so, he started refusing to pick up his toys.  I finally told him he didn’t have to put things *away*, but he had to consolidate them.  "Mama, what does consolidate mean?"  "It means take all your toys and put them all in the same area.  You don’t have to put them all away, but you have to make it so they’re not scattered everywhere."  This was a workable solution for both of us, and, having learned a big word that surprised and impressed the adults he interacted with, he was keen to learn more, as often as possible. 

The biggest problem we had with Spawn was when he felt comfortable around the adults around him.  He became pushy, demanding, mouthy, rude.  It was shocking that he could be so well-behaved and everything we had worked to instill in him when he didn’t know the people around him well, but as soon as he was comfortable and around the people who, let’s be honest here, were judging us, as parents, most harshly, it was as if he was raised by a pack of wolves.

I think some of the problem was just that he was so damned smart, and he knew it.  Not even that people would tell him how smart he was, but he could see how advanced he was compared to his peers.  His vocabulary was better, he was more able to manipulate people and to "trick" them into giving him what he wanted.  I think that most people weren’t even really aware of his manipulation, but he certainly was, as were his father and I.

Dragonmaker and I tended to gravitate toward non-traditional parenting roles.  I was more tough and disciplinarian, while Dragonmaker was more loving, sympathetic and motherly.  We both love our son very much, but the ways in which we go about it are the opposite of the traditional way.

And the reality for me is that I don’t like kids.  I don’t like kids, I don’t like babies.  I’m not that kind of woman.  I won’t coo over baby pictures, especially of people I don’t know.  I like *some* kids, but it’s on an individual basis, and I’m incredibly picky about the kids whose company I actually enjoy.

Obviously, I love Spawn.  Now that he’s older, I actually like him, too.  His friends…  eh…  most of them when he was younger, I didn’t particularly care for, even leading someone (who shall remain nameless) to give me significant grief for not wanting to take one of his more obnoxious friends on vacation with us, because I didn’t want to have to deal with his drama.  "You are a mother.  Suck it up and deal with it.  You’re supposed to be able to do this."  To that I replied, and still reply, if it’s not my kid, then I don’t have to deal with it.  Being Spawn’s mother does not put me in a parental role to any of his friends.

But I digress.

I haven’t always been a great mother.  So far, I’ve glossed over much of that, but that entire period of my life was kind of glossed over.  It will become more apparent in future posts, I’m sure, but I’ve done the best that I am capable of, and that’s all I can really do.  My son has always been well fed, well clothed, entertained, and, to some extent, spoiled.  Not for material things, but for attention and the knowledge that we will always give him whatever we have to give.

Dragonmaker tied up all the loose ends in Michigan and came to meet me in Albany.  We stayed with my mother while we looked for work and for an apartment, which took a couple of weeks.  I registered with temp agencies and had no problem getting placed.  More importantly, the jobs I was sent on generally wanted to hire me permanently, so I was feeling pretty good about myself in that sense.

We put Spawn into the same alternative school I had gone to.  It had changed significantly, both in terms of how things were done and the teachers working there and it seemed like the best option of the schools available to us at that point in time.  He made friends quickly there and fit in right away, so I didn’t really need to worry about him at all.

But things between Dragonmaker and I weren’t really getting better.  I had been dissatisfied for a long time without even really realizing it, but thought that a change of scenery and getting him away from his smothering family might make a difference in our relationship.  It hadn’t.  In fact, the time that I had been away from Dragonmaker and Spawn, Dragonmaker and I had grown apart significantly.  We had both grown up in some ways, but we found ourselves even less compatible than we were before I had gone.

This was becoming a problem.  We had, essentially, grown up together and been best friends, confidants and lovers for 10 years.  Now, we no longer really knew each other and were coming to find that we didn’t particularly like who the other person was growing into.  I tried to suppress the feeling, but that didn’t make it go away.

I spent the time I had alone with my thoughts scripting what I felt needed to be said.  I went over it in my head again and again until I felt that it was right, or at least true, then looked for the right time to actually have the conversation.

I spent so much time working on that speech that I remember it pretty closely.  This may not be an exact quote, but it’s damn close.

"You know, we’ve been together a long time.  I gave you my teens and I don’t regret that.  I’m in the process of giving you my 20′s and I don’t regret that either, but I know, at this point, that if I turn 30 and we’re still together, I’m going to wind up resenting you and I don’t want that to happen.

"We have a kid together and that’s never going to change.  In fact, it means that we really have no choice but to be in each others’ lives forever.  If we’re going to end things, and I don’t think that’s as much an if as a when, I want to make sure that we’re still able to be friends and that we’re not going to make things difficult for Spawn in the long run.

"I think we need to end things, though.  I think it’s something that’s been building for a really long time, and while I still love you and still care about you and don’t want to hurt you, I think that staying together is hurting both of us."

And he said…

"Oh thank god.  I’ve been waiting for you to say something."

And in that moment I felt completely validated in everything I had said to him and, frankly, I was PISSED OFF.  It summed up most of our relationship and his unwillingness to do much of anything.  It screamed to me that this was him not speaking up on my behalf to his mother, it was him not taking care of things that he could possibly get me to do, like doctor appointments and taking the car to get the oil changed or whatever.  Every single problem that I had with my husband was summed up in that simple statement.  It was when I knew that I had made the right decision.

So I found a local college and enrolled.  I signed up for work study and was able to take it further with additional hours and responsibilities.  I took 14 months to get my ABA in Business.  I wanted to do something different, but I wasn’t really finding the different in Ann Arbor.  Dragonmaker and I discussed it and decided that we would make a go of things in Boston.

But Boston is far, and two young parents with a small child and a house to sell can’t exactly pick up and go, so we decided that I would go to Boston, get a job and start looking for an apartment, while Dragonmaker stayed behind with Spawn and packed and sold the house.  It felt like a good plan at the time.

It didn’t turn out as well as we wanted it to.  A friend of my family had put me in touch with some people in the Boston area who I could stay with, but they lived pretty far outside of the city of Boston and it meant a significant commute for me.  They were older, childless and fairly affluent.  These were not people that I would have related well to under any other circumstances, but since they were all I had at that point, I made every effort to keep things working.

I immediately started looking for work and, unfortunately, the work that I found right away was a direct marketing situation.  I was selling perfume on the streets of Boston.  I think that if I had waited for a real job to come along, things would have been different, but as it was, I was pretty well screwed.

I wasn’t really making money and was starting to run out of money, too.  I was homesick and missed my husband and son and, to top it all off, the people I was staying with were having marital difficulties and didn’t want an additional person in the house anymore.  It only took me one night of crying myself to sleep in the prison cell-like room at the Boston YMCA for me to buy a bus ticket and go home.

I went home for a week.  Having been gone around 6 weeks, I needed the reminder of why I was doing this, but on my way back to Boston, I just couldn’t go all the way.  I got off the train in Albany to visit my family and didn’t move on.  I called Dragonmaker and told him that I didn’t think I could do it anymore in Boston and he agreed that we would move to Albany, near my family, and consider Boston as time went on.

I went into the hospital so they could induce labor.  I was 10 days late by then, though Dragonmaker was happy because it meant we weren’t going to have a Virgo.  They put a gell on my cervix, which was supposed to soften it and get things started, then hooked me up to a whole bunch of monitors.

And Spawn’s heart rate plummeted.

They rushed me on the hospital bed up to the maternity ward and immediately put me on Pitocin, which sparked my contractions and brought them on HARD.  Because I was all hooked up, I wasn’t able to walk around much and was confined to the hospital bed.  I had intended to have as natural a childbirth as I could, but once I was on the "Pit-drip", all of that was out the window.  Dragonmaker stayed by my side when he wasn’t calling all the family.  I was in a lot of pain and really unhappy with the turn of events.

10 or so hours later, it was late in the evening and, while I was progressing, it wasn’t happening very fast.  The nurses advised that I have a shot of morphine so that I could sleep.  I was tired and so agreed.  They gave me a shot, but instead of becoming sleepy, I WOKE UP.  My mind was at peak activity.  I had a book of crossword puzzles and shoved pillows behind my back until I was sitting bolt upright.

Dragonmaker would notice the monitors shooting up and ask me if I was having a contraction.  I couldn’t tell until I actually felt my stomach.  There was no pain at all, but I still couldn’t sleep.  I encouraged Dragonmaker to sleep while he could.  I was fine and he needed to sleep, too. so he should go ahead.  I spent the evening, to the amusement of the nurses, sitting bolt upright and blowing through crossword puzzles.

Around 6am, the morphine wore off and I was tired, but in so much pain, so frequently, that I couldn’t sleep.  They gave me a second shot of morphine, which did absolutely nothing for me.  It didn’t knock me out, it didn’t lessen the pain.

Several more hours passed and they came to check on me.  Though I was almost fully dialated, instead of dropping down, Spawn had moved back up.  It was as if he changed his mind about coming out into the world.  The doctors and nurse midwife decided that more drastic measures were in order.  They gave me a tank of nitrous oxide and a mask.  They gave me an epidural.  They tried to pull him out with foreceps.  Nothing worked.  They decided that a c-section was in order.

They took me into the operating room and hooked me up to all different things.  There was a curtain in front of me, so I couldln’t see them cutting me open, but that didn’t matter.  I was fascinated by the cap the anaestesiologist wore.  When Spawn finally started crying, I didn’t realize he was mine.  I thought we were hearing a baby from a different room.  Upon announcing "It’s a boy!", I said "He sounds like a duck."  And he did, at least in my drug-addled mind.

I stayed in the hospital, on a morphine drip (which still didn’t do anything for me), for 4 days.  Spawn was kept for 5 days because they were still concerned about his heart rate plummeting when we first started inducing.  Sleeping in the NICU was one of the most depressing nights of my life.  My son was healthy, despite the doctors’ concerns.  The other babies in that room were not.  I’ve blocked most of that out.

My mother came to Michigan to help me when I first got home, so when we finally left the hospital, it was back to the lake house we went, with family and friends around to help.

I moved to Michigan and into the basement of my future (ex) in-laws.  It was dusty and mildewed and spider-infested, but it was something new.  I looked for a job, but no one wanted to hire a 17 year old high school dropout.  My future (ex) mother-in-law helped me to get enrolled into night school classes.  According to the state of Michigan, I only needed a half a credit of government to graduate.  I would start in January and would graduate on time.  In the meantime, I was just trying to get acclimated to my new life.

In early January we found out that I was pregnant.

My parents drove out to Michigan and the six of us had a powwow on what was going to happen.  My parents thought that abortion was the best plan.  Dragonmaker’s parents thought that adoption was the only solution.  I had dreamed about my son and knew that I had to have him.  Dragonmaker backed me up and we argued three ways until it got too much for me and I walked out.

I didn’t get very far.  I had a quarter in my pocket, but no one to call.  I think I walked about 6 or 7 blocks before I realized that there was nowhere for me to go, no one for me to call, nothing for me to do and Dragonmaker found me.  We talked for a little while and he convinced me to go  back.  It wasn’t difficult.  Where else would I have gone?

But I didn’t leave with my parents, though, at that point, I could have.  I had made a decision to stick this out and to make a life with Dragonmaker.  He was right there with me and we started planning pretty shortly into it.  My parents were disappointed, but they had been extremely young when I was born, too.  My future (ex) in laws weren’t happy about it, but it wasn’t their life, at least it shouldn’t have been.

I started night school and the coursework was a breeze.  I met one girl and we hit it off immediately.  She was to become one of my closest friends for many years and as our friendship progressed out of class, we started hanging out and really getting to know each other.

I still couldn’t find a job.  It was hard enough to find something at 17, but add pregnant to the mix and it was just too much.  Dragonmaker was in school to become a paramedic and working in a restaurant, supporting both of us.  We were still living in the basement.

In the spring, Dragonmaker’s sister came to visit for a few months.  She didn’t like me.  I’m not sure if it was because I was pregnant or because of her own demons, but she was an unhappy person and took it out frequently on me and my future (ex) mother in law (her stepmother).  This added to my future (ex) mother in law’s stress, so she took it out on me.

I wasn’t working and was barely in school, so I tried to keep up with whatever extra burden Dragonmaker and I were putting on the household.  I cooked fairly regularly, cleaned up after both of us and kept  the basement in decent order.  This, however, was not enough.  I was expected to pick up the extra work caused by Dragonmaker’s sister.  When my future (ex) mother in law finally lost it entirely and smashed skunky homebrewed beer all over the entryway to the garage, it fell to me to clean it up.  I was told, in no uncertain terms that it was partially my fault that it happened (though they weren’t my beers she smashed, nor were they Dragonmaker’s) and, therefore, I would clean it up.  I was also supposed to be cleaning up after my future (ex) father and brother in law because, apparently, my mere presence added to the workload that my future (ex) mother in law had taken upon herself.

Probably the entire situation would have been lessened if I were a more cooperative person, less stubborn and less confrontational, but it was not to be.  The more she assumed I was to take on, the more I pushed back.  Less than a month after I graduated, it became unbearable for everyone.

Dragonmaker’s grandma to the rescue!

The grandparents owned half a cottage on a lake, 45 minutes out of town.  The other half of the cottage was owned by Grandpa’s cousins and was traded off every August.  Grandma told us that we could move in to the cottage and I could spend my pregnancy out there.

It was a mixed blessing.  Dragonmaker and I were able to set up housekeeping, just the two of us, family and friends would come to the lake for boating or swimming or just sitting on the porch, enjoying the breeze off the lake, it was relatively low-maintenance, had an excellent kitchen, which inspired me to bake ALL THE TIME, but…

I was 17 and pregnant., it was exceptionally hot and I had an internal space heater, I had few friends in the area, my family was 600 miles away, I didn’t drive, Dragonmaker worked 45 minutes away and I was alone a lot of the time.

I read, I baked, I sat on the dock and fed the ducks.  When Dragonmaker was home, we spent time together, often playing cards, our friends came to visit (and ate the baked goods, thank goodness, because there were WAY too many for just the two of us.  It was mostly peaceful and we were mostly happy, but I don’t think I had yet shaken the underlying feeling of sadness that I wasn’t even really aware of.

The summer passed, as summers do.  My pregnancy progressed, as pregnancies do.  The further along I got, the more I was ready to just be done, but the baby (we had avoided finding out the sex ahead of time) wasn’t even due until September 13.

On my birthday, I made a failed attempt to throw myself a party.  No one really came, although one of the (very) few who did literally gave me the shirt off his back as a gift.  I still have that shirt, believe it or not.  I also got a phone call from my mother.  She told me she was leaving my father.

All in all, not the best birthday ever.

Time went on and I found myself counting down the weeks until my baby was due.  Dragonmaker spent all his time complaining that he REALLY didn’t want to raise a Virgo.  I countered that I REALLY didn’t want to carry a baby an extra 10 days.  He won…  the baby waited and waited and waited.  I walked constantly, I drank castor oil, we went for rides on bumpy roads (not that there were other types of road out by the lake), but to no avail.  Meanwhile, in utero, the baby started making his personality known.  He would kick in time with certain songs or to specific bands.  The Ramones and Harry Belafonte were favorites.  He would periodically stick his foot out as if he were stretching, to the point where you could see the wee foot sticking out of my belly.

It had gotten to be too much, and I talked to the CNMs about scheduling an appointment to induce labor.