Well to this point I’ve managed something of a post a month, I’d have to say it’s not such a bad thing, is it?
I figured that since I was up early due to my mother not being home and the dogs needing taken care of early in the morning that I would try to write that big, bad, in-depth post about what I remember of my past. It won’t be so easy as will be explained later on but I’ll give it a try.
I have memory issues. You could ask me what I ate for lunch three days ago and I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I take a lot of notes following that issue. Some people tell me it’s because I just need to accept the past and move on. I wish it was just an issue I could resolve this way, I honestly don’t know its source and I assume to knowing. That too I will cover soon enough.
What you are about to read is a semi-big post. It contains personal information and not all of it is pleasant to read through. So if you don’t want to bother with it, I’d suggest not clicking the link following this line…
As a child…
When I was a child, just five years old is what I’m remembering though why I remember is something else I’ll cover, there were issues with my grandfather. On my father’s side of the family, my grandparents had four sons, of those four sons, five grand-daughters were born, and two grand-sons. I was one of those five grand-daughters, the family’s baby, actually.
My grandfather was of the beer-at-eight-in-morning type. He’s been in the war, I don’t know the details, I don’t really want to know them. Each one of us girls has gone through this and the parents were aware, at least until my parents learned. What were they told? It’s a family affair, we can’t bring it out in the open like this, it’ll ruin the family!.. my grandfather used to ask us, his granddaughters, to touch him. Not in the innocent child way, know. We’re talking in a sexual way. When my parents learned about what my grandfather had done, they never again left me alone with him.
I’d like to think that I have memory issues because of that. I’d like to believe that my mind blocked something way back and that’s why I can’t remember anything. Things I learn are different, those stick, but memories? It takes a lot to make them stick.
Recently, my grandfather has started developing Alzheimer. It’s not too deeply set yet but it’s there. He and my grandmother used to live in an apartment tower built for the elderly. When the Alzheimer started to show in my grandfather, his sons were given a week, seven days!, to place him elsewhere because they couldn’t continue taking care of him. As of some time around September 2010, he has been living in another facility that’s closer to our house, all of five minutes away by foot honestly and I can’t bring myself to visit him. My grandparents have been married a long, long time and living apart hasn’t done much good to his health. Within a couple of months, he had lost forty pounds and since his transfer there, he’s been in the hospital three times for pneumonia. He manages to get better every time though it takes longer and longer. We don’t know how much longer he’ll be with us.
I still can’t bring myself to visit him.
As a growing teenager…
When I was thirteen.. my father came down to my room with the Polaroid camera and told me I could get a quarter if I would pose for him. Why not? The issue was that those photos were half-nude. I was thirteen! It took me six months before I told my mom about it and I remember it clearly enough.. well to a point, I mostly remember her looking at the photos and tearing them to pieces. My dad, to this day, has apologized and keeps on apologizing, he seems to understand well enough that what he did was wrong–he didn’t touch me. He merely took the photos, though I suppose ‘merely’ is bad enough–and when he can give me something, he tends to. I guess he’s trying to make up for things at this point but while I do love him in some way, while I don’t mind spending time with him, I don’t think I could live with him in any way.
I put on some music to help the post come along easier and I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not. I have Butterfly Kisses playing now and it always, always makes me cry. I’m not sure if it’s for the message behind it or for the fact that I didn’t have the relationship the song talks about, or that I never will have it that gets me going.
In school…
I don’t know where to start exactly. In grade school, I think I was in fourth, I met this girl, we got along so well together I’d gotten one of these best-friend split necklaces. Gave her one half, I kept the other. Summer came along and when the following school year started, it’s like she’d never even met me. Like she had no idea who I was.
From early on, I was picked on, I don’t know why exactly. I guess I made a good target. Throughout all of my school life I was stamped with one nickname and I would suppose it’s because of the length of my hair and that, when I was younger, I liked wearing it in braids on either side of my life. I was often told as a child, in a compliment however, that I resembled Pocahontas. That as a whole wasn’t a bad thing but the teasing and taunting I received at school had nothing to do with compliments.
In high school, I transferred from Music studies to Language studies. You’d think that kids you grew up with all of your life would stick by you no matter what choices you make but the moment I started that new year, I was left behind and on my own.
I didn’t make any friends in Language studies. I was there to learn and most others were there because the classes were two hours a day, every day. Who didn’t want two hours of mostly free time a day every day? I was well enough versed in English (I was born to a French-speaking area and couldn’t formulate a single sentence in English until I entered high school) that when came time for new years, I skipped what they called Modules. As I had started the studies on my second year of high school I was in module two. When I got into my third, I was skipped to fourth module, in fourth, module six which was the last module. By the time my senior year had come around, I was done with English and I was helping my Spanish teacher with her classes.
Going back a little, to explain why I remember, to a point, what happened to me as a child… I think I was in my third year in high school and this one student who used to sit in front of me was constantly picking on me. I guess I must have had enough because I just remember breaking down and crying in class.
I was sent to see the school shrink. I would have imagined her to only keep to school issues but she kept on digging deeper, wanted to know more about things and things eventually came to the surface.
There is one thing I learned through her however. In sixth grade, they had us through a slight test to see if we could be smart enough to do our first two years of high school as one. I was in the top tiers in everything and I could have done the two years together. Why they never contacted me I’ll never know.
God.. what else is there for me to say about this? I know there’s more I could add, more I could say but my mind is currently drawing a blank so I’ll end this now.
Then again..
There goes my mind on another subject, one I’ve avoided for a few years now for fear of something and I don’t know what.
I lost three years of my life to a few people whose names won’t be mentioned. At this point I don’t even know how much of it was real and how much of it was the invention of a single person/group of person. During those three years, I also lost all of the friends I had ever made online to that point. It was hard, hard time in my life and to this day I would rather leave it all behind me. If any of those souls were to show up on my door step, I don’t know what I would do, I don’t think I could do anything. I would rather just turn away.
As of the past year I was however able to rekindle with one of the person I had been unable to keep at my side then and it makes for an easier passing, I think.
I know and I understand we parted on bad terms. I know things were getting stressful and life at home wasn’t making any of this easier. I know that while we may want to, we can’t change the past and I’m just glad that things are going as they are now.
I don’t have any close friends here, around where I live. I am down to speaking to one person daily, a second when there’s free time to be had.
At times I look at my mother’s list of friends and I can’t help but wonder why I can’t make friends so easily. I know it’s something to do with me but that’s just how things are. I cherish the very few I have and that is all there is to that.
– There are a few things I need to do before I get to this, but today I will be beginning to clear out old posts from this blog, things that I wanted to keep there for fear of losing them but I will still clear them out. I will keep them, of course, but just offline.
