Drug Free Month

Husband and I are trying our hardest to not fall off the bandwagon this coming month. It's big news because we both have been hitting the bottle and the narcotics hard. Me especially. They threw me in the hospital twice this month and that's something that I wish I had not done. My doctor says I need help (no shit!) but I just don't know where to seek it. I want to get well, I really do. This blog is about recovery and I need to recover as best as I can.

Drugs have made me the person I am. I won't lie about it. Because I have done them I have the family I have, the education I have, the children I have, and the life that I have had. They have also contributed to my health in a severely negative way. I have shelves of journals that tell the same tale. I have notebooks that I have written the same thing over and over again in. They all say the tale of recovery then failure. They go back to 1992.

Drugs don't define me.

I worked up the nerve to talk about my problem with my doctor, and he said I needed help but did not offer it.

Heroin has become my world and earlier this month I drug an innocent person into that world. I watched their eyes glaze over as I injected the poison into their blood stream. I did that. I introduced them to a world that has taken me for rides that only others can imagine. Rides that have recently ended in hospital ED's and rooms. I don't like being in the hospital. They ask too many questions, there are too many coppers wandering around, and I just don't like being away from my home life.

So I want to try to get clean next month. March will be a drug-free month if I can help it. I am going to try hard. My last day I used: February 17, 2014. I want to make it to St. Patrick's day without using. Then I can call myself a success. Wish me luck!

Husband and I are trying our hardest to not fall off the bandwagon this coming month. It's big news because we both have been hitting the bottle and the narcotics hard. Me especially. They threw me in the hospital twice this month and that's something that I wish I had not done. My doctor says I need help (no shit!) but I just don't know where to seek it. I want to get well, I really do. This blog is about recovery and I need to recover as best as I can.

Drugs have made me the person I am. I won't lie about it. Because I have done them I have the family I have, the education I have, the children I have, and the life that I have had. They have also contributed to my health in a severely negative way. I have shelves of journals that tell the same tale. I have notebooks that I have written the same thing over and over again in. They all say the tale of recovery then failure. They go back to 1992.

Drugs don't define me.

I worked up the nerve to talk about my problem with my doctor, and he said I needed help but did not offer it.

Heroin has become my world and earlier this month I drug an innocent person into that world. I watched their eyes glaze over as I injected the poison into their blood stream. I did that. I introduced them to a world that has taken me for rides that only others can imagine. Rides that have recently ended in hospital ED's and rooms. I don't like being in the hospital. They ask too many questions, there are too many coppers wandering around, and I just don't like being away from my home life.

So I want to try to get clean next month. March will be a drug-free month if I can help it. I am going to try hard. My last day I used: February 17, 2014. I want to make it to St. Patrick's day without using. Then I can call myself a success. Wish me luck!

Fourteen Years

Today is my oldest daughter's Fourteenth Birthday.

Or it would be, if she were alive.

Poetry Rose died of a barbiturate overdose, just a dose and a half of what was prescribed for her, in the wee hours of the morning on May 20, 2009. She was ten years old.

Suffering from multiple tumors that were causing her severe pain, PoRo's doctor had told her father and I that chemotherapy would just prolong her suffering, and wrote us a prescription for her of high dose barbiturates, a dose so high that I once tried it and found myself sobbing and "out of body" for hours. The doctor informed us that if we tried to pursuit chemotherapy from another physician or cancer treatment center, he would personally report us to child services for child abuse. Our parents also threatened us with a report to child services if we did nothing and just let our daughter die.

It was a horrible time for me, for Dennis, for our family.

PoRo mimicked my medication taking. She had watched me take pain medication for a long, long time (since July of 2003), and she was certain if I did it, it had to be right. I was her hero, another mistake she made. In mimicking what I do many times with my invalid pain medications, she took just a half a dose higher than was recommended, and it killed her.

Her death was ruled an accident.

Dennis and I both turned ourselves in to the police after the paramedics took PoRo's body away. We blamed ourselves, and each other, at the same time. No charges were brought because PoRo had written in her journal hours before taking the fatal dose, that she had saw not only myself take multiple pain medicine pills, but her father usually over medicated, and so did her cousin Jess. We were all fine. She was never aware that medicine could be lethal, and if you died in this world, there's no reset button, and you don't get to come back. She thought she had super powers, as she thought the same about me, because she had beaten cancer three years before she died. I still cry for her because she died like an unwanted animal. With the same overdose they get. Except she wasn't an animal, and she wasn't unwanted. She was dearly loved and much wanted.

Not a day goes by that I don't think of her and the situation, and how tragic it turned out. There are many days that I wonder if there was something I could have done differently, that would make her alive to this day. When she was seven, she had several tumors removed from her breast, and was given a clean bill of health after six months. But the cancer came back. It has a nasty, bad habit of doing that. I was happy when Chloe's tumors were declared benign. I don't think I could live through another innocent life being sick, weakened by a disease that is almost always fatal.

Because they were the best of friends on this Earth, in this Life, PoRo and Jess were interred next to one another, so their spirits need not wander too far to be together again.

Every February 25th since her death, I make a birthday cake for dessert at dinner time. I made one this year. As a tributing tradition, we, as a family, all blow out the candles on the cake at the same time. My hope is that she will be remembered because of this tradition.

I'd also like to point out, even though it is irrelevant in this whole thing, that a freak from the far ends of the web harassed me to tears over me taking extra pain medication for my severe pain. They mocked me, telling me that my kids were going to get into my medicine and die from drug overdoses. That person was not right. In both telling me that I was this apathetic bitch who partied down on prescription pain killer, and in accusing me of not caring for my kids. I care for my family. Just because I don't update my blog every day with how much I love and cherish them doesn't mean that I do not feel it, that I do not care for them. I don't know where that person (or her other two personalities are, the ones that pretended to be my friend(s) to get info out of me) is now, but if she does want to come mock me for her being "right" I really don't care. I don't have to let her comments through. And I can ban her second set of IPs as well.

Oh, and if he were alive, George Harrison would be 70 today.

Today is my oldest daughter's Fourteenth Birthday.

Or it would be, if she were alive.

Poetry Rose died of a barbiturate overdose, just a dose and a half of what was prescribed for her, in the wee hours of the morning on May 20, 2009. She was ten years old.

Suffering from multiple tumors that were causing her severe pain, PoRo's doctor had told her father and I that chemotherapy would just prolong her suffering, and wrote us a prescription for her of high dose barbiturates, a dose so high that I once tried it and found myself sobbing and "out of body" for hours. The doctor informed us that if we tried to pursuit chemotherapy from another physician or cancer treatment center, he would personally report us to child services for child abuse. Our parents also threatened us with a report to child services if we did nothing and just let our daughter die.

It was a horrible time for me, for Dennis, for our family.

PoRo mimicked my medication taking. She had watched me take pain medication for a long, long time (since July of 2003), and she was certain if I did it, it had to be right. I was her hero, another mistake she made. In mimicking what I do many times with my invalid pain medications, she took just a half a dose higher than was recommended, and it killed her.

Her death was ruled an accident.

Dennis and I both turned ourselves in to the police after the paramedics took PoRo's body away. We blamed ourselves, and each other, at the same time. No charges were brought because PoRo had written in her journal hours before taking the fatal dose, that she had saw not only myself take multiple pain medicine pills, but her father usually over medicated, and so did her cousin Jess. We were all fine. She was never aware that medicine could be lethal, and if you died in this world, there's no reset button, and you don't get to come back. She thought she had super powers, as she thought the same about me, because she had beaten cancer three years before she died. I still cry for her because she died like an unwanted animal. With the same overdose they get. Except she wasn't an animal, and she wasn't unwanted. She was dearly loved and much wanted.

Not a day goes by that I don't think of her and the situation, and how tragic it turned out. There are many days that I wonder if there was something I could have done differently, that would make her alive to this day. When she was seven, she had several tumors removed from her breast, and was given a clean bill of health after six months. But the cancer came back. It has a nasty, bad habit of doing that. I was happy when Chloe's tumors were declared benign. I don't think I could live through another innocent life being sick, weakened by a disease that is almost always fatal.

Because they were the best of friends on this Earth, in this Life, PoRo and Jess were interred next to one another, so their spirits need not wander too far to be together again.

Every February 25th since her death, I make a birthday cake for dessert at dinner time. I made one this year. As a tributing tradition, we, as a family, all blow out the candles on the cake at the same time. My hope is that she will be remembered because of this tradition.

I'd also like to point out, even though it is irrelevant in this whole thing, that a freak from the far ends of the web harassed me to tears over me taking extra pain medication for my severe pain. They mocked me, telling me that my kids were going to get into my medicine and die from drug overdoses. That person was not right. In both telling me that I was this apathetic bitch who partied down on prescription pain killer, and in accusing me of not caring for my kids. I care for my family. Just because I don't update my blog every day with how much I love and cherish them doesn't mean that I do not feel it, that I do not care for them. I don't know where that person (or her other two personalities are, the ones that pretended to be my friend(s) to get info out of me) is now, but if she does want to come mock me for her being "right" I really don't care. I don't have to let her comments through. And I can ban her second set of IPs as well.

Oh, and if he were alive, George Harrison would be 70 today.

Resentment

Fifteen days ago, I fell from grace.

I walked out of my home to see a family member at a show, and ended up shooting up, not once, but twice. I was pissed at myself for that. I could only think of all the things I had lost by making that mistake. My memory was blotchy. I couldn't remember things normally, and I had a few flash memories of said male family member on top of me.

But that couldn't happen, right?

If it did, it's the first time heroin took my conscious mind with it.

Or maybe it was something more than the herion. Maybe my own mind thought that the memory was too painful to keep, and forced me to forget. Fuck'd if I know.

It can't be heroin.

My mind went blank on the Sky Ride at the fair. I was a little afraid of it, and when the car rocked back and fourth violently as it was lurched forward to the steep, eighty-five foot cable, I clamped my eyes shut and started murmuring that everything would be okay. It wasn't going to fall. The last thing I remember is my friend James taking  my hand and telling me it would be fine. I peeked at him, just for a split second, and saw his sincere smile, and then shut my eyes again. The next thing I remember was the gondola docking at the same station we had taken off from. My mind had kept me from remembering a twenty minute ride? What the hell did I do Friday?!

After the ride, James led me to a park bench, and we sat down while I took in the reality that we had not fallen from the high cable, and we were still alive. He hugged me, he kissed my cheek. I accepted his affection, and suggested we go on the Giant Wheel -- a Ferris Wheel that was twenty feet taller than the sky ride that I had just been on.

I have no memory of the ride on the Giant Wheel.

James told me we were the last to get on, and someone had gotten tangled in a gondola they were leaving, and we were stranded at the tip of the wheel for at least forty-five minutes.

No memory of that. No memory of panicking. James insisted that I did not panic, or even see distressed after he took my hand on the Sky Ride.

I want so badly to ask if I screwed him on either ride, but, believe it or not, I am embarrassed. I'm also angry. I'm angry at my husband for jumping into the gondola two spaces a head of us, and for only buying a one-way token. I couldn't walk the midway, so to get back to our families after the Giant Wheel ride, we had to take the Sky Ride again. Or so I was told. I blinked walking away from the Giant Wheel, and opened my eyes to find myself in the car, on the way home.

Fifteen days ago, I fell from grace.

I walked out of my home to see a family member at a show, and ended up shooting up, not once, but twice. I was pissed at myself for that. I could only think of all the things I had lost by making that mistake. My memory was blotchy. I couldn't remember things normally, and I had a few flash memories of said male family member on top of me.

But that couldn't happen, right?

If it did, it's the first time heroin took my conscious mind with it.

Or maybe it was something more than the herion. Maybe my own mind thought that the memory was too painful to keep, and forced me to forget. Fuck'd if I know.

It can't be heroin.

My mind went blank on the Sky Ride at the fair. I was a little afraid of it, and when the car rocked back and fourth violently as it was lurched forward to the steep, eighty-five foot cable, I clamped my eyes shut and started murmuring that everything would be okay. It wasn't going to fall. The last thing I remember is my friend James taking  my hand and telling me it would be fine. I peeked at him, just for a split second, and saw his sincere smile, and then shut my eyes again. The next thing I remember was the gondola docking at the same station we had taken off from. My mind had kept me from remembering a twenty minute ride? What the hell did I do Friday?!

After the ride, James led me to a park bench, and we sat down while I took in the reality that we had not fallen from the high cable, and we were still alive. He hugged me, he kissed my cheek. I accepted his affection, and suggested we go on the Giant Wheel -- a Ferris Wheel that was twenty feet taller than the sky ride that I had just been on.

I have no memory of the ride on the Giant Wheel.

James told me we were the last to get on, and someone had gotten tangled in a gondola they were leaving, and we were stranded at the tip of the wheel for at least forty-five minutes.

No memory of that. No memory of panicking. James insisted that I did not panic, or even see distressed after he took my hand on the Sky Ride.

I want so badly to ask if I screwed him on either ride, but, believe it or not, I am embarrassed. I'm also angry. I'm angry at my husband for jumping into the gondola two spaces a head of us, and for only buying a one-way token. I couldn't walk the midway, so to get back to our families after the Giant Wheel ride, we had to take the Sky Ride again. Or so I was told. I blinked walking away from the Giant Wheel, and opened my eyes to find myself in the car, on the way home.

Abnormal

I seriously dislike the family that I married into. They weren't like this when I initially met them some twenty two years ago, back in 1990 at the Cancer Treatment Center of Chicago. They were happy, normal people. I'm not sure what happened to them between then and now, other that random, casual sex with any willing partner they could find, extreme alcoholism, and enormous drug overdoses, addictions, self harm, heart break and failure.

We all experience one or more of those in our life. We don't all go off the deep end and start to set up the ones we love.

At least I never did.

If I had a problem with one of my family members, I sat down and talked with them. Saw their point, told them my complaint, and we worked together to compromise. But I am a sane and rational person. Over the past ten years as I tried to sit down and talk to Billy or anyone in the family keeping the fighting going, they would flip out. Name call, lie, claim exaggerated versons of my life and problems. I noticed this happened around February or April of 2002, and it's drove me insane ever since. I feel as though I am constantly walking on eggshells, that any little thing, such as the wrong juice poured at breakfast, would set off a psychotic episode.

We were all heavily medicated. Thorazine. Risperdal. Prozac. Cymbalta. Zoloft. Abilify.

We had all seriously attempted suicide, going so far as fighting others to let the sick person blow their brains out, overdosing on pills that only accomplished liver damage, or getting caught stealing barbiturates from hospitals or clinics.

We spent hour after hour in family therapy, telling a stranger why we no longer functioned as a family or even as people who could stand to live knowing the other was alive somewhere in this world.

We were suspicious of each other.

We lied to one another. Billy claimed "demon possession" when he physically beat me so bad I had a concussion, and brain damage so bad my "blue eyes turned black" or the retina was so huge because of the brain damage. Dennis claimed to have "multiple personalities" or "disassociation identity disorder," self-diagnosed, of course, and "Trevor," the oldest person in his community was the one who was the alcoholic, the drug addict, and the one who hated me and repeatedly smacked me when I "got out of order."

I stayed with this family because it was better than going back to my parents. Especially my mother. I knew if I lived there, I would relive several days of my teen years, and I never want to relive them. They are what caused the psychosis in my initially. Situations where I had to stay home from school with chicken pox for two weeks and the third week was spring break, so I got nearly a month home from school, and I was punished for it, by my mother sending my female cat to the animal shelter and made me watch euthanasia videos the entire time I was home from school. If I wanted to watch TV, I could only watch a euthanasia recording.

When I tripped, slipped on  the ice, and fell into my drunken failure of an uncle, and he thought I 'pushed' him, my mother punished me for that by breaking the neck of my tom cat, the brother of the female cat who had died a year earlier. She came into my room with the cat still alive, and made me watch her break his neck. I screamed and cried in horror, but it did no good. She threw the cat, his nose gushing blood, onto me in my bed in the middle of the night, shut and locked my bedroom door from the outside.

The last episode that I remember was when I was 16 and my dogs had gotten pregnant and given birth to a total of twenty puppies. It happened while I was in college that day and she was mad that I was "wasting money" by furthering my education. I came home one day and she told me to "go clean up the mess in the back yard" I thought I would be scooping dog shit. What else could be out there that needed cleaning so badly? I got outside in the middle of December, to find both adult dogs and nineteen of the twenty puppies murdered. Slaughtered. Blood staining the dead brown grass. Pieces of meat and fur were all over the yard, as if the dogs had been run over with a lawn mower. I remember I went numb, didn't talk for months after, and that I methodically cleaned up the mess. I buried the dogs deep in the wooded area behind our house so that no one could find the evidence. I remember sitting on the swing that night, sobbing, when a lone little female puppy, the runt of the litters, came out from where ever she had been hiding, and nuzzled against me. I picked her up, stroked her, and called Billy. I told him what had happened and begged him to come get that puppy. He agreed.

My mother enjoyed abusing those puppies that I spent days after school playing with, teasing, and playfully tossing them in a pile of leaves I had raked up. I would come in from the back yard after hours of playing with the babies, covered with muddy puppy tracks on my white shirts and jeans. Leaves clung in my hair, pebbles and pieces of sandstone stuck to the sides of my sneakers. I was a mess, but I was happy and I felt alive for the first time in my life.

My mother's entire family hated me before they ever physically met me. They called me filthy names before I had ever set foot in their homes or general presence. All lies my mother told them from the day she was given me back from the loving foster man, a transexual, who was treating me good and loved me dearly. My mother hoarded dogs for years. Little dogs. Poodles and chihuahuas. She had over a hundred of them. They were not allowed out of the house. My brothers and I were not allowed to clean up their shit from the carpets, or the hardwood floors. If they shit on our beds, and that was a common occurrence there, we couldn't clean the shit off. If they shit on the table, same rule. She would clean it, when she got time. But she was usually passed out on  illegally acquired tranquilisers and to this day, there is still dog shit from those dogs ground into her living room carpet. Cockroaches were so thick in there, if you left the light off to walk to the bathroom, you would step on them and leave a trail of footprints of dead cockroaches to and from where you had gone in the night.

The house had a strong ammonia smell all the way through it, and still does to this day. In 2016 the dogs and their waste will have been there thirty years. The smell would burn my throat and my eyes were constantly watering. My mother chain smoked and talked on the phone by the hour. If I dared open a window, she would nail it shut. If I tried to go outside, she would claim that "child services" would see me out there and take me away and put me in a place where I would be raped, maimed and killed the first day. She moved in a "male friend" who molested me more than once while she was on the phone. If I interrupted her on the phone, she would throw coffee mugs at me, or punch me in the head, showing off for her drunken friends who happened to camp out in our kitchen every day. When I told her what had happened, she called me a whore and a liar. To this day, she defends the assholes, even though one confessed that he did do it.

My mother would get drunk with my uncle as soon as my dad would leave for work. She would get my uncle and his girlfriend fighting by saying that she was screwing my uncle (she was; I caught them many times in the act), and they'd leave fighting. Fifteen minutes later, while I would be doing my homework, she would come in and make me go to their house with her. She could easily drive across town to their house to get in the middle of their drunken fights, but she couldn't drive me three blocks away to the school so I could participate in sports or extra curricular activities.

I learned to entertain myself, locked in that bedroom, with nothing but my note books, secret photos of my friends from school, and my collection of rainbow inks pens. In 1991, at the age of 10 years old, two months before my 11th birthday, I started my first journal. Writing kept me from going insane. I wrote down what happened at home. I wrote my fantasies, I wrote poems, I wrote plays, I started taking the journals to school and write there. I would write how the kids would make fun of me because I constantly smelled like cigarette smoke and dog piss. Sometimes the first ten or so exhales I would do in the clean school air, was pure second hand smoke that I had inhaled the seventeen hours I had been away from the school. By the time I was fifteen,  I had been prescribed all the breathing pills, inhalers and even oxygen known to medical science. In 2003, when I went to the doctor I now go to, he asked me if I had worked in a coal mine all my short life.

My father, who worked from 3pm until midnight every night, seven days a week, never witnessed what had gone on there. When I tried to tell him, on the rare occasion that he would ask me where the bruises or cuts came from, I would tell him. But he never believed me. I told teachers, they laughed it off. I told my family doctor, he did not believe me, either. I told every adult I came across when I was away from my parents, and they failed me. I was never removed from that environment. Living there was worse than when Dennis' family was feuding, as my mother was not afraid to hit me repeatedly. I remember times when her drunken friends had to pull her off of me because they were afraid she was going to kill me. I used to go to school in the mornings after, with vision that was still blurry from the blows to my head, a broken wrist, or the swollen face that was painful to move.

I cried for help so many times during those days, and no body came.

I don't know if it was because they enjoyed me being abused or didn't believe I was, that I was just bruising myself, from age six until fifteen, to lie and get my parents in trouble, but there was never an investigation. There was never even a phone call. It was just me against the biggest bully in the world, and there were many times that I didn't think I was going to survive.

I always turned to Dennis' family to get away from my own. It was better than what I had, even though Dennis has his own horror stories to tell. I always dreamed of running away from my home and going to live with them. The past five years, I longed to get away from them. It's a vicious cycle that one can never fully recover from. When I tried to run away, my friends would tell my mother. There was hell to pay when I got home.

Dennis never told. We used to hang out in the crawl space above my mother's house while she was drinking, doing tranquilisers and screwing my uncle, and entertain ourselves. Sometimes that involved lighting the antiqued glowing candles and pretend to be doing seances, or we'd light them for the warmth. The crawl space was freezing in the winter and late fall months. We would talk or read, or I would write in my journals while Dennis would rummage through old books and magazines.

All in all, it was abnormal. The story of my life.

I seriously dislike the family that I married into. They weren't like this when I initially met them some twenty two years ago, back in 1990 at the Cancer Treatment Center of Chicago. They were happy, normal people. I'm not sure what happened to them between then and now, other that random, casual sex with any willing partner they could find, extreme alcoholism, and enormous drug overdoses, addictions, self harm, heart break and failure.

We all experience one or more of those in our life. We don't all go off the deep end and start to set up the ones we love.

At least I never did.

If I had a problem with one of my family members, I sat down and talked with them. Saw their point, told them my complaint, and we worked together to compromise. But I am a sane and rational person. Over the past ten years as I tried to sit down and talk to Billy or anyone in the family keeping the fighting going, they would flip out. Name call, lie, claim exaggerated versons of my life and problems. I noticed this happened around February or April of 2002, and it's drove me insane ever since. I feel as though I am constantly walking on eggshells, that any little thing, such as the wrong juice poured at breakfast, would set off a psychotic episode.

We were all heavily medicated. Thorazine. Risperdal. Prozac. Cymbalta. Zoloft. Abilify.

We had all seriously attempted suicide, going so far as fighting others to let the sick person blow their brains out, overdosing on pills that only accomplished liver damage, or getting caught stealing barbiturates from hospitals or clinics.

We spent hour after hour in family therapy, telling a stranger why we no longer functioned as a family or even as people who could stand to live knowing the other was alive somewhere in this world.

We were suspicious of each other.

We lied to one another. Billy claimed "demon possession" when he physically beat me so bad I had a concussion, and brain damage so bad my "blue eyes turned black" or the retina was so huge because of the brain damage. Dennis claimed to have "multiple personalities" or "disassociation identity disorder," self-diagnosed, of course, and "Trevor," the oldest person in his community was the one who was the alcoholic, the drug addict, and the one who hated me and repeatedly smacked me when I "got out of order."

I stayed with this family because it was better than going back to my parents. Especially my mother. I knew if I lived there, I would relive several days of my teen years, and I never want to relive them. They are what caused the psychosis in my initially. Situations where I had to stay home from school with chicken pox for two weeks and the third week was spring break, so I got nearly a month home from school, and I was punished for it, by my mother sending my female cat to the animal shelter and made me watch euthanasia videos the entire time I was home from school. If I wanted to watch TV, I could only watch a euthanasia recording.

When I tripped, slipped on  the ice, and fell into my drunken failure of an uncle, and he thought I 'pushed' him, my mother punished me for that by breaking the neck of my tom cat, the brother of the female cat who had died a year earlier. She came into my room with the cat still alive, and made me watch her break his neck. I screamed and cried in horror, but it did no good. She threw the cat, his nose gushing blood, onto me in my bed in the middle of the night, shut and locked my bedroom door from the outside.

The last episode that I remember was when I was 16 and my dogs had gotten pregnant and given birth to a total of twenty puppies. It happened while I was in college that day and she was mad that I was "wasting money" by furthering my education. I came home one day and she told me to "go clean up the mess in the back yard" I thought I would be scooping dog shit. What else could be out there that needed cleaning so badly? I got outside in the middle of December, to find both adult dogs and nineteen of the twenty puppies murdered. Slaughtered. Blood staining the dead brown grass. Pieces of meat and fur were all over the yard, as if the dogs had been run over with a lawn mower. I remember I went numb, didn't talk for months after, and that I methodically cleaned up the mess. I buried the dogs deep in the wooded area behind our house so that no one could find the evidence. I remember sitting on the swing that night, sobbing, when a lone little female puppy, the runt of the litters, came out from where ever she had been hiding, and nuzzled against me. I picked her up, stroked her, and called Billy. I told him what had happened and begged him to come get that puppy. He agreed.

My mother enjoyed abusing those puppies that I spent days after school playing with, teasing, and playfully tossing them in a pile of leaves I had raked up. I would come in from the back yard after hours of playing with the babies, covered with muddy puppy tracks on my white shirts and jeans. Leaves clung in my hair, pebbles and pieces of sandstone stuck to the sides of my sneakers. I was a mess, but I was happy and I felt alive for the first time in my life.

My mother's entire family hated me before they ever physically met me. They called me filthy names before I had ever set foot in their homes or general presence. All lies my mother told them from the day she was given me back from the loving foster man, a transexual, who was treating me good and loved me dearly. My mother hoarded dogs for years. Little dogs. Poodles and chihuahuas. She had over a hundred of them. They were not allowed out of the house. My brothers and I were not allowed to clean up their shit from the carpets, or the hardwood floors. If they shit on our beds, and that was a common occurrence there, we couldn't clean the shit off. If they shit on the table, same rule. She would clean it, when she got time. But she was usually passed out on  illegally acquired tranquilisers and to this day, there is still dog shit from those dogs ground into her living room carpet. Cockroaches were so thick in there, if you left the light off to walk to the bathroom, you would step on them and leave a trail of footprints of dead cockroaches to and from where you had gone in the night.

The house had a strong ammonia smell all the way through it, and still does to this day. In 2016 the dogs and their waste will have been there thirty years. The smell would burn my throat and my eyes were constantly watering. My mother chain smoked and talked on the phone by the hour. If I dared open a window, she would nail it shut. If I tried to go outside, she would claim that "child services" would see me out there and take me away and put me in a place where I would be raped, maimed and killed the first day. She moved in a "male friend" who molested me more than once while she was on the phone. If I interrupted her on the phone, she would throw coffee mugs at me, or punch me in the head, showing off for her drunken friends who happened to camp out in our kitchen every day. When I told her what had happened, she called me a whore and a liar. To this day, she defends the assholes, even though one confessed that he did do it.

My mother would get drunk with my uncle as soon as my dad would leave for work. She would get my uncle and his girlfriend fighting by saying that she was screwing my uncle (she was; I caught them many times in the act), and they'd leave fighting. Fifteen minutes later, while I would be doing my homework, she would come in and make me go to their house with her. She could easily drive across town to their house to get in the middle of their drunken fights, but she couldn't drive me three blocks away to the school so I could participate in sports or extra curricular activities.

I learned to entertain myself, locked in that bedroom, with nothing but my note books, secret photos of my friends from school, and my collection of rainbow inks pens. In 1991, at the age of 10 years old, two months before my 11th birthday, I started my first journal. Writing kept me from going insane. I wrote down what happened at home. I wrote my fantasies, I wrote poems, I wrote plays, I started taking the journals to school and write there. I would write how the kids would make fun of me because I constantly smelled like cigarette smoke and dog piss. Sometimes the first ten or so exhales I would do in the clean school air, was pure second hand smoke that I had inhaled the seventeen hours I had been away from the school. By the time I was fifteen,  I had been prescribed all the breathing pills, inhalers and even oxygen known to medical science. In 2003, when I went to the doctor I now go to, he asked me if I had worked in a coal mine all my short life.

My father, who worked from 3pm until midnight every night, seven days a week, never witnessed what had gone on there. When I tried to tell him, on the rare occasion that he would ask me where the bruises or cuts came from, I would tell him. But he never believed me. I told teachers, they laughed it off. I told my family doctor, he did not believe me, either. I told every adult I came across when I was away from my parents, and they failed me. I was never removed from that environment. Living there was worse than when Dennis' family was feuding, as my mother was not afraid to hit me repeatedly. I remember times when her drunken friends had to pull her off of me because they were afraid she was going to kill me. I used to go to school in the mornings after, with vision that was still blurry from the blows to my head, a broken wrist, or the swollen face that was painful to move.

I cried for help so many times during those days, and no body came.

I don't know if it was because they enjoyed me being abused or didn't believe I was, that I was just bruising myself, from age six until fifteen, to lie and get my parents in trouble, but there was never an investigation. There was never even a phone call. It was just me against the biggest bully in the world, and there were many times that I didn't think I was going to survive.

I always turned to Dennis' family to get away from my own. It was better than what I had, even though Dennis has his own horror stories to tell. I always dreamed of running away from my home and going to live with them. The past five years, I longed to get away from them. It's a vicious cycle that one can never fully recover from. When I tried to run away, my friends would tell my mother. There was hell to pay when I got home.

Dennis never told. We used to hang out in the crawl space above my mother's house while she was drinking, doing tranquilisers and screwing my uncle, and entertain ourselves. Sometimes that involved lighting the antiqued glowing candles and pretend to be doing seances, or we'd light them for the warmth. The crawl space was freezing in the winter and late fall months. We would talk or read, or I would write in my journals while Dennis would rummage through old books and magazines.

All in all, it was abnormal. The story of my life.

Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day

I stopped updating. The entire time I told myself that I would write again, only when I was ready and not before. I was ready many times, but I could not force myself to sit at the computer and write. Just write. Just close my eyes, think of my day, open my eyes and type for all that it was worth. I use to find that so therapeutic.

Then I relapsed. Then I relapsed again and ended up in the hospital.

Then I had the two positive drug tests and I felt ashamed. Ashamed not because there was drug use in my system, but because I wasn't just destroying my life, I was also taking my best friend down with me, and he was the one who provided the drugs. I forced him to provide the drugs. I belittled him when he asked me why. I told him that I had a back ache or that I had a knee pain and all that could settle my storm. This was someone who loved me and was taking care of me, or so he thought, and here I was, verbally abusing him and running him into the ground.

That wasn't me.

Taking a look around the hospital ER room after an IV full of benedryl, fluids and an antidote, I was coherent again and able to take in my surroundings. My friend was sitting in a chair, in the corner of the room, looking scared. I quietly asked what happened and he said I was "rolling" for three days. On the third day, or that night, I started begging for help. I had not been eating. I had only taken one dose. Then I started seeing stars inside and floating. This went on for three days, and he had to call in to work, and he had to deal with my husband coming by asking for me. He thought he was doing me a favour by keeping me hidden from friends and family because they shouldn't see me like that.

And I shouldn't be remembered like that.

Remembered? The next seven words made my hair stand up on the back of my neck: "I thought you were going to die."

Two days later I walked out of the hospital with him, holding hands.

I made some affirmations right then and there. No more drugs. No more asking for them. No more brow-beating one of the truly few friends that I have for drugs. No more. No more. No more. No more pushing others to do drugs with me. I didn't pick up a Bible and become religious in that time frame, but I became more spiritual. I scared someone who loved me dearly, and I should not have done that. On the long, silent drive home, he said that I knew I was dying. That he could not sleep because I might stop breathing and he didn't know CPR.

So I asked, "What now?" he shrugged. Sitting outside my house with a small overnight bag on my lap, I leaned over and hugged him. I held him in my arms. Our silent tears were all that we needed to realise just how real this all was.

I slowly went back on my prescriptions. For a day or so, I was too afraid to take anything, thinking it was an over dose of one of my prescriptions. I basked in the warmth of my daughter and sons showering me with "Yay! Mommy is home!" and my husband's look of relief before asking where I was. I promised to tell him when the time was right. I sat down and did glitter crafts with my boys and little girl. I diapered dolls with my little girl. I wore a pink gem stoned tiara and dressed up as the queen and the boys were my little princes. I got out my old pins and mounted them on a framed cork board with my husband. I wrote in the journal that sits on the night stand. I watched TV endlessly with him. I played video games with the boys. I played Nintendogs with Chloe. I returned all the phone calls that I had been thinking about getting back to. I bought my mother scented candles and Godiva chocolates. I bought my father a stuffed rabbit with chocolates. I told my parents that I appreciate them. I wore the hoop-diamond-drop earrings that my Nick bought me for Christmas on my 18th Christmas. I put on the simple silver ring for my wedding band. I took nothing for granted anymore. I ordered a new journal and some stickers with Chloe and we have been making little scenes in the pages of my journal.

I take nothing for granted now that I know it can all be taken away from me so quickly. I never would have known my life was ending.

The next part I did Sunday evening. I went to my friend's work and watched him take drinks to several of the tables, back a fourth. He didn't even see me there. Shame that he was working on that day. I ordered a glass of merlot and waited. When he delivered it to me, I stood and held out my arms to him. We were instantly pulled together in a tight embrace. I whispered in his ear that I loved him and thanked him for being there, for letting me live another day. When the hugging was over, I asked what was in that final pill. I specifically said nothing harder than a barb. He said he wasn't sure, he'd gotten it from the john that was always asking for me. I sighed and told him that we could still be friends, in fact, I had made him a cake that he needed to come over and celebrate with me with after his shift. He gave me a wide-eyed look. "You know what..." he began. I nodded. "I know it's your birthday. Happy twenty-fifth! Come by after your shift for cake and ice cream!" I replied. His face immediately brightened.

I celebrated my friend's birthday with him, just the two of us, just as he had envisioned it. I'm not going to lose a friend because of an accident. I apologised to him for all that I had done, and I hoped that he would forgive me. He says he has. We should go on an adventure. We will. Just not this week, or the next. I need to rest up.

It's good to be alive.

I stopped updating. The entire time I told myself that I would write again, only when I was ready and not before. I was ready many times, but I could not force myself to sit at the computer and write. Just write. Just close my eyes, think of my day, open my eyes and type for all that it was worth. I use to find that so therapeutic.

Then I relapsed. Then I relapsed again and ended up in the hospital.

Then I had the two positive drug tests and I felt ashamed. Ashamed not because there was drug use in my system, but because I wasn't just destroying my life, I was also taking my best friend down with me, and he was the one who provided the drugs. I forced him to provide the drugs. I belittled him when he asked me why. I told him that I had a back ache or that I had a knee pain and all that could settle my storm. This was someone who loved me and was taking care of me, or so he thought, and here I was, verbally abusing him and running him into the ground.

That wasn't me.

Taking a look around the hospital ER room after an IV full of benedryl, fluids and an antidote, I was coherent again and able to take in my surroundings. My friend was sitting in a chair, in the corner of the room, looking scared. I quietly asked what happened and he said I was "rolling" for three days. On the third day, or that night, I started begging for help. I had not been eating. I had only taken one dose. Then I started seeing stars inside and floating. This went on for three days, and he had to call in to work, and he had to deal with my husband coming by asking for me. He thought he was doing me a favour by keeping me hidden from friends and family because they shouldn't see me like that.

And I shouldn't be remembered like that.

Remembered? The next seven words made my hair stand up on the back of my neck: "I thought you were going to die."

Two days later I walked out of the hospital with him, holding hands.

I made some affirmations right then and there. No more drugs. No more asking for them. No more brow-beating one of the truly few friends that I have for drugs. No more. No more. No more. No more pushing others to do drugs with me. I didn't pick up a Bible and become religious in that time frame, but I became more spiritual. I scared someone who loved me dearly, and I should not have done that. On the long, silent drive home, he said that I knew I was dying. That he could not sleep because I might stop breathing and he didn't know CPR.

So I asked, "What now?" he shrugged. Sitting outside my house with a small overnight bag on my lap, I leaned over and hugged him. I held him in my arms. Our silent tears were all that we needed to realise just how real this all was.

I slowly went back on my prescriptions. For a day or so, I was too afraid to take anything, thinking it was an over dose of one of my prescriptions. I basked in the warmth of my daughter and sons showering me with "Yay! Mommy is home!" and my husband's look of relief before asking where I was. I promised to tell him when the time was right. I sat down and did glitter crafts with my boys and little girl. I diapered dolls with my little girl. I wore a pink gem stoned tiara and dressed up as the queen and the boys were my little princes. I got out my old pins and mounted them on a framed cork board with my husband. I wrote in the journal that sits on the night stand. I watched TV endlessly with him. I played video games with the boys. I played Nintendogs with Chloe. I returned all the phone calls that I had been thinking about getting back to. I bought my mother scented candles and Godiva chocolates. I bought my father a stuffed rabbit with chocolates. I told my parents that I appreciate them. I wore the hoop-diamond-drop earrings that my Nick bought me for Christmas on my 18th Christmas. I put on the simple silver ring for my wedding band. I took nothing for granted anymore. I ordered a new journal and some stickers with Chloe and we have been making little scenes in the pages of my journal.

I take nothing for granted now that I know it can all be taken away from me so quickly. I never would have known my life was ending.

The next part I did Sunday evening. I went to my friend's work and watched him take drinks to several of the tables, back a fourth. He didn't even see me there. Shame that he was working on that day. I ordered a glass of merlot and waited. When he delivered it to me, I stood and held out my arms to him. We were instantly pulled together in a tight embrace. I whispered in his ear that I loved him and thanked him for being there, for letting me live another day. When the hugging was over, I asked what was in that final pill. I specifically said nothing harder than a barb. He said he wasn't sure, he'd gotten it from the john that was always asking for me. I sighed and told him that we could still be friends, in fact, I had made him a cake that he needed to come over and celebrate with me with after his shift. He gave me a wide-eyed look. "You know what..." he began. I nodded. "I know it's your birthday. Happy twenty-fifth! Come by after your shift for cake and ice cream!" I replied. His face immediately brightened.

I celebrated my friend's birthday with him, just the two of us, just as he had envisioned it. I'm not going to lose a friend because of an accident. I apologised to him for all that I had done, and I hoped that he would forgive me. He says he has. We should go on an adventure. We will. Just not this week, or the next. I need to rest up.

It's good to be alive.

Over-Stayed The Welcome

I was never honestly happy today. The weather is nice, sure, but I wanted to share what little bit of happiness that I had left in me to ask a question. Something that I had planned 100% myself, without any help at all from Nick with the exception that just by chance I came upon his cell phone ringing and I answered it. I did a double take when I realised who I was talking to. I wrote down his message and then asked the question no musician wants to hear: "Can I ask you something?" "Sure!" Man, he was friendly!

I have a dear, sweet friend who is getting married soon, and if the person on the other end of the line was who I think it is, then I just had a wonderful idea for the wedding gift. I asked him if he was who I thought he was, and he said yes. Then came the worse question: "Do you do private parties and weddings?" He laughed. I tried to smile. We chatted a bit and I finally had him convinced to perform at the wedding. I was so happy. I was happy for her, happy for me, and happy for everyone who was going to be there.

Then I tried to share my happiness.

The friend that I set up the wedding surprises for, the perfume, the wedding singer, the hand-made invitations, wasn't too enthused with what I had put together. Yes, it was the best that I could do. I had those things when I got married, and they brought me good luck. The tradition goes that if something at your wedding brings happiness and good luck to your marriage, you should share it with a friend who is getting married. I tried. She wanted no part of it.

Horrifying thoughts of when Roxanna was an unfortunate part of my life, and I was forced to be nice to her while she cut me down, and talked bad about me behind my back to people who truly loved me. I had a small flash-in-the-pan thought that maybe that is what my friend is doing to me, now. Maybe I have over-stayed my welcome. Maybe we have grown apart. Maybe I was just fooling myself when I said that people genuinely like me and would have a better chance at being liked if my mother wasn't there to interfere. Maybe I am wrong.

It seems to happen when I'm in a good mood. Do they plan it that way?

I'm going to take some more leans and sleep until the pain stops. When ever that may be.

I was never honestly happy today. The weather is nice, sure, but I wanted to share what little bit of happiness that I had left in me to ask a question. Something that I had planned 100% myself, without any help at all from Nick with the exception that just by chance I came upon his cell phone ringing and I answered it. I did a double take when I realised who I was talking to. I wrote down his message and then asked the question no musician wants to hear: "Can I ask you something?" "Sure!" Man, he was friendly!

I have a dear, sweet friend who is getting married soon, and if the person on the other end of the line was who I think it is, then I just had a wonderful idea for the wedding gift. I asked him if he was who I thought he was, and he said yes. Then came the worse question: "Do you do private parties and weddings?" He laughed. I tried to smile. We chatted a bit and I finally had him convinced to perform at the wedding. I was so happy. I was happy for her, happy for me, and happy for everyone who was going to be there.

Then I tried to share my happiness.

The friend that I set up the wedding surprises for, the perfume, the wedding singer, the hand-made invitations, wasn't too enthused with what I had put together. Yes, it was the best that I could do. I had those things when I got married, and they brought me good luck. The tradition goes that if something at your wedding brings happiness and good luck to your marriage, you should share it with a friend who is getting married. I tried. She wanted no part of it.

Horrifying thoughts of when Roxanna was an unfortunate part of my life, and I was forced to be nice to her while she cut me down, and talked bad about me behind my back to people who truly loved me. I had a small flash-in-the-pan thought that maybe that is what my friend is doing to me, now. Maybe I have over-stayed my welcome. Maybe we have grown apart. Maybe I was just fooling myself when I said that people genuinely like me and would have a better chance at being liked if my mother wasn't there to interfere. Maybe I am wrong.

It seems to happen when I'm in a good mood. Do they plan it that way?

I'm going to take some more leans and sleep until the pain stops. When ever that may be.

It's Been Done

I am having some thoughts about this place. About my place in the world. Writing is a chore now. I do it because I feel that I should, not because I actually enjoy doing it. I write to please others. I write out of habit. Before I used to write because I got something out of it. Yes, that's selfish, but it's the only way I can fo it honestly, damnit. I feel that it is the only way artists can do anything good; if it's secretly selfishly for them and them alone. Think about it. How many #1 hit songs overflow the charts every year that are written/intended for the fans? None. It's always about love, lost or new, and the authors.

This whole "writing for a crowd" was good for me. I could express all that was on my mind, and people really enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed sharing. I enjoyed the sport, the art, of writing. Now I look at my paper on what I need to cover, just to be on top of things.

My life is not that particularly interesting. I will probably never have a movie or a novel made about my life, unless I write the book or I make the movie. I share a life that is identical to every other person in the world. Struggles, a family, life. What have I done that thousands or millions before me haven't already done? Millions after me will do the same things. The same is true with my thoughts. Others will have these same thoughts on the world. There's nothing unique about me.

I would be kidding myself if I said that I thought I had a unique outlook on life, because I have been dealt a bad hand, but I know that I do not. I do not want to become another cookie-cutter ex-addict, ex-escort on the web telling their tale of woe. That was one thing that I thought separated me from the others. I have a better outlook on life, not because I was all those things, but because I survived them and had a better outlook on life before, during and after. There was nor has been many things that would turn me bitter. Not even my health crisis afterwards.

In the end, it's all about being done, isn't it?

I am having some thoughts about this place. About my place in the world. Writing is a chore now. I do it because I feel that I should, not because I actually enjoy doing it. I write to please others. I write out of habit. Before I used to write because I got something out of it. Yes, that's selfish, but it's the only way I can fo it honestly, damnit. I feel that it is the only way artists can do anything good; if it's secretly selfishly for them and them alone. Think about it. How many #1 hit songs overflow the charts every year that are written/intended for the fans? None. It's always about love, lost or new, and the authors.

This whole "writing for a crowd" was good for me. I could express all that was on my mind, and people really enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed sharing. I enjoyed the sport, the art, of writing. Now I look at my paper on what I need to cover, just to be on top of things.

My life is not that particularly interesting. I will probably never have a movie or a novel made about my life, unless I write the book or I make the movie. I share a life that is identical to every other person in the world. Struggles, a family, life. What have I done that thousands or millions before me haven't already done? Millions after me will do the same things. The same is true with my thoughts. Others will have these same thoughts on the world. There's nothing unique about me.

I would be kidding myself if I said that I thought I had a unique outlook on life, because I have been dealt a bad hand, but I know that I do not. I do not want to become another cookie-cutter ex-addict, ex-escort on the web telling their tale of woe. That was one thing that I thought separated me from the others. I have a better outlook on life, not because I was all those things, but because I survived them and had a better outlook on life before, during and after. There was nor has been many things that would turn me bitter. Not even my health crisis afterwards.

In the end, it's all about being done, isn't it?