EPT
I was born in a rural town in northeastern france, to a dyslexic (and struggling) poet mother and a wino father. I can't recollect much of my early childhood, save for various specific events that resurface in my mind from time to time. I remember most the aroma of the house in which we lived. It had a stagnation to it that seemed to follow my father around, and it was comforting to me as a child to smell it on him as we walked. I have vague memories of the fights my parents used to have, and of my father standing just across the belgian border taunting french police.
In my fifth year, my father committed a felony in Belgium that I'm still unclear of the details on. The result was that he could no longer use the country as a 'home away from home' to avoid the french police, who were consistantly after him for various misdemeanours. My family knew no permanent home for several months, and through tears my mother recently revealed to me that she had taken to selling her body to feed us. My father would steal some of her earnings for wine and in an alcohol-fueled rage go seeking my mother's customers, forcing us to move on again.
The longest home we would have before coming to north america could be an apartment in northern spain, close enough to the french border that we could cross with relative ease to do our shopping. My mother's art degree landed her a job teaching English, and my father took to odd jobs, whatever he could find.
I remember vividly the eventual split from my father. I was eight years old and after a particularily brutal battering at his hands, my mother roused my sisters and I and stole us away in the middle of the night. We found our way to the coast, and down to Portugal, where my mother used most of her stowed away cash to buy us a ticket to Montreal.
I spent the next few years bouncing from home to home as members of my extended family throughout quebec, ontario, and manitoba took us in. My mother chased better job opportunities ceaselessly, looking for a way to provide easily for my sisters and I. She knew many different men she would call "my future father" in that period, and I took a liking to several of them, but none of them would last. My mother would time and time again drive men away from her, comparing them to my father. She went through bouts of total self-loathing, and it became a routine for her to disappear for several days every few months, leaving us in the care of whatever relative we happened to be staying with. She would return as if nothing had happened, and routine as it was, it made no difference to me. I gained a sense of freedom from it, in a way. By the time I was 14 I was sensible enough to hold a job that would support me in my mother's absences.
My mother never really recovered from the emotional damage living with my father had done to her. Though she would strongly express to my sisters and I that she was thankful he was "too far gone to follow us", she would make me sit with her while she drunkenly reminisced about what she enjoyed in the relationship. I was 15 when she took off for good. Days turned into weeks waiting for her to return, but she didn't.
I wasn't really bothered by it. I had been set up with a roofing job in Edmonton, through the family of the man I'd been working for in Winnipeg. It bothered me more to leave my two sisters behind, in the care of an aunt and uncle that I really didn't know very well. I would have loved to have taken them with me, but the reality was simply that I wouldn't be able to support all three of us once we got to alberta.
I settled into an apartment in Edmonton, living with a guy named Hal, who had advertised a room to rent in the newspaper. The income from my new job was decent, more than enough to live off of, so I set a lot of money aside. Two years and a few pay raises later I moved into my own apartment, and that's where I live right now.
I still haven't heard from my mother. My sisters work as waitresses in Winnipeg and have found a place of their own. I kept in regular contact with them, and still do. A year ago I tried to find my father, because I honestly wondered if he was still alive. After a lot of searching and probing, I found a mailing address in Vienna and send off a letter filled with a lot of emotional questions, prefaced by an explanation in case the address was incorrect. A few weeks later I recieved a response, all it read was "Alive and well, give your mother my love."
Steve your a real man.
