Whew.

The end of a long-ass week and the beginning of a tall cold drink.

I'm getting really dissatisfied dealing with the snot on the sleeve of society.

Where's the positive change I wanted to make? It can't be naivete to want this. The highlight of my career is when I get to put on the bunny costume at Easter and get driven place to place by deputies to make little kids smile.

I've got a job I do well. I know how lucky I really am. But it doesn't stop me from wanting to effect positive change.

I can only hope that somewhere along the way I'm the person who the little kid with the cracked-out parents fondly remembers, or that I am maybe setting a positive example.

I was born into a family of weirdos. The whole town of 300 we lived in knew how fucked up my family was, which added embarassment to the richness of turmoil. Kids wrote graffiti on the metal culvert at the end of my street that the man up the hill was a bastard. I tried to tell myself they meant the other old bastard on our street, but I knew better.

I started not getting along with other people in school in about 3rd grade and I was having behavioral problems. By 8th grade, I was mean. I decided I'd rather be respected than liked, but I was confusing respect with frightening people into silence. My angst was equalled only by the amount of eyeliner I used.

The minute I turned 16, I got a job working as a waitress in a nearby town. It was great training in people-pleasing, and I got decent tips. My parents didn't want me to have a social life, but they certainly didn't mind that I would go to school on Friday, work graveyard shift Friday and Saturday nights, and go back to school on Monday exhausted. If I was making money so I wasn't a burden on 'em, that was great. If I had a date, I had to be home by midnight. Always burned my ass, because I could be out all night making a buck and that was ok, but I damned well better not be having fun. I remember dad telling me he was going to charge me rent when I was 16. I told him if I was going to pay rent I was going to fucking move out and pay rent. Then he backtracked and tried to say all the rent I paid he was going to save and give to me for a graduation present, but if I really didn't want that...aww, how sweet. He was going to gift me my own money. He dropped it. I didn't pay rent. I should have moved out. I really hated my life. I daydreamed of suicide. When I finally worked up the guts to tell my mom I needed help, she told me they certainly didn't have the money for that kind of thing. Later that night she came to me crying and bawling, saying, "You're not really going to kill yourself, are you?" I told her what she wanted to hear. I was anointed her best friend, but she wouldn't help me seek help. I couldn't count on her. I didn't try to tell anyone else my problems. I would just embarass the family. Like they needed any help.

Later in my 16th year, after a string of boyfriends who have long since become felons (one went to prison for attempting to murder a prostitute - true story), I met the coolest bad guy. He was 22 and drove a '77 TransAm (just like the Bandit but without a T-top). He was a great mix of sweet and pissy and I was a complete fool for this guy. I got knocked up about a year later, at the beginning of my senior year, about the time I was wondering if this is where my life should be taking me, but I sure as shit wasn't responsible enough to prevent getting knocked up, so I figured this was my path. By that time, I could see the chinks in the knight's shining armor.

My father's reaction to my getting knocked up was so fucking weird. I expected to get clubbed upside the head or kicked out. He said, "I'm proud of you." Wow, proud of me for having sex and getting knocked up? WTF. I have no idea what he was thinking. He did say, "You thought daddy was going to yell at you, didn't you." Well, yeah. Most parents who gave a shit would. But whatever.

I stayed in school long enough so I didn't screw up the speech thing for the other seniors in group speech on my team. Right after we got I's at district but learned we hadn't been chosen for state, I arranged with my principal to take my last credits at home. I moved out of my parents' house that same day and into the boyfriend's apartment a few towns away. My parents pretended they wanted what was best for me, but they were for me to go. My sister was a well-liked cheerleader and they had hope for her. She was a credit to them.

The next few years are a haze of searching for reasons why my life wasn't working out, but I forced myself into denial. I worked full time and struggled to find good daycare for my son. The only doctor I could afford in town told me my son's behavioral problems were because I let him walk all over me, and also, boys will be boys. I tried to leave the boyfriend and went back to my parents' house one day. My mother burst into tears because she was so unhappy I was back. It turned out, I had foiled a tryst with her then-boyfriend. I went back to my boyfriend the next day. It was obvious my mother didn't want me to come back. My boyfriend had developed a meth addiction and was spending all the money he made, so I didn't have any cash to make arrangements to live somewhere else because I was paying for my house and I couldn't get him out. In the end, the only way to get rid of him was to change the locks on the doors of the house I had bought with every last penny I had saved because my parents told me to and he told me to. I hated that fucking house. But I made so many excuses and forced myself to be "loyal" and I woke up every goddamned morning and thought, "If there was a god, I'd be dead right now."

The year following the lock-changing, on a day when I was supposed to drive to my parents' house and go with them so they could take my collegiate sister out to eat for her birthday, my mother calmly sprung on me before we went that she had been having an affair. In fact, several affairs. Dad had decided to forgive her. Now, that's all said and done. Let's go out to eat.

We went to play happy-happy family at the sis's house and my parents didn't say anything to her, but she could tell shit was up. On the ride back to her house from lunch, I told her what I had been told. I look back and feel guilty about it. It was her birthday for christsakes. But I was so sick of their fucking secrets and pretending. That whole year afterward mom spent into a nervous breakdown spiral. She came to my house and announced that she was Satan. When I took her to the mental health center, she completely pretended nothing was wrong and refused to talk about why I brought her there. I was crying and shaking. She was calm as a cucumber. They probably thought I needed evaluation. There was nothing they could do. We left and I decided I was never going to try to intervene for her again. I quit letting my son be with her without me there. I started to try to break the chain.

She and dad got a divorce, mostly because dad couldn't handle her mental health issues. I think he really wanted her to stay with him so he could hold her infidelities over her head for perceived power. She went to live with her brother and in short order ended up hospitalized and subsequently had a stroke. Apparently her mental issues were a result of blood clots in her brain. I used to feel guilty for being mad at her because she couldn't help some of her crap, technically. But she got to forget all the shit years and I can't even work through anything with her if I wanted to.

Yeah, that's enough for now. It was time to start, though.