Biography, Prt. 3

Ahhh, so now we are back in our home, oh thank goodness!  The car was cool, but not for long!  And ironically enough, as I write this, April 14th will be exactly 17 years since my dad passed away.  All I have are second hand memorys and a fistfull of photos, but the hole I feel is very real.
I decided the previous size of type seemed little while I typed, but it translated HUGE!  So lets hope this is better!
So we move back into the house.  I take to cooking supper and to making lunches for us on weekends.  My sister and I sweep, mop, vaccuum, dust, wash windows(or the bottom half anyways!).  I learn to do laundry, to wash the dishes til they shine.  Occasionally my mum leaves us money and we go grocery shopping.  By the time I am 9 I can buy a weeks worth of food for $20. 
Sometime in the two years since I lost my dad my mum has met a man.  He is many years her junior.  She only introduces him as her friend.  And when he needs a place to stay he stays in our heated garage, that my mum has cleaned out, scrubbed down,  and arranged to look like a bedroom.  He often comes into the house, he cooks for us, he cleans, he's nice.  When we ask him questions, like 'can we go to the park?' he says 'I'm just a friend of the family, you have to ask a parent for that.'
And then my mum drops the bombshell that we all suspected.  And the man, Trent, moves into our house.  Into the bed with my mum.  My dads bed.  I'm angry, of course, but I also understand, to the best of my ability, that my mum is lonely. 
Overnight Trent turns into a monster.  Suddenly, since he is in the house, he is a parent.  He dictates what we are allowed to eat, where we are allowed to go, what we wear, what we say.  One night he caught me watching a horror movie.  My mum didn't approve of my love for scary movies, but she allowed it as long as I understood they weren't real.  This one was particularily scary, so I was flipping between it and another show.  Trent caught me, and made me sit in the dark, a foot from the TV and watch the whole movie.  If he caught me closing my eyes or looking away he hit me.  Then he made me walk to my bedroom, through the house, up the stairs, down the hall, in the dark all alone.  I had nightmares for weeks.  I told my mum and she laughed, telling me that I was just scared of a movie I shouldn't of watched and I shouldn't blame Trent.
We moved out of our small town to the nearby city.  But it was only a ten minute drive, so there were still old friends at arms reach, and new friends to be made.  I enjoyed that year.  I spent barely anytime at home.  I was constantly out.  Trent made being home scary and I hated how he looked at us.
Maybe while they lay in bed at night, maybe it was just something Trent decided and my mum went along with it, whatever it was, they made the decision we were going to move across the province.  Leaving my friends, the life I had known for as long as I could remember, behind.  And I had just started to set roots in the city.
So we packed up and went.  I sat in the passanger seat of the U-haul and sobbed.  My mum told me I would make new friends, make a new life, etc etc.  The usual speil.  But at the time my heart hurt so much.
Once away from everybody we had ever known Trent tightened the reins. He and my mum opened a second hand furniture store.  And I used to go to auctions with Trent.  I loved those.  He would give me a five dollar bill and let me bid on anything.  Plus, people would test out the couches and when we bought one, he would let us dig through the cushions for the change that had fallen out of the testers pockets.
But that was the only bright spot.  Trent became financially controlling.  It got so bad even my mum was scared.  I remember that I lost my winter gloves, I was ten, and Trent told my mother she was not allowed to buy me another pair, to teach me a lesson.  We were living up north and -40C was a pretty common occurance.  I suffered immensley that winter.  My hands chapped, my fingertips suffered frost nip.  I wore socks on my hands to hide it from my mom when I got home.  But then she saw my hands and forced me to take her gloves, but she wasn't able to buy herself another pair, so now her hands suffered.
My little sister had a birthday party up there, and I wasn't there, so I'm not sure what the argument was about, but Trent punched a globe light on the kitchen ceiling, shattering it into my sister's birthday cake, in front of her friends.  She slept in my bed that night, crying.
Trent got physical only with my little sister.  He would push her, he would hit her ''playfully'' but you could tell it hurt.  He would pull her hair, pinch her.  One night I caught him pinching her arm while she cried, I ran and got a sneaker, and I beat him over the head with it!!  He was laughing and that made me even angrier.  I screamed a bunch of mean things at him and he told me to get used to it because he wasn't going anywhere.
A week later I came out of my bedroom in the middle of the night to use the washroom and my mum was sitting on the couch in the basement in the dark.  She told me Trent was leaveing her for a younger woman.  I danced, I...literally....danced.  Then became aware of how my mum must be feeling and I sat on the couch, apologized for my dancing and hugged her.  She told me to never apologize for being a kid.
During our time there, my older sister moved up there to be closer to us.  She met a man, and got pregnant a third time.  But this time there was talk of marriage and he was a really great guy.  We all got along great, and my sister seemed like a better person with him.  Her third child was a son.
We moved back to the small town I had grown up in.  A friend of mine, who's mother was friendly with my mum, put us up until we could find a home.  I was so happy.  Happier then I had been in years.  However, Trent had driven this old blue pickup, and it took years for my heart not to skip a beat when I saw a blue truck, months for me to train myself not to jump in a bush.  *Trent came into the restaraunt I was working at when I was 16, he was thin, unkempt and had a little girl with him who he introduced as his daughter.  He looked miserable, told me the girls mom had left him for someone younger(KARMA!!!) but anyway, the little girls name was Chanlene, my little sisters name is Chantelle, my name, Jolene.   I thought it was funny*
We found a house and moved in.  Life was great.  Sure money was non existent, and at 14 I started working full time to help pay bills.  But I had found a group of friends who didn't care that I was poor and we still found time to hang out.  I had my first boyfriend, my first kiss.  I went to party's, I hung out, I learned and I loved.  I had good friends, people who looked past my thrift store clothes, who came to visit me at my work.  They were truly some of the most amazing people I knew/know.
My older sister and her man moved into our basement because they were looking for a place to move to.  But while in our basement, he was diagnosed with an illness.  And it took it's toll on them.  They ended up splitting, him going to live with his parents.  They shared custody of their son, but nothing was legally written.  One visit he phoned my sister and said he wasn't bringing their son back.  He had filed for custody, and the courts had ruled that it best the boy stay with his father until all was resolved.
Thus began my sister's decent.  But I'll get back to that.
My mum dated occasionally, but never seriously.  We met a few men and she often told me that I was the 'test'.  If a man called her back after meeting me then he had a shooting chance.  My little sister was so eager for a father figure she threw herself at thier feet, but I was frostier.
I graduated at 17 and moved out.  I was still working full time. 
My sister also took the two kids she had and moved out on her own into a low income housing.  It was only my little sister and my mum left.
I worked, then I decided to upgrade my education, so I did that, then I worked.  I had one disastorous relationship, my first love technically, where it ended when his OTHER girlfriend phoned the house phone.  How dumb do you gotta be to give one girlfriend the other girlfriends house number?  We had a chat, and all his stuff miraculously ended up on the front lawn, and it just so happened to rain, and that soothed the anger abit :).
I moved back in with my mother for a short time while I was doing the college bit.  I love my mum but after tasting freedom I couldn't stay, so I moved out again.  I met Joey on that go around.  I told him I wasn't rushing to move in with him.  After two years together we got our own place.
It was tiny but it was ours.  I was so in love then.  When it came to light that my older sister was addicted to crack it was like a big boot squashed all my happiness.  We fought endlessly, Joey and I.  He thought I should turn my back on her and walk away.  I couldn't do it quite like that.  We started fighting with Children's Services to have her kids taken away. 
But once again, that's for another part!  Getting closer to the here and now yet!  Only about four years left to go!