Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 4: The Colorado catastrophe
My step-father relocated us to the suburb of Aurora, Colorado, which was just outside Denver, and we arrived as I was just starting grade nine. It wasnt the first time we had moved near the beginning of a school year, in fact it was the third - first we had moved when I was part-way through grade five, then again when I was part-way through grade seven. Now, once again, I was the “new kid”, trying to fit in when most of the pecking order had been established before I got there.
Needless to say, I pretty much ended up on the bottom.
As I had done in Canada, I hid in the drama room whenever I could, and just tried to survive the school, but it turned out that school was safer than home ...
My stepfather, who had struggled with drinking before, really started hitting the bottle hard. Later I would learn his job as a pilot was coming to an end, which is why he fell further into alcohol. As a result, he became more belligerent, more aggressive, and spent most of his time putting my mother, my brother, and me down.
Then things came to a head.
One night, he swung at my mother, and I snapped.
I went to the fireplace, picked up a small axe, and went after him.
God alone knows how why I didn’t, but somehow, I managed to bring myself to a stop before I swung the axe. I dropped it at his feet, said, “You’re not worth it.” and turned away from him.
He picked up the axe, and came toward me, looking like he planned to use it.
My brother drop-kicked him, and we fled the house.
We went to the nearby church we attended, in the hopes that someone might be there, but no luck. We were debating what to do when my mother drove up and asked us to come home. As we were now pretty cold (It was winter), we agreed.
My stepfather wasn't home, and when he got back there seemed to be an unspoken agreement to pretend the whole event never happened, and life went back to normal.
Of course, for me, “normal” is a very relative term ...
Most of the rest of our time in Colorado passed quietly, with one major exception. One day, on my way home from school, I found a woman’s nightgown that had been left on a fence. (Don’t have a clue how it got there, honest) I decided to take it home, and did something that was either really dumb or a subconscious way of trying to get the issue of my gender out in the open - I asked my mother for a cup of hot chocolate, slipped on the nightgown, and went to bed and covered myself with blankets up to my neck.
Of course, when my mom came in the room with the hot chocolate, she realized I was acting strangely, and demanded I pull back the blanket. When I did, she accused me of stealing the nightgown, which I disputed hotly, and asked me if I wanted a girl wardrobe to go with it.
My life would have been so different if I had only answered yes ...
Finally, our time in Colorado ran out, and we had to return to Canada. My brother had gone ahead, as he couldnt stay once he graduated high school and finished a bartending course, so it was my mother and I in one car and my stepfather in the other as we headed north.
It was almost the last trip I ever took.
My mother was suffering from a cold and had taken medicine which made her drowsy, and my stepfather refused to stop so she could rest. The result was when he pulled out of a access road because the gas station had been closed, she didnt quite manage to make the adjustment, and ended up driving sideways in a ditch, with a barbed wire fence all between us and flipping right over ...
But I guess it wasn’t my time to die, so we safely managed to get back to Canada.
But not everything was roses ...
