Canine News

We have sadly discovered that our beloved Piper (the Punk), is not as perfect as we thought she was when she joined our family. We now know that she has a serious disability, and we are, of course, heartbroken that Pipes is not "normal" in society's terms, but we will love her and care for her as if she were like any other dog who looks like an alien baby, smells like she lives on a diet of beans, cabbage and broccoli, snores like a drunken sailor and thinks she is a Pugtreiver.

The Punk can't bark.

Every once in a while I'm in another part of our three level townhouse and hear, from the first floor, the sound of a gerbil being strangled (or, more accurately, the sound I think a strangling gerbil would make, never having heard a gerbil strangle). The sound is pathetic, very heart-wrenching, and it always catches me off-guard.

It's Piper, trying to bark. Like a dog. The alien baby is so determined to be seen as a real canine that she steadfastly pretends to be disability-free, but the sad truth is that the Punk squeaks.

Yes, she plays fetch, yes she loves bones, yes she loves her stuffies (and has a very disconcerting obsession with tree limbs and leaves), but she is more rodent than dog. Actually, no self-respecting rat would make a noise that lame.

The other dogs are fine. Madison lost 10 pounds, Kirby found them. Chunky hates Piper with a passion. MacKenzie-the-Shark is plotting a coup, Clio is Clio, sweet and simple. The dogs have us, beaches and one another, life is good.

Except for the defective Pug.

The Guilty, All Of Them, Need To Be Held Accountable.

It's 2006, and little children, babies, are still being murdered by members of their "families" or people responsible for their care and protection. Thousands of kids are being brutalized in their own homes, with no hope of escape. Foster care is a joke, and a bad one, living on the streets is life-limiting, and though lots of lip service is paid to the plight of abused and neglected children, nobody is making any real moves towards societal change.

And somebody knows. Somebody is always aware, we do not exist in vacuums, and battered children are not invisible. People who are alert to the fact that abuse is taking place and choose to do nothing, say nothing, for whatever pathetic excuse they conjure up, are complicit. Not quite as guilty as the abusers themselves, perhaps, but still as guilty as hell.

Child abuse, in all its insidious forms, has to be made abhorrent to every member of society, regardless of race, ethnicity, religious or cultural beliefs, or history. Until child abusers, and those who shield them by not reporting abuse, are reviled for being the cowards and bullies they are, children will be bruised and broken every single day. Some will die, some will live and grow up to be bruised and broken adults.

I know that there were several people in my small childhood community who knew what was happening behind the walls of my house. They knew, and chose to ignore the torture of small children. That's sub-human, repulsive behaviour, and I wish those people suffered with the pain of guilt. They don't though. Guilt requires an understanding of right and wrong, and people who allow the abuse of children are not burdened with conscience.

I'll see you all in hell.

Blue Eyes. Black Heart.

Has anyone ever touched you with the intent to inflict grievous bodily harm, with the absolute disregard for your health and welfare that can only come from someone who just couldn't care less whether you lived or died, as long as he wasn't held responsible? I'm not talking a slap here or a punch there, I'm talking a 1'x2' coming, in the dark, from nowhere, with no warning and no sound until wood finds flesh.

If you haven't, stop reading, you can't understand, and won't be made to understand by reading further, it'll just be heartbreaking or titillating, depending on whether you are compassionate or totally insensitive.

I've been coming to terms with a lot of my less pleasing characteristics lately. Part of my disposition is hard wired, but mostly, my temperament is the direct result of fist on flesh, or some weapon chosen for versatility, watching siblings being pounded, waiting for the next attack (and there was always a next attack), and knowing, being reminded every day, and many nights, that the bastard could do whatever he wanted to me, whenever he wanted, and I was only going to stop him by escaping or dying.

Not that I didn't fantasize. My body was battered, but my imagination ran riot. I planned a hundred, maybe a thousand ways to stop him, hurt him, kill him. I knew that I could never get away with any of my vicious daydreams, but they allowed me some vengeance, at least in my soul. My fantasies were vile, and had I mentioned them to anyone, I'm sure I would have been labelled a troubled child and not just "trouble".

I am a violent person masquerading as a pacifist. My father taught me to suck it up, put all feelings aside, but I also learned that brutality is the ultimate power. I will never be the victim of any man again. I know how to defend myself now, and may Goddess help anyone who tries anything. I'm just afraid that once started, I'd never stop.

Retribution became a big deal to me as a very small child. I couldn't stop my father (or my mother) but there were other wrongs to be righted. I settled scores for any unfairness I witnessed, regardless of whether I was involved. I brought myself a whole world of hurt doling out reprisals for stuff that was none of my business. One teacher actually broke her pointer on my leg, and screamed at me, "What are you, inhuman? Do you not feel pain? Do you like pain?" I remember thinking "pointer, amateur".

I learned to nurse a grudge, forgetting no slight, regardless how insignificant. One was my ally or my enemy. I became the anti-bully, protecting the small from the big, the weak from the powerful. I fought like a tiger to protect my little brother from threats, both real and imagined, and I have the scars to prove that I won the battle of wills with years worth of teachers to keep my brother safe. They had no weapons in their arsenals scarier than my father's hands. I had no weapons at all.

I developed into an angry young woman, embracing rabid, uncompromising feminism. I went from identifying as a Lesbian to acting and reacting as I believed a Dyke should. As an adult woman, I am still angry and full of hatred, but my rages are fewer and more centred. I don't go looking for physical altercations anymore, but I am a sarcastic bitch who storms through life with balled fists and clenched teeth all the time.

I hate. My anger is not distaste, it is violent abhorrence of many things: child abuse, child poverty, child sexual abuse, violence against women, systemic racism, homophobia, religious intolerance. I have overblown, fierce reactions to being questioned about my actions, although those reactions are generally delayed, and I blow up over something stupid and unrelated hours or days later.Just like almost every other humam being I also get pissed at traffic, stupid people, empty milk cartons left in the fridge, dirty dishes in the sink, someone saying "sorry, I didn't hear you" for the umpteenth time. I get angry when I'm scared, I get angry when I'm tired. Am I going to beat someone into unconsciousness with a belt or a broom handle because I'm angry? No, I'm not. Am I going to watch another part of my heart blacken and die?

Yes, yes am.

Nature vs Nurture

It is said, by people who are supposed experts, that two of the most important aspects determining who we become are nature and nurture. Obviously heredity is an important factor, and it comforts me to realize that my birth mother provided me with enough positive traits to help my nature overcome the total lack of nurturing I received.

I've never really given much thought to searching for my birth mother. I occassionally give in to the "what-ifs", but not in any serious way, certainly not in any formal manner. I've given zero thought to finding my birth father, which seems to be the norm for most of my adopted friends and aquaintances. I grew up being told that my birth mother was 17, and I was born as the result of a rape. This could be true, and I certainly believed it when I was a child, which caused me no end of self-hatred, but as an adult, I have come to doubt the "facts" of my conception. She probably was 17, and as a Jewish teenager in Newfoundland in the mid sixties, being 17 must have been hard. She may have been raped, but she may also have just had casual sex with some boy she knew. In a "good" Jewish family, in Newfoundland ( seems oxymoronic, I know) in the sixties, being raped was far more acceptable than screwing with some local and getting "knocked up". He must have been a Gentile (like 99 % of Newfoundlanders were at that time) because I have brilliant blue eyes, unlike any of my siblings (all Jewish, all adopted) or any of my adoptive mother's people (all "pure", as I was often reminded, unlike me).

She hasn't tried to find me, I haven't tried to find her, and I can live with that. My sister found her "real" mother, and it was an unmitigated disaster that nearly destroyed my sister's fragile psyche. I have questions, of course.....health related, history, the usual stuff, but what I really want to know, what would really fill the empty spaces, is "why?" She would never be able to give me a satisfactory answer of course, and no response would truly make a difference, except for maybe a measure of comfort, knowing that it wasn't my fault I ended up where I did. I have to believe she felt she was doing the right thing, although in reality she probably had no voice in the decision to give me away. I have to believe that she hoped my life would be better, easier, bigger than hers. I have to believe, in order to protect my own sanity, that she had no idea she was sending her newborn into hell, or she would have found a way to stop it. I don't so much need to know if she loved me at all, but I do need to know that she didn't hate me.

The mother I ended up with should never have been given a child to raise. She couldn't take care of herself, and being burdened with other womens' unwanted offspring just made her problems deeper, darker and more acute. My brother once considered launching a lawsuit against the agencies that gave several babies to a couple who were woefully, obviously and horribly ill-equipped to care for them. They gave a sexual predator trapped victims, they gave two survivors of vicious childhood abuse, two people who never got help, never thought there was any other way of life, helpless babies who became the means for them to carry on the cycle of victims becoming perpetrators.

It stops here. I would no more harm a child than I would suddenly sprout wings and fly. There is no excuse for victims who become abusers, and I have no tolerance, no empathy, nothing but disgust for any survivor who harms children. Judgemental? Yeah, so? Child abusers are scum, they deserve to be judged, and until every member of society demands that abusers be stopped, more and more terrorized kids will grow up to be disfunctional adults.

Until every child is a wanted child, a loved child, a protected child, we must all take responsibility.

I Can't Let Go.

I get fixated on subjects sometimes, and letting go is a process of perseveration followed by an almost physical separation of my thoughts from my brain.

Right now my family of origin is wedged, tight, into my psyche. If I could verbalize my thoughts, I suppose it might not take so long for the natural progression from thought to obsession then on to something manageable, but I can't speak with the ease of writing, and I'm a two-finger typist (guess which two fingers I use).

We were an almost silent family. Nobody spoke unless spoken to, and the lack of sound was deafening. When I was young, my mother was a screamer, but as we got older, and her alchoholism became complete, she stopped yelling, and communicated with her fists, belts, brooms, and in at least one case, a fireplace poker. She'd wreak havoc, then sleep, her rage spent, while we tried to make sense of a totally nonsensical world.

My father never raised his voice. He spoke in calm, clear, accented sentences. When he got mad, his voice lowered, and lowered again, until it was nearly impossible to hear what he was saying. It never really mattered what he was saying anyway, my father never believed in talking things through. Actions speak far, far louder than words, and there is no language that comes close to fist, leather, wood or metal on flesh.

We were not permitted to cry. We did, of course, when we were too young to know how to make the tears stop. Sometimes I think the psychological torture was far worse than the physical. I learned fast, my brother much more slowly, to remove all feeling from my body. That was the easy part. Cutting off feelings is literally a double-edged sword, the pain is deferred, but feeling anything at all becomes hard, sometimes impossible. I still almost never feel hunger, I ignore most pain, or only acknowledge it when things are dire, I have inappropriate responses to some situations, and as awful as they can be (laughing when someone is hurt, getting angry when someone is crying) I truly cannot change those reactions. For years I simply denied my own need for sleep, and now I take medication to supply me with the ability to get six hours of real rest. I spent so many years forcing myself to stay awake to protect my brother and myself that it became a habit to be awake for days and nights) at a time.

There was never enough of anything in our house, heat, food, money, love. If my mother cooked something, and there was too little to feed everyone, somebody didn't eat. That person was never one of my parents, and whomever went hungry on any given day was not allowed to leave the table until everyone else finished. My sister, brothers and I knew the rules, and followed them, to do otherwise was unthinkable. My brother was a skinny, scrawny little kid, whose head seemed far too large for his body. He was always hungry, he woke up every day and went to sleep every night with an ache in his belly. Trying to share food, save food or steal food could result in broken bones, but we both tried anyway.

To say that food and issues around food and eating still plague me is a gross understatement. I don't think I will ever have a normal, healthy relationship with food.

Chanukah, birthdays, any special occassions meant that someone would be left out. I am still far more comfortable with giving gifts than receiving them. There can never be too many gifts for those I love, it becomes critically important for me to not only find the right present, but enough presents.

It will get easier, I have faith in my partner, my family of choice and my doctor. I've already survived childhood, it can't get worse than that.

Can it?

Stephen Harper. Socially Inept And Arrogant. Who Knew?

What an interesting man our current Prime Minister is turning out to be.

Everyone knew that Mr Harper had his God's private cell phone number, e-mail address and they were closerthanthis in Harper's rabidly religious little mind, but St. Stephen seems to feel he's in line to take over from St. Peter as God's right hand man. He's already proving that he's a decisive resolution maker. No more flying the flag at half staff when members of Canada's military are killed in action in some part of the world that resents our presence and will fight to the death to get our sadly under-funded, under-equipped and under-staffed troops back on Canadian soil, alive or dead. You tell 'em Mr. Harper, that's the way to lead a divided country.

Lester B. Pearson must be weeping in whatever plane he inhabits.

Harper hates the press, does not believe in free speech, has a short fuse, a shorter memory, and is distainful of anyone who isn't, well, him. Or George W. Bush, who is the only other mortal that Harper seems to believe is worthy of his time and energy. Like Dubya, Harper is a marginally intelligent, socially clumsy, egomaniacal and power hungry politician. The difference between Bush and Harper is that Dubya stole the presidency fair and square, and unless the U.N. gets smart and charges him with crimes against humanity, he'll go down in America's dubious history as a legitimate two-termer. Harper is the basically by-default leader of a minority government in a country that can be fickle. There are not enough dyed-in-the-wool far (far) right conservatives in Canada to save him and his little band of throwbacks should he piss off enough people.....and he will. The fifth estate is a powerful force in a large, far flung country. When the press finally decides that this obnoxious, narcissistic, Dubya-wannabe has to go, they will ensure that even the most die-hard Bible-thumping, freedom-hating, fire-and-brimstone Albertans sees Harper for what he is. A bogus, shallow man who got lucky for a while, and was allowed to perform the role of Prime Minister of Canada.

Uh-Oh. Poetry.

i learned to be a girl child
at the knees
of women
brutalized
made harsh and distant
generation after generation
each one more filled
with self loathing
by their mothers before them
in a world made
foreign
heartless
frightening
by their own fear
i learned to be a woman
at the fists of men
brutal
harsh and distant
hate filled
made violent
generation after generation
by their fathers before them
in a world made for
conquering
dominating
terrorizing
and now i am an alien
unprepared for adulthood
personhood
womanhood
in a world made for
affection
compassion
tenderness
pain and fear i understand
learned through the blood of foremothers
the violence of forefathers
i do not question hurt
it is love i dread

Laying Demons To Rest

I'm in the inenviable position of finally coming to terms with the things that make me tick. I have great respect for womyn (and men) who successfully fight their internal battles early in their adulthoods, giving themselves the permission to live the balance of their lives on their own terms.

I tried, as a much younger adult, to work through the traumas of my childhood. I failed, at that time, quite miserably, and gave up healing as a lost cause. So I crashed through life, bull-in-a china-shop style, never feeling "okay", never feeling "real", allowing myself to do stupid things, dangerous, thoughtless and sometimes awful things, and justifying my bad behaviour, my carelessness, my lack of responsibility by blaming everything on the abuse.

Not to diminish the effects of the abuse. It was horrific, and I can now look back at my child self and say, with absolute truthfulness, that I could not survive that level of violence, terror, pain and cruelty now. I was a much tougher kid than the adult I grew to become. That I escaped my childhood at all amazes me, to have escaped with my intellect intact, and to have accomplished any meaningful and healthy goals is a small miracle.

Our house had no interior doors. There was no privacy, no place to hide. My father was a functioning alchoholic who was given to flying into fits of rage with little or no warning. He was an angry, deeply unhappy man who blamed everyone but himself for the life he led. Nobody in "his" house was safe from him. My mother, my siblings and I were at his mercy. Except that there was no mercy.

My mother grew up being battered, emotionally, physically and verbally, by her mother. Her father was a happy drunk, seemingly oblivious to the torture endured by my mother and her sisters. In reality, he chose to abdicate any responsibility for the safety and well-being of his children, and my mother, in turn, chose to hide in a bottle and let my father brutalize his children. We were violated in every way that one human being can be violated by another, often in full view of other family members. My father seemed to enjoy finding new ways to cause pain, ours was a world of hurt.

The difference between my mother and her father is that my mother was not a happy drunk. She slept a lot, but when she was awake, she was almost as vicious as my father. She hated my younger brother with a passion. There was something about him that caused her to lose any control she ever had of her temper. I spent years trying to defend my brother from her, and from my father, with various degrees of success. Sometimes he escaped, most times he didn't. I deflected their violence when I could, but more often than not, we were both left bruised and bleeding, clinging to one another, bound by our shared misery.

My brother hasn't spoken to me in many, many years. I'm a Lesbian, and regardless of the number of times we spent long nights hiding outside together, regardless of the number of times I intercepted blows that were meant for him, regardless of the number of times I held him while he cried, I no longer exist to him because I love womyn, and to him that is unforgiveable. I stood by him during his self-destructive years of drug and alchohol abuse. I bailed him out of jail, lied for him, cried for him and almost died for him, and his last words to me were "I hate you." Too bad I still love him as much as I did when he was five, too bad I would still give my life to save his, too bad I can't turn my back on someone who no longer exists.

I developed into an angry, fearful, defensive, reckless and scary adult. I don't drink, I don't do illegal drugs, I'm not a sexual predator and I don't hit people, but other than that, I am a lot like my father. I'm passive-aggressive, I blame others for my failures and shortcomings, my temper can be violent and I often hurt the people to whom I am closest. I use words, or silence, or emotional blackmail instead of my fists, but abuse is abuse, and I'm as guilty as he was of throwing my weight around.

The biggest difference between me and my father is that I don't want to live this way. I know there is help, I understand my thoughts and my behaviours are not acceptable, and I'm choosing to do something about it. He self-medicated and fed his hatred. I'm following the advice of a medical professional and trying to extinguish the hatred.

Wish me luck.