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As a child my life was full of opportunities to live or die. The immediate choices were often contemplated and weighted against the consequence. I lived a life of fear and consequence; now I live my life and when I find fear, I find a cliff to throw it from.
The familiarity and the fear was all I had day in and day out. My need for consistent and familiar filled my every thought. On the rare occasions that my sister and I talked we would only talk about one thing; how our lives when we grew up were going to be so different. She would talk about loving and protecting her children and I would talk about how my life as a free woman would play out. I would never be tied to one man, I would have my own little apartment in the city and I would feel safe in my own skin. I would be a famous writer or singer and not one person would run my life the way every man ran my mothers life. My sister and I were always in agreement in the back of the car on our Sunday drives; our lives would be so much different when we grow up. Then we would fall back into our separate day dreams, staring out the window on opposite sides of the car while my little sister slept between us.
After three years in our house on Covington Road mom and our step-father found a house in Ridgefield for rent. Our move like so many others was swift but less confusing. Our step fathers dream was to live his life in Ridgefield and as his prisoners we were to move without consultation and with complete disregard for our own lives. We moved at the end of a school year to a dumpy little house on Elm Street. Like so many other moves we packed out things and unpacked our things like robots without complaint and in complete silence. The house had rose bushes in the front yard that seemed a hundred years old. The grass had grown higher that the windows in the front and so our summer was spent working tirelessly to make the house inhabitable. The grass was cut but hand at first until it was low enough to run a mover over the top of the uneven cuts, it took nearly two weeks to finish cutting the grass with a sickle and a hand push mower. Walls were torn out of the inside and 80 year old newspapers were found inside the walls doubling as insulation and a historical reference whenever we could keep shards of them in one piece. Dry-wall was hung, taped and plastered. We never actually attained a real heating system in the house, so the kerosene heaters were found and placed strategically throughout the house for heat as the rainy season approached. Once again we were enrolled in school and we found ourselves again trying to build a life as foreigners.
Ridgefield is the smallest town we had ever lived in, our anonymity was diminishing and I felt that we were being watched and judged around every turn. Friends in high-school were hard to come by but slowly over time we each found a friend to talk to but only at school because friends at home or during the weekend were forbidden by our step father. Friends by any right were forbidden because outsiders threatened our step-fathers hold over us as a family. Our home became our prison and any outside contact was potentially dangerous. He found ways to put us down or find fault in any friends. If I found a friend he found a reason that I shouldn’t hang out with them. Either they were too stupid, a bad influence or they would get me hooked on drugs. Boys were strictly forbidden in any sense. There would be no boyfriends because any contact with a boy would turn us into whores which would eventually lead us into a life on the street selling our asses. Each day our lives were spent in the same way, we would go to school, come home and do our chores – after dinner we would each retreat into our rooms to read, write or paint; anything that was quiet is what we were allowed.
My mothers life was much the same, she would go to work, come home and go to bed only to rise again the next day and do
