When reality hit

By the time I was a teenager I had been so sheltered from reality that I had no idea how bad things really were. I still thought that only bad guys and robbers did drugs and bad things and the the real everyday people never did bad things. Even though my dad was an alcoholic and my mom did cocaine every weekend. I was completely naive and oblivious to the real world! I lived in Sarah's world! Bad things only happened in the movies. How my parents managed to keep me so isolated while living in Verdun, a small town in Montreal, filled with gangs and drugs and  violence either took a lot of creativity on their part or I was just too gullible, or a bit of both.
I remember one night where in reality some guys robbed a bank and were caught and there were cops and swat cars and if I remember correctly the military all with guns out waiting for theses people to come out. Well those guys they were after were on our roof. I wanted to look out the window to see what was going on, my mom kept shoving my head down telling me that they were making a movie. Well then maybe I could watch it live or even be on TV too and I kept trying to see and she kept shoving my head down. I was so mad at her thinking why she always had to ruin my fun! Although things like that happened all of the time in our town, I never had any idea!
My first dose of reality happened when I was 12 years old, a girl I had known had been murdered. There are no words to describe what I was feeling. My parents tried to shield me from as much of it as possible but it was everywhere. On every station, in every paper and of course being talked about all over the school. They didn't really know how to talk to me about it, seeing as how they'd never really had to talk to me about anything hard they'd always just covered it up. I pretty much just stayed in my room. I didn't want to talk about it because I didn't want anyone to know how much I was hurting. She a year younger than me and a grade lower. When I was in grade 6 and her 5, we played together, I shared my lunch with her, we talked, she told me things, we were friends! I moved up to high school in grade 7 and she was in grade 6, but somedays on my luches I would go back to the school to visit some of the teachers and other kids, and her. She hadn't decided on what high school to go to yet and I was trying to convince her to choose the one I was going to. Then one night on the news there was her picture and then came the news. Sarah Dutil Coculuzzi, 11 years old, brutally murdered. The graphic details were so horrifying! She had been beaten, strangled, sexually assaulted, stabbed through the eye, and killed and then stuffed into a hockey bag and tossed into the dumpster. All alone! I would just imagine at how scared she must of been how alone she must have felt and just how unfair it was! THe guy who killed her was on trial for murder but never sentanced. I will never be able to walk past a dumpster bin without getting chills! That was the first funeral I had ever been to. A piece of me changed, a part of my inocense was gone and my views of the world changed. I just wanted to stay in my room and just be alone. I stopped being interested in things. What was the pint if someone could just come and kill you for no reason. I was mad at my parents for ever letting me think that the world was good and not to worry about things. How could I not worry if people were out killing kids!
I slowly started to get back to my life and move on but it just felt so different. I didn't feel safe anymore like I used to. I felt like bad things could happen. I would go on with my days the way I always had but my mind just wouldn't let me fully enjoy anything. It took a long time to start to feel normal again. But slowly I did. I will  never fully let go of what happened to her but I had to move on.
Things at home were really shaky. My mom was so tense and my dad was drinking more and more. My mom wanted to have a baby. She wanted a baby so badly and all of her friends were having their 3rd and 4th children and all she had was me and I was growing up, I was already a teenager, wouldn't be much longer until I was moved out and then she'd have no one. It was driving her slowly insane!
Well she got her wish, she was pregnant! She was so happy! I was so happy, I really wanted a sister or a brother. We started gathering baby things, going through my old baby things and picking out some new things here and there. We were all so excited! One morning I heard my mom crying in the bathroom, really crying hard. I knew that her and my dad had been fighting the night before but I didn't think much of it and continued to get ready for school. My mom was crying so hard and wouldn't come out of the bathroom and well I had to go. I went in, with an attitude like other people live ere, hurry up and that is when I saw her, on the floor by the toilet and blood everywhere! She told me that she lost the baby. I didn't quite understand so I was like well I will help you find it. She cried more and said its gone. She couldn't bear to flush the toilet. She couldn't get up. SHe was heartbroken beyond! I helped her to the couch and just layed with her the entire day. We did not speak, we did not move. Nothing was ever said about it after that day, ever!
I started to see how unhappy my parents were. They barely spoke to eachother and when they did it was yelling. You could feel the tension as soon as you walked in the door. We tried to do things fun like going camping but it was still the same, lots of fighting or nothing at all. My dad found out that someone he had known had a pregnant daughter and they did not want to keep the baby. My dad knew the only way to make things right with my mom was to give her a baby so he thought they could get this baby! He tried. This little baby girl was born right around the time my mom's baby would have been, it was almost like fate! We had the baby for 1 month when the child welfair came in and said that the child must go to a registered foster home. My mom asked how we could become a foster home and the lady explained that it would take a long time. The mother of the baby found this out and did not want her baby going to just anyone so she took her back until we could find out a way to work it out. My mom was a mess. It was like her baby had been taken again! She had lost all hope! My dad kept trying, my dad worked out with the mom that his name be placed on the birth certificate as the father and then she could just sign over custody to the father of the baby and child welfair never has to know. It worked! We had a baby! SHe was now ours! Things with my parents seemed good for a while, although my dad's drinking was starting to get out of hand and my mom was so stressed about taking care of the baby but she couldn't because she had to keep dealing with him. My dad had been accused of child molestation. My mom was mad but was sure it was all a missunderstanding but at the same time she had begged him not to go out that night and he did anyways and well after that who really knows what happened. My mom wasn't as concerned about the situation as she was as to how it would effect keeping the baby. She was so worried that the wrong people would find out and we'd lose that baby. It was talked about all over the place. I heard bits and pieces of the story and had met her myself and well since I would never really know what happened I put together my own version of what I believed happened and that was that this girl was 16-17 was pretty flirty and would go and sit on the men's knees and ask for some beer and when my dad said no to her she accused him of molesting her. I know my dad said no to give her some beer cuz well that would mean that he'd have less. Again I really don't know any of it just the bits and pieces that everyone else talked about and that was all just stuff they had put together, no one really knows what happened that night except it was another factor in the end of my parents relationship. It tore my dad up to know that people thought he could actually do this, or he was embarrassed that he got caught, either way he was really upset!
My whole world was turning upside down, one day nothing bad ever happened to all of a sudden so many bad things were happening. After Sarah's death I started self destructing. I would stop eating, just a meal here and there to start and then I would make games out of it like see how many days I could go with no food at all, until I got dizzy. After the stuff with my dad is when I started cutting myself, again just a bit here and there, usually on the top of my foot, a place no one would ever see, then it got worse and worse.
Things just seemed to keep going down but whenever things seemed to be at the worst, there was this beautiful baby who would just melt my heart. I could tell her all of my secrets and she couldn't tell anyone. She would just look up at me with love in her eyes. I would sneak her out of her crib after my parents had gone to bed and have her sleep in my bed with me. I would take her out for walks while my parents fought, I would come home from school early so I could be home before my mom got home and clean up and look after the baby because well my dad wasn't getting out of bed at all anymore and to save him from getting yelled at and us from having to listen to it, I would just solve it all by taking care of everything myself. Plus I loved being with her. Life had so much more meaning whenever her face lit up when I walked by or when she'd put her arms out for me to pick her up. I actually felt loved, not a feeling I had felt in a while. It was wonderful! Being at school felt so pointless, I knew I wouldn't need it since I was going to be the kind of mom who stayed home with my kids. I would never have to leave them with anybody and then spend the day worrying about them. No way, not be, I was going to be there for them and with them 24/7. Being at school and worrying about the baby was hard enough now never mind when it would be my own child! I just wanted to graduate high school, take the ECE program at Vanier college and then I could open my own daycare and have children, that way I could make money while being with my kids. The perfect plan! Life was actually making sense.