hiatus

This year is almost over and I haven't written since early April, obviously. Don't remember why I stopped or if it even was a conscious decision.

This is a cathartic blog so I will continue. I want to continue.

Like I said in previous post, I was a somewhat sad, quiet child with few friends. Did really well for myself in school. Got a really good friend around the age of eleven ... she lost her dad at that age, and I lost mine when I was two, so we had sort of a common denominator there. That wasn't the only one. We were ambitious, studied ... one summer, I remember we studied German on the beach -- learned the prepositions by heart!

When she was around fourteen/fifteen [she was one year older than I], she met a guy! Young love! However, our roads parted a little at that time. This was in my grade 8. I can almost look back on a particular day when everything changed. I had very long hair, but went to a hair-dresser and had it cut short and I think I started smoking for real about the same day. Changed totally, started hanging out with the «in-crowd» in school.

The evening I had my first drink is forever etched in my memory because I was so scared. Doing something against what my, extremely dominant, mother felt so strongly about, was frightening beyond words, but somehow the peer pressure won.

One of my newly won friends had stolen a big bottle of cognac from her father, and we shared that in a park. I got very drunk, but not as drunk as could be expected ... I remember most of the evening and I actually walked home! I think that is significant ... any other teenager would have crawled on all fours.

After that first encounter with alcohol, there was mainly beer and wine. It had hit home with me, big time. All of a sudden I had FUN, I was social, had lots of friends.

My Mom discovered that I'd started smoking, because a bus driver snitched on me. She sent me to see a psychiatrist. Her reaction was comparable with if she'd found out I'd started heroine or something.

My grades dropped sadly, so I didn't make it to real highschool [it's not called that ... it's a whole different system there]. Went away to another town, far away, to go to school for one year. Things didn't exactly get better there ... twelve girls living in a sort of dormatory [not really], same age, away from home for the first time. Made it through that year with pretty good grades still, went back home and got a job. Kept that job for twelve years. It was like growing up there, because I had not yet turned seventeen when I started to work there.

Things were going pretty good, considering. Good job, living at home with Mom, saving a great deal of money. Partying a lot, but it didn't really get out of hand. Never so that I lost memory or had to call in sick due to booze.

About the same time as I started working there, I met the man, who later in life would become my husband. I'll save that for next post.

Besides, I see now that this was pretty much a repetition of an earlier post. I should have read it first, but what the heck...