I’m a success story.
I’ve told parts of this saga in other threads, so I’ll try to condense it, so as not to be redundant.
I come from a violent and turbulent home in a little town in Southern Ontario. I escaped it when I was 15, and had been on my own since then, with very little to no support from family. I hitchhiked to Vancouver and back in 1976, because I had nowhere else to go. I wanted to be a musician, and after many years of practice, I’d met some good guys and we played well together. Then someone stole my Les Paul, along with the bassist’s new Rickenbacker bass, out of the rehearsal room. My life sorta hit the skids then, and I went on a prolonged period of unemployment and poverty, down to where I was living in hostels with bums, and eating with the poor and indigent. I was one of them.
Looking back, I could just never seem to get an opportunity to get ahead. I’d work somewhere for 89 days, and on day 90 they’d “lay me off indefinitely.” That meant I was ineligible for unemployment insurance, and with no further income, I’d lose the place I was staying and be back on the streets of Toronto. The whole second half of the '80s was my low point. In 1991, at the end of my rope, I moved back to the city where I was born, to be close to my family. I was rooming in a family’s house, in an illegal basement room next to the furnace, on assistance. There was no work that I could find. I was perpetually unemployed, except when I could get jobs out of day labor places.
The few friends I had were druggies. I was one, too. You know where that gets you, hanging out with people on drugs. I lost many of my possessions to them over the years. I had never had a serious relationship with a woman. I wasn’t ready for that kind of responsibility yet. I still had a lot of problems to work out before I could be worthy. I was getting into my mid-thirties, and it made me begin to wonder about myself. I suspect others did, too. I knew I could be OK if something would just happen to me.
In 1996, my hobby was dealing in Beatles audio memorabilia. I had a client in the southern States, who was also a woman. We liked the same thing! We had just started to become friends when my mother got seriously ill and died. It sounds awful to say, but the trauma of losing my mother was blunted by new optimism about my blossoming relationship with my new lady friend. We became friends by mail over the summer and fall. She called me on my birthday in October, which began a very expensive series of phone calls that went on for two years. They eventually cancelled my long distance privileges until I paid my bill.
I worked out of temp agencies at factories and warehouses to get the money to buy a round trip plane ticket to Florida to meet my new friend, as she had shown signs that she was interested in me, too. I met her, and I knew she was the one. I knew that if I didn’t marry her, I may never get another chance like this, or meet anyone like her, and I’d kick my ass for the rest of my life. She said yes to my proposal. Over the next two years, we wrote hundreds of pages to each other…35 page letters, spent hours on the phone, and visited each other several times.
In the spring of 1998, I came here to stay, and we were married a week later. This coming May 9th, we will have been married for ten years, without an argument. No tears, no shouting, no drama. Everything has been totally copacetic, and we are the best of friends as well as lovers. During my time here, I found my dream job. The job I always wanted, and I can stay at it until I get a pension. I have just about all the things any man would want. I have toys and equipment, and some really good friends who have turned me on to a lot of things I’d never experienced before. I love it here. I feel like I belong here, and I feel like I belong to people now - my in-laws and my friends. I didn’t used to know what that felt like.
I have little or no contact with my family. They are all but strangers at this point. With both our parents now deceased, the family unit has collapsed. I doubt I will ever see my siblings again, nor anyone else I’m related to. I miss the idealized memory of what we used to be once, but it’s never going to be that way again, if it ever really was. Our family, and our extended family, were dysfunctional on a sick level. We are now all having to deal with the post-traumatic shock of our childhoods alone. But on the bright side, I have all these people here who know me and like me now, and respect my ability and my opinion, unlike others previously alluded to. And I am happy now. I’ve been happy for ten years. A record, to be sure.
I can never forget the things I’ve seen, but having experienced them makes me who I am, and at last, I’m comfortable with that person. So I cleaned up my act to be worthy of my wife’s continuing company. It was entirely worth the effort. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things in my life, but not this. There is a real satisfaction knowing that I went for it despite the odds, and it all worked out.
My heart goes out to everyone else in this thread. There are some heartbreaking stories here, and still others of breathtaking courage. I wish everyone the best.
