Stuff about me

During part of my teenage years my Father had a girlfriend.  The six of us, my Father, the girlfriend, her two kids and myself would often be involved with different activities.  These ranged from visits to such riveting institutions as the State Library of NSW and the State Archives of NSW to holidays away together.  My brother and I were used to visits to these institutions and generally found things to amuse ourselves with while our Father did his boring genealogy.  Turns out his girlfriend also had an interest in genealogy and so it led to the four of us kids having to amuse ourselves while our parents poured over riveting reels of microfilm and sheets of microfiche.

* During the proof reading I remembered the Milperra Massacre.  Probably isn’t important but it’s one of those things that have stuck in my mind because we were only a few kilometres away when it happened.  It also gives a better date reference then I previously gave.  See Milperra Massacre

When I was a little older, probably around 16 or 17, I was excused from the weekend stays at my Father’s girlfriend’s house and after about the third year in a row to the same holiday location for Christmas I was allowed to stay behind.  It was a little odd in that I wasn’t trusted to stay in our apartment by myself but my Father was OK with the idea of me staying at some boarding house type establishment down the street.

Around this time I’d dropped out of school to work at K-Mart.  As touched on in earlier blog entries I made friends there and we formed a group of friends comprising of people from work and school.  Over time this group grew into friends of friends and probably peaked at about eight or nine of us socialising together.

Some of the group were closer mates than others and often it was the original core group that would gather at my place on Friday and/or Saturday nights for sessions of drinking, smoking pot and for a brief phase a few of us dabbled in speed. At the time I was having a ball.  I had a new found freedom and sense of responsibility which I flaunted in the true tradition of being a teenager.  My place was the place to be on weekends.  Thinking back it was probably more about my place being more convenient than hiding by the river or some other discrete location to indulge in our recreational escapism.

I only lasted at K-Mart a few months before I resigned.  I started in the Home improvements sort of section which I enjoyed.  It was all a hardware, tools, paint and very manly stuff.  I was 16, fresh out of school, working and obviously a man now.  This department suited me to a tee.  For some reason I was moved into Plastic ware which I thought couldn’t be further removed from the previous department.  I was wrong.  They next moved me to Crockery and Glassware.  I was increasingly displeased with working there. I think that started showing through when I took some sickies.  It was only a few but I’d only been there a few months.

At around the same time I had my first serious girlfriend.  At that age I considered it a serious relationship because my only previous girlfriend and I did little more than kissing and some infrequent groping.  With this girlfriend it was obviously serious because we were having sex.  At 16 sex is a serious thing, albeit clumsy and sometimes unsatisfying.  At the beginning of the relationship I figured that dating her wasn’t the wisest of moves mainly because my best friend had just broken up with her.  I knew I was the rebound boyfriend but I was the rebound boyfriend that was having sex so I went along with it.

I don’t think I fell in love with her but being the first sexual partner I felt a closeness to her I hadn’t felt before.  I felt some degree of closeness to the first girlfriend but not like I did with the current girlfriend.  To this day, despite being basically used by her to get back at my mate, I still have fond memories of her.  To be honest, and I hadn’t really thought about it before, I guess I was using her to some degree too because I made efforts to keep the relationship going, partly because I liked her but logically I think, and especially at that age, partly due to the sex.

Back to K-Mart; At around this time the relationship with the girlfriend was heading downhill.  I think she was talked out of seeing me by my mate’s sister.  One of the duties I was given at K-mart was to write down damaged goods.  We were to note the price and description of the product and in what way it was faulty.  It seemed like such a waste but no one was interested in giving the goods away.  It was imperative that they were destroyed and disposed off.

While I was cleaning out the plastic ware section of the store room I came across a lid to an hamper that I was unable to find the hamper for.  I put it to one side incase the hamper turned up so that I could pair them up and put them on the shelves for sale.  One of the Area Managers spotted the lid and angrily demanded why it hadn’t been written down.  I told him my reason then watched him remove the lid from the shelf and jump up and down on it until it was ruined.  I proceeded to do the necessary paperwork.  In the column for the reason why the product was no longer salable I wrote “Jumped up and down on by Area Manager”.  At the time I thought it was amusing but a I suspect the Area Manager didn’t.

Not long after, days or weeks, I was summoned to some office.  I don’t recall now if it was HR or the store manager.  I was told to sit down and we discussed my future at K-Mart.  He told me that it was obvious that I wasn’t happy at K-Mart and suggested that I should resign.  He then proceeded in handing my a piece a paper and pen so that I could write my resignation letter.  I didn’t know any better and it hadn’t occurred to me to involve the union that I was forced to pay money to so resigned thinking to myself “I’ll show them!”.  The innocence of youth.

A while after K-Mart I went through a string of jobs and for around a year I seemed a maintain a consistent pattern of working for three months then spending three months on the dole.  I was living at home, had no financial commitments, I didn’t care if I was working or not.  I enjoyed working and being responsible but I also enjoyed bumming around doing very little even though it usually meant that I had very little money to spend.

By now I’d stopped hanging around with the original core of friends.  The guy from K-Mart was still at working there, my mate from school was still doing his apprenticeship and we sort of grew apart from there on.  I still spent time with him but a lot less frequently then we used to.  It was around then that I started spreading my friendship wings and hanging out with other people.  More often then not it was another new friend and myself hanging out and doing regular teenage stuff.

One kid I was hanging around with was a couple of years younger then me and I think looked up to me as the older, wiser guy.  He was there the day the sticky brown stuff hit the shiny spinning things.  We were both at my place and I had most of a carton of beer in fridge thinking it would be hours before my Father would be home and I’d have plenty of time to clean up.  I hadn’t considered on how I’d sober up and as it turned out that ended up being a non issue.

He came home earlier then expected and soon spotted the beer in the fridge.  Turns out that that was the final straw.  He told me I had until the end of the month to move out.  From memory I packed some stuff and moved out that day.  I had no real idea of where I was going to stay but I still seemed to have a sense of “I’ll show him” about me and left.

Without background it reads like my Father was pretty harsh by kicking me out.  Up until that point I was a shit of a kid.  I lied, stole, came home drunk, came home stoned (but I think he thought I was drunk then too and I didn’t see the need to correct him).  Home life was an odd mixture of strict rules regarding things that seemed fairly unimportant and also a freedom that a lot of my friends were jealous of.

In some respects I think it was maybe it had it’s upsides.  To at least some degree it demanded that I had to grow up and grow up fast.

I stayed in a variety of places like the room above the elevator shaft in the building that a friend was living in.  The cement floor wasn’t terribly comfortable but the room was warm. It wasn’t long after that I heard of the existence of Men’s homeless shelters.  That was the beginning of a few years of living on the streets and in different homeless shelters over a few different states until I moved to Perth in around 2001.

It was a downhill spiral for a number of years and saw the introduction of the pills I was taking recreationally.  I’ve lost count of the different number of shelters I stayed in and the number of consecutive months when I was stoned on these pills constantly.  It was literally months on end during which I was under the effects of them.  One of the side effects of the pills that ranged from vaguely amusing me to scaring the absolute shit out of me was the hallucinations.  After a few bad trips I managed to better monitor my intake and mostly those episodes while still maintaining the numbness I escaped to under their influence.

And now it’s almost midnight.  Time to proof read, upload and go to bed.

I was at work one day late in December in 2007.  I took a call from Liz regarding an idea she had for a Christmas present for me.  From memory a few of her relatives were going to pitch in towards a present and she wanted to know if I would be OK with the idea of putting one of the cheques another relative had sent for the kid’s Christmas presents toward my present.  She hinted that the extra money would get a better version of the original gift she was planning on buying.

I gave it a quick thought and justified to myself that the kids already had a ton of presents and weren’t really at an age to appreciate the sheer volume they were already getting.  I felt a little guilty and selfish at the idea but agreed that the cheque could go toward my present.  For some reason I had it in my head that it would be an iPod.  Turns out later it was going to be a BBQ, which would also have been awesome.

I kept working throughout the day and later in the afternoon Liz called me again and said we needed to have a talk about something.  I tried to get more information out of her but don’t recall succeeding.  She picked me up from work that day rather then me catching the train home and we went about our afternoon/evening activities.  Cooking dinner, feeding and bathing kids, that sort of thing.

By this stage we’d already had a serious talk during which Liz said she was thinking about a trial separation unless I could stop drinking.  Going from the amount I was drinking to drinking nothing was mindblowing but the prospect of losing Liz and the kids was enough for me to agree to give up drinking.  Starting right then I decided I wasn’t going to drink anymore.  I decided to go cold turkey and stopped drinking.

I think I made a fair effort at it.  I also think that I too easily talked myself into excuses for having a drink.  One of the reasons Liz was against the amount that I was drinking was because I was little, or probably more accurately no, help with the kids when it came time to feeding, bathing and getting up to them during the night.  First excuse I made came within days of agreeing to stop drinking.  I justified that if one of the reasons for not drinking was that I was no help with the kids it should be ok for me to have a drink when they were away for the weekend or off visiting relatives in Melbourne.  Coincidently they were off for the weekend attending a friends wedding and I couldn’t make it due to work commitments.  So I made the most of it and drank while they were away.

Over the thirty days between the discussion about me stopping drinking I had drinks on the way home twice.  On the days that I came home sober I was in a fairly sullen mood.  I would wear my iPod and make myself busy in the garden.  I was digging new plots, planting new plants and giving the whole thing a good watering.  I found that listening to podcasts kept my mind, at least mostly, off drinking and was a useful tool in my ongoing battle.

When it came to dinner time, if I actually ate with the rest of the family, I was short tempered and snapped at silly little things like trying to teach a three year old daughter not to talk while she was eating.  That in itself was an uphill battle because it seems that when Liz was growing up that was less of a strict rule at their house then it was at mine so the poor kid was getting mixed signals.  Although I don’t specifically recall it apparently I was also less tolerant of the youngest son and his crying.  This was something I logically understood to be normal behavior for a baby but it grated on my nerves all the same and I made excuses to go back outside and continue gardening.

On the couple of days that I did have drinks on the way home I was my ‘normal’ happy self.  I’d play with the kids, mostly ignore the whole ‘eating with your mouthful’ and not be overly fussed if the young lad was crying a lot.  I think when the decision ultimately was announced one of the reasons behind it was, other than the kids watching me drink myself to death, the radical mood swings between when I was and wasn’t sober.

Continuing with the justification one of the great ideas I had was that rather then completely give up drinking I’d drink moderately on special occasions such as birthdays, Christmas, Australia day, etc.  I think this was part of Liz’s reasoning that I wasn’t as serious at giving up as I said I was.  I can see that that is how it looked.  In my defense I’d gone from drinking a 4LT cask of wine every two or three days plus two or three alcopops on the way home when my budget permitted to attempting to drink nothing at all.

Getting back to the original topic Liz and I had the discussion that she talked about that afternoon once we had the kids settled in bed.  Sometime between the phone call about spending the extra money on my Christmas present and later in the day she had come to the conclusion that she wanted a trial separation for 30 days and if I was still sober then we could see whether the marriage could continue.  I was in stunned silence for several minutes while I digested that news.

She offered to move her and the kids into a friends house if I wanted to continue living in our house.  I opted for moving out instead.  I packed some essentials and went looking for public transport late at night to make my way into the CBD to find a hotel room for the night.  My almost 30 days of sobriety ended that night.  It was around 9:30 - 10pm at night and it took visits to a number of establishments to find a room that allowed smoking.

The room was more then my budget could sustain so I found a cheaper room for the next several nights and stayed there.  I remember calling my Father and telling him “I’ve done it again” and went on to explain that Liz and I had separated.  The next morning I called in and told them I’d just split up with Liz and wouldn’t be in that day.  The next day I went to work and tried to get back on with my usual work.  To some extent it was good to bury myself in my work but ti wasn’t long before I utterly over estimated my ability to do my job well with what had just happened.  I talked it over with my Manager and he said I could take off whatever time I needed to get myself together again.  I was also especially grateful for a donation of a significant amount of money from a benefactor that helped allow me to extend my hotel stays, pay a bond, eat, etc until I found a unit to rent.

Within a night or two of being kicked out, and even though I know I was offered the house I still considered it being kicked out, Liz and I decided that she’d fly to Melbourne with the kids and live with her mother for a month to give me a chance to find an apartment to rent.  This would be a considerable saving for me in hotel charges.

We decided to do Christmas presents on Christmas eve that year as it would give the two older and two younger kids a chance to see each other for what may be the last time for a while.  Prior to that they saw each other every second weekend.  I maintained my composure throughout most of the day but by later in the afternoon all I wanted to do was go back to the hotel and start drinking again.  In what I considered a kind gesture Liz agreed to look after the older two kids until their mother arrived to pick them up.  By this time I’d already had a discussion with Mary and the older two kids that Liz and I had split up and Liz had, as best as is possible, Liz explained to the youngest daughter that Mom and Dad had some problems they couldn’t work out right now and were not going to be living with each other for a while to see if they could sort them out.

At the time I hated the idea of being near Liz.  As far as I was concerned she had given up on me and while we didn’t do the whole ‘in sickness and in health’ vows at the wedding it seemed like she could have put more effort into tolerating what I was going through.  I know I can’t speak from her perspective and I gather I must have been especially painful to live with at the time but it was my understanding that these were part of the challenges of marriage that you work through together.  That said, I couldn’t hope for a better mother for the younger two kids.

Early the next day, Christmas day, Liz and the kids picked me up from the hotel I was staying at and we went back to our house.  They finished packing and I took them to the airport for their flight to Melbourne.  I’ve not been overly sentimental about Christmas since I was a young kid but that was very definitely a shitty day.

I managed to find an apartment on the day before Australia day.  Over the next week or two I took most of the belongings I planned to take with me into the apartment.  This all happened just a couple of days before Liz and the kids were due back from Melbourne.  It was awesome seeing the kids again but by this time I’d made my decision.  There wasn’t going to be a trial separation.  As far as I was concerned there was no coming back from the trial and the marriage was effectively over.  Thinking about it it was a complete about face on my earlier opinion that these things should be worked through but that was my state of mind at the time.

Thinking back and comparing the end of the two marriages I don’t think I was near as bitter the second time but the two situations were so very different it probably wasn’t a good base for me to form part of my decision to end the marriage.  During a later discussion I told Liz that I still hadn’t felt the same depression I did the first time round, while trying to be sensitive about comparing the two wives with each other, she suggested that I probably hadn’t been sober long enough to give it proper thought.  I think she was probably correct.

To this day I think there is still a small part of me that would like things to have worked out differently.  The idea of happy family, seeing the the kids all the time and the companionship are very appealing but I can’t get past the idea that Liz gave up on me.

Not long after moving to Perth my mate and I found an apartment to share and moved in.  We did a couple of brief stints in backpackers hostels, which was fun, but it was time to move on.  The apartment was in Osborne Park, or Ossy Park, about 13km from the CBD.  It was a nice enough apartment that was priced within our unemployment benefits budget.

My mates parents lived in Perth, which was the reason we hitchhiked over from Newcastle (NSW).  Apparently when he was younger he was involved with a drama academy.  Getting up on stage was far from interest to me but I tagged along with him anyway for want of something better to do.  The woman that was teaching at the academy was still there from when my mate previously attended.  We were introduced to everyone.  Attendance at the academy consisted in taking part in lots of acting exercises and rehearsals for several performances per year.

I took part in most of the exercises but, for the most part, couldn’t be convinced to take a part in any of the plays.  I say for the most part because I had a brief walk on role in one play that I thought I sucked in.  I remember my Father telling me stories about him doing some lighting work for a club in Sydney when he was younger.  With this in mind I started doing back stage work and ended up Back Stage Manager.  A title that sounded more impressive then the work I felt I did.

I stayed on partly because I really enjoyed the buzz from the live performances and the social scene.  I’d been raised and thus far lived in a predominately male environment so socialising with females was very appealing.  This was more of a pill stage then a drinking stage.  Sure when we thew unofficial cast/crew parties there was alcohol but my escape of choice at the times was pills.  I was under the belief that I could maintain this without anyone finding out.  To the best of my knowledge I was successful at that endeavor.  The only thing I had to be careful of was not taking too many at once because one of the side effects were hallucinations.  Other than these pills I hadn’t had much experience with hallucinations.  They tended to consist of scary things which experience taught me led to embarrassing situations with me running around pointing out crazy things that only I could see.  Obviously not a situation that was desirable when I was coordinating lights, curtains and set changes during a public performance.

It was at the academy that I met the woman that was to become my first wife and mother to my older two children.  It all started slowly.  Mary had a car and frequently gave my mate and I a lift home after sessions at the academy.  The public transport situation to our place wasn’t great at the time.  I later found out the reason that she was giving us lifts home was because she liked my friend.  This was after Mary’s and my friendship had developed and I was solid enough in the relationship to find that funny.

The relationship started slowly.  We hugged and held each other on several occasions but it was a while before our first kiss.  I don’t recall the time frame but later I told her that I wasn’t certain what love was but that I loved her.  For me that was a huge step.  It would have been the first time in a number of years that I’d said it to anyone.  She told me she loved me too and I was the happiest I’d felt for as long as I could remember.  It didn’t occur to me that perhaps she said it because I said it first.

Things flourished from there.  My mate ended up dating someone that he’d dated in his youth.  He ended up keeping the apartment and I moved into a caravan in the backyard of Mary’s parents place so we could save some money.  We later married in about 1993.  At this point I was more of a social drinker, smoked pot a little and maintained a fairly minimal pill intake.

Not long before we married we found an apartment.  As it turns out it was in a block of apartments across the road from where my mate and I were living.  We lived there for a year or so then bought a house in Balga.  At the time it was a cheap suburb with a lot of Government sponsored housing.  According to a neighbor a lot of the houses in the area, including ours used to belong to air force and were used to house service men.  It wasn’t exactly a pretty house but it was ours, well actually it was mostly the banks.

My pot and pills intake started increasing while we were living there and I ended up spending a lot of time away from the house with friends.  If I was at the house I was often out the back in the shed keeping to myself.  Another form of escapism that took many hours of my time was IRC (Internet Relay Chat, precursor to such things as ICQ, MSN messenger, etc).  I had a group of online friends that I spent a lot of time keeping up with.  Some located around Australia and some in North America.

Mary soon picked up the IRC bug and found her own channel to chat in and made friends of their own.  There was little crossover between her online friends and mine.  My devotion of time to IRC kept us apart for significant periods of time.  Mary’s devotion of time to IRC widened that gap further.

Around this time, June 1994, our first son was born.  To us he was perfect but over time relatives started showing concern for his development.  I know I didn’t put in any effort to researching parenthood and to the best of my knowledge neither did Mary.  Sure we attended some prenatal classes but that was about it.

To this date I don’t really have a name for his condition but I’ve heard Mary mention Selective mutism.  It’s strange to observe, if I try and have a conversation with him it can be a great struggle to get a word or two from him.  Conversely watching from a distance he’s chats happily with some others.  I first noticed him chatting happily a lot later when he, his sister and my eldest from my second marriage were playing together in a room.

Up until fairly recently I’d assumed the reason behind his condition was related to my drug taking and carried a great amount of guilt for a long time.  I was at a point for a number of years that he was ‘just a bit different’ and that there was nothing actually wrong with him, after all not all kids are the same.

Several years later, when I was with the woman that was to become my second wife, we got into quite a heated argument over my son.  She was convinced that there was something wrong with him and specialists should be involved. I maintained that there was nothing wrong.  This was odd for a couple of reasons.  One reason was that we rarely, all throughout our pre, during and post marriage years had an argument that led to me losing my patience like I did that night.  The other thing that I now think is odd is that by this time he would have been about three or four years old and I suspect I was the only one that thought he was OK.

Pre, and during, my marriage to Mary she’d mentioned some of her own personal issues that she had gone through and it hadn’t occurred to me that this may be in any way related to his condition.  More recently, last year, Mary spent some time in hospital for reasons relating to her issue.

Since then I’ve rethought my stance on his condition and while not actually blaming Mary for being responsible it did cause me to rethink the situation.  Perhaps there was more then one reason, or perhaps the reason was completely unrelated to both of us.  To some extent this was a great weight off my mind.  I suspect there is still guilt there in the back of my mind but like a lot of things if I go looking and find something I don’t want to see how will I deal with it?

We also had a daughter in late 1995.  All indications were that she was a perfectly normal child and to this date there has been nothing to contradict that.  Granted her upbringing has been far from perfect, something I can relate to, and there are still things about it I’m learning but I’m sure that will come up in a later entry.

Looking back it may well have been before our daughter was born that the marriage was starting to breakdown, at least in my eyes.  At the time I was happy to put it out of my mind.  Maybe I was too wrapped up in myself.

In the early days of the marriage we kept going to the drama academy but for us that started slowing down as we started breeding.

I think it was around this time I ‘discovered’ my bisexuality.  A later discussion with a gay male suggested that my ‘discovery’ was actually me admitting it to myself.  I guess he’s had more experience in that particular area than I had but I had previously assumed and believed that I was heterosexual.  It was all very new and exciting but I didn’t really act on it in any form or intimate way.

I don’t recall exactly where it fits in the timeframe but there was a brief period where Mary had decided to take a holiday in Melbourne by herself.  This made me a little suspicious and luckily for me my, at the time, in-laws offered to look after the kid/s.  It was shortly after that episode Mary and I had a conversation and I found out that the reason our marriage wasn’t working was due to an issue that could have been avoided prior to the marriage.  I have unequivocally no regrets having both children but it appears now that the marriage was destined to failure from before it began.

It took me a little while to find a new apartment to move into.  I took very little with me and had to buy most essentials again.  I took the car because at the time I was working as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut and naturally needed the car to maintain that.  I took the computer too. To say the least I was pretty bitter about the whole arrangement.  It probably wasn’t the most fiscally wise move to make but I let her have the house.  I think her parents helped her catch up with the payments on the house and she made a small profit on it when she sold it later.

As it turned out it ended up being a good move.  After a period of taking too many drugs and drinking too much I woke up to myself and met the woman that was to become my second wife.  That eventually ended in separation but not before we were both blessed with two great kids.  These leads into a different section of the blog so I’ll leave it there for now.

I moved to Parramatta when I was nine and started at the local primary school the next year.  I became mates with a guy from the school that lived nearby and we often hung out together.  We did regular stuff like going to the school during the weekends to play cricket in the cricket nets, what videos at his place (he was the first person that I knew that had a video recorder, it was a Betamax with a corded remote control).

We ended up at the same high school, our friendship continuing.  He left high school after year 10 to start an apprenticeship and I was insanely jealous.  My Father insisted I finish high school so that I could go to university.  Via my friend I had a taste of the ‘real world’ and wanted out of school.  I soon lost interest in school.  I lasted about half of year 11 and ditched about half of that.  I found a job at a nearby by K-Mart then told Dad that I planned on leaving school and starting work.  To my surprise he didn’t put up much of an argument and my working life was about to start.

While working at K-Mart I befriend another guy, and subsequently his younger brother.  As time went on the four of us often hung out together.  My mate from school was about my age, the mate from K-Mart several years older and his brother a year or two younger.  Back in those days we smoked pot mostly and drank occasionally.  One or two of us dabbled in a few other recreational drugs at the time too.

On one occasion a number of people went to ‘find’ some pot that had been spotted earlier.  I wasn’t invited to come along but some other guy, who I vaguely remember going to our high school at one point, was.  I was a bit disappointed at missing the adventure but shit happens.  The night, by all accounts, was a success, and I was tasked with hiding my mates stash at my place because he didn’t want his parents to find it.  I was pretty easy to be talked into things at the time so I agreed to hide it at my place.

Unfortunately the temptation was too much for me and I started sampling the stash. Over a period of time I got a little carried away with how much I was sampling and the weight of the bag was noticeably lighter.  It had yet to be dried out so I tried making the weight up a little by sprinkling some water into the bag.  It wasn’t long after I handed the bag back to my mate that my plot was foiled.

The three mates and the blow-in turned up at my place one night with what I gather was revenge on their minds.  I got the sense that my mate from school had been talked into extracting revenge on me in the form of a beating.  He started the beating and between the few of them it continued on for I’m not sure how long but it seemed like hours.  He hit me a few times about the face, which I fully expected to hurt quite a lot but it wasn’t too bad.  I’ve often been more scared of perceived pain then actual pain.  The blow in wanted to take part in the beating too, I’m not sure why, I don’t see how it affected him in the first place.  He chased me and I kept my distance for around half a kilometre or so of near enough to sprinting then gave up to face the music.  Some sort of fancy kick later and I was missing a front tooth.  A little later the younger brother of the guy I had worked with had a beef with me over some stick throwing incident I was supposed to have done to his girlfriend several weeks ago.  His efforts were a waste of time, he attempted to knee me in the balls and missed and got my thigh then he left it at that.

What hurt most, mentally, was that my mate had given me a beating over something that I thought was fairly trivial.  Sure we’d had little bouts of violence in the past but it all seemed like good natured fun.  In this case he was clearly angry and wanted to hurt me, at least that was my impression.

To this day I’ve never really forgiven him.  We kept seeing each other and hanging out after that but it was never the same, not for me at least.

We caught up in Parramatta several years ago.  I was over from Perth for a relative’s Birthday and he and I made plans to catch up.  We had a few drinks, chatted about old times and what we were doing with our lives currently.  By this time is was about six years after the incident but I still hadn’t let it go.

I think not letting it go says more about me then about him.  Who knows, that was twenty years ago now, people grow apart, we may not have stayed as close friends anyway.

My guess is it stems back to childhood.  I don’t recall my Mother or Father actually saying “I love you” as we were growing up. For the sake of some fairness there is a lot of my childhood I don’t remember either.  I can’t tell the difference between what are memory of photos and slides of life before I was around four years old.  That was when we moved to Blacktown (NSW).  I have some memories of Blacktown and memories start getting clearer after we moved to Parramatta (NSW) when I was nine.

Logically thinking my parents marriage may have been in a state of breaking down during at least some of those first four years.  I don’t remember exactly how long after we moved to Blacktown when Mum moved out.  My memory is that it was when I was four (fact checking reveals it was closer to when I was six, the date of their divorce was my 7th birthday).   This means it can’t have been long was a couple of years after my brother was born.  He’s four years  younger then me.

I don’t specifically remember them fighting but as the story goes the first thing I said after my Father told me that Mum and Dad were going to be living separately was that I wanted to call my Aunty and tell her that the fighting had finished.  Based on that story I gather I must have seen, or heard, them fighting.

There are only two times that I recall telling my Father that I love him.  Once was Christmas day when he bought my Brother and I bikes for Christmas.  The other time was not long after my mates Father had died.  I don’t recall the initial cause of the trauma but he suffered some knee injury and at the time he seemed liked he’d be OK.  Days later a blood clot made it’s way to his heart and he had a heart attack.  At least that’s how I remember it.  One night not long after that we were out drinking at some club a long way from where we lived.  My mate and both got pretty smashed and during what was one of my rare instances of violence I tried to pick a fight with a few guys while I was in the restroom.  We left shortly after.

I’m not sure what triggered it but I saw that my mate as crying and it got to me me and I cried too.  I insisted that on the way home we detour via my Dad’s girlfriend’s place so I could talk to him.  That was the second time I recall telling him I love him.  It isn’t about not loving him just saying it hasn’t come naturally to me except for during, so far, a marital situation.

My Mother and I don’t keep close contact.  There was the occasional call I’d make when I was drunk and that was about it.  At least as far as I memory goes.  Though recently, I think Sunday 8th February 2009, the day after Black Saturday, she sent me an SMS to ask if I was OK.

When I decided to move to Melbourne my contact arrangements with the kids was full of good intentions.  I’d fly back from time to time to see them, I’d email them and when it came to Laura, I’d snailmail her.  At the time she had just started at school for a couple of days per week and had lots of artwork to show off so I gave Liz a stack of prepaid envelopes so that Laura could send me things she had recently done at school.  I also planned to call the kids periodically so that we could chat.  At Ethan’s age that wasn’t going to work, he was around 12 months old at the time, and Jack’s not big on talking and in my experience even less so on the phone.

I called Laura fairly regularly after I moved here to Melbourne. It didn’t seem long after I’d settled into my apartment that Liz, Laura and Ethan had moved to Melbourne too so that Liz could be closer to her Mother, Sister, etc.  Shortly thereafter I started regular Saturday visits with Laura and Ethan.

I haven’t managed to keep the same contact up with Jack and Nicole.  I went over there at Christmas time and saw them but we didn’t get much in the way of quality time together.  I spent Christmas Eve with Mary’s family, which was a little odd at first but I settled in nicely and it was almost like old times (the good part of the old times at least). I caught up with the kids again a couple of days later to exchange Nicole’s present.  I bought her a camera and it seems someone had bought her a camera just recently for her birthday.  I got a refund earlier in the day and met up with Mary and the kids a little later to go shopping for Nicole’s Christmas present.  Once that was done we had lunch together and that was the last I’ve seen them since.

I’ve called a couple of times and managed to speak with Nicole.  Nicole uses Facebook so we’ve exchanged cutesy Facebook application fluff and I’ve sent her a Facemail once (same concept as email but wholly contained within the bounds of Facebook so I don’t call it email).  Both Jack and Nicole have Flickr accounts but they don’t seem to use them much.  Nicole also has a Twitter account but she doesn’t seem to use it.  She made one post back in November, has one follower, me and follows one person, me too.

During one of our phone calls I told her that the posts I make on Twitter are automatically added to my Status on Facebook.  I told her that I wasn’t always appropriate on Twitter and that she’d need to be a little mature about some of the comments she saw on my Facebook status.  By inappropriate I don’t mean illegal or immoral but there is often cases of me swearing, most commonly when Connex or Optus fail me again.  ”Fuck you Connex” and “Fuck you Optus” are not uncommon.  By this stage Nicole was 13 so I assumed, and continue to do so, that she has the maturity to not pay too much attention to such comments.

I’ve never had a problem calling my Father, usually only when I was either drunk or had just started drinking and ended up drunk.  It wasn’t that I need to be drunk to talk to Dad it was just what I did.  I rarely call people in general.  I tend to live most of my life online and keep in touch most with those that also do.  Unfortunately three out of my four kids haven’t embraced online life so it’s limited communication at best.

There’s something about making a phone call to the kids that I baulk at.  It’s not that I don’t want to talk to them, far from it, I’m not sure what it is but I really struggle to pick up the phone and make the call.  I don’t think the issue is the use of the phone either.  The field I’m in often has me on the phone to customers and in special cases they are customers who are displeased about some aspect of a service and the call has been escalated to me.

Even through the last seven weeks I haven’t called Laura, something I found easy to do at least weekly during the period when I was living here and she was living in Perth.  I’ve seen Laura and Ethan once in the last seven weeks and while I wanted to see them I think it was also because it was convenient for Liz because it gave her a chance to give her apartment a cleanup before a rent inspection.

I’m not blaming Liz for me not seeing the kids, I should be making more effort.  I understand her concern for me being alone with them in my current state of mind but I think there are stark differences between her opinion of my current state of mind and mine.  That said I can only really speak for me.  Obviously I can’t comment accurately on what Liz thinks, except for what she tells me.

I’m sitting here now, I’ve got a Easter gift for Laura and Ethan and I’m hoping that typing this out will be cathartic in some way.  By the time I finish this post I want to be able to call both sets of kids, organise time to see Laura and Ethan again and discuss when Mary is bringing the Jack and Nicole over.

Mary and the kids were planning to come over just after Christmas.  Stay here for a night or few then make their way up to Sydney to see and stay with my Nanna for a little while.  Things don’t always pan out the way we expected and they couldn’t make the journey.  Last time we talked about it Mary was going to try and come over again during the school holidays in May.

I’d like to be able to blame my Mother for my lack of ability to keep regular contact with the kids, especially Jack and Nicole, but ultimately it’s my choice whether or not to pick up the phone. On the occasions she’s called she often ends the call with “I love you” with a tone that sounds to me like I’m supposed to say it back.  I don’t.  I tend to say something like OK.  I don’t do it to hurt her but saying “I love you” is something I’ve typically reserved for my wife/wives.  When I do speak with Nicole I try and end the phone call with an “I love you” but try hard not to make it seem like she’s expected to say it back just because I said it first.

Even with Laura and Ethan I don’t tell them I love them enough.  I have no problem telling Laura that I love her when she says it to me first but I don’t recall ever initiating the exchange.  Ethan is barely speaking so I’m not even sure if I’ve ever told him.

During 2000 I lived in Newcastle, NSW.  I was staying at a Salvation Army Men’s Hostel.  Full board, bed and some meals, was $155/fn.  I don’t remember how much unemployment benefits were back then but by the time I’d paid my board and bought tobacco for the fortnight there wasn’t much left for entertainment.  I’m not sure how, at least initially, but I still managed to find money to get pissed, stoned and high on pills.

I got along well with the staff at the hostel and in turn was treated to the oaccasional favour.  The hostel had a curfew and if you weren’t inside before then you had to spend the night on the street.  Additionally if you were considered to be intoxicated you had to spend the night in the ‘Tank’.  The Tank was a room with a handfull of beds, all plastic lined in a room separated from the rest of the accommodation.  If you were condemned to the Tank you didn’t eat in the dining room with the rest of the occupants and didn’t get use of the TV room or recreational room (a room that had a pool table).  Many a night I came in either after curfew and/or intoxicated.  The staff knew that I wasn’t a trouble maker and usually told me to go straight to bed.

I stayed there for a while and was offered a position in the kitchen.  There were two roles for occupants in the kitchen.  One was dishbitch, the dishbitches helped with the dishes after each meal and didn’t have to pay for their meals for each day they were on duty.  Before long I was promoted to more of a kitchen hand roll.  There was still an element of dish bitch work but there was also some food preparation for the dinner (and lunch meals on the weekend) and I was reasponsible for preparing breakfasts in the morning.  The extra responsibility meant that I didn’t have to pay any board at all.  It was seven days a week, several split shifts per day but it freed up my unemployment benefits for more ‘entertainment’.

The main accommodation at the hostel was two dormitories that held around 20 beds each.  It felt a little dodgy to the point that you put your smokes and wallett in your pillow case overnight so they wouldn’t get pinched.  There were also a few double rooms that had two single beds in them.  They had much more privacy and as long as you trusted your roommate a lot more security because they were locked.  At around the same time I was promoted to kitchen hand I was also given a bed in one of the double rooms.  At the time it seemed almost like a perfect situation.  Free access, effectively, to the kitchen (and pantry and cold room) and I was no longer in the dorm.

I don’t recall the time period but after a while the staff decided I was ready to move to a half way house.  This was a house shared by a few other of the occupants of the hostel but had added responsibility.  We had to pay more rent for it and were responsible for our own cooking, cleaning, etc.  It was also strictly a dry house, ie, no drinking in the house.

The house was further away from the Newcastle CBD and there wasn’t a great deal to do in the general area.  There was a RSL nearby however.  Cheap drinks and pokies, it was better then nothing.  After staying at the house for a while and observing the ‘dry house’ rule we got a little cocky and started having the occaisional drink at the house.

One day whilst in the back yard I spotted a couple of Pot plants growing in the next door neighbours yard.  We made plans.  They were to be ours.  Plan failed and the neighbour caught me.  Surprisingly he wasn’t pissed at me trying to pinch his plants and the occupants of the half way house the neighbour and I spend several occasions sitting out the front drink and talking bullshit.  He claimed that he was a gay priest that was HIV positive and had been kicked out of the church.  I wasn’t sure that I believed him but went along with it anyway.

One night the rest of the occupants had retired back to the half way house and gay priest guy, don’t remember his name, invited me in for drinks.  I think in the back of my head I thought it was a little suspiscious but if push came to shove I was a larger lad then he was and coudn’t envisage a situation whereby he’d be able to force himself on me; And he didn’t, not physically at least.

We’d been talking about the home made tattoo guns that’s we’d attempted to put together using a toothbrush, guitar string, a small motor and a battery.  They were very crude and only vaguely effective but he was intriged with them.  He asked me into his room so he could show me a drawing of a tattoo that he’d made and asked if I could tattoo it on him.  I was a little suspicious about going into his room but shrugged it off.

I don’t remember exactly what the picture looked like but it was something like the symbol for male combined with the symbol for female and a cruicifix and he said it was some sort of insult to Jesus or question of Jesus’ sexuality or some such thing.  I thought it was amusing, until he mentioned where he wanted it tattooed.  I was envisaging arm or thigh or ankle or something.  He wasn’t. He dropped his pants, lay on the bed and spread his legs.  He wanted the tattoo on his perineum.

He tried and tried to get me to tattoo him but I refused.  I think maybe I was briefly tempted but kept refusing.  He later asked me to take my clothes off so that he could masturbate while looking at me.  I think it was about then I’d decided I’d had enough and decicded to go home.  I was polite about leaving because I thought he was a nice enough guy but I wasn’t into the sort of entertainment for the night he had in mind.

Sometime later a few of us had been drinking in the house and left a cask of wine on the table in the lounge room.  I’d gone out for a while and a friend of mine was still in the house when one of the staff from the Salvos turned up for a snap inspection.  Naturally the cask of wine didn’t go down well.  When I got back my friend was packing his stuff because he’d been kicked out of the half way house for having alcohol there.  The cask was mine and I felt guilty that he took the blame for the cask.  He said that he couldn’t turn around and say it wasn’t his and tell them that the cask was actually mine.  I suspect he’d done some time inside gaol before but that was just a guess.

One of my next memories of that era was me sitting at the pokies drinking beer and feeding the last of my entertainment money into the one armed bandits.  I remember getting to the point that the only money I had left was my rent, nothing left for food for rest of the fortnight.  I justified that I could put myself into the Bridge programme and continue drinking and wasting money on the pokies for now.

Their Bridge programme house was next to the hostel.  I think I stayed there for a little while but don’t recall having to go to AA or any of the other rituals I’d associated with the programme.  Some time after that I was allowed back into the hostel and back into the kitchen.

Around this time my drinking increased along with smoking pot, though not often on the same days.  A few of us would spend time with the local winos who were usually more then happy to share their flagon or cask or whatever they had with us.  Some days we’d pool our funds and get our own flagon of muscat or other crap that only mildly tasted like shit after several mouthfuls.

I don’t recall what led up to it, or how, but one of the staff that used to mostly look after the guys in the tank was drinking with us.   I remember feeling guilty that he’d fallen off the wagon and was drinking with us but not specifically why.  I don’t recall how long he’d been sober but I recall it was an impressive amount of time.  About all I can remember of that event was we bought some vodka from somewhere and I fell down a flight of stairs at his place and that was apparently very funny.

The drinking continued and for a time I was able to fresh mint myself enough that staff in the kitchen didn’t know, or at least didn’t let it be known that they knew, I’d been drinking.  One day I staggered into the kitchen to start work and it was too obvious that I was drunk and I was effectively fired from my volunteer job.  That was briefly crushing, how often does someone get fired from a volunteer job?

Shortly after that another mate I’d made at the hostel said he had family that lived in Perth and that he was going to hitchhike over to see them.  He asked me if I wanted to tag along.  I figured I had nothing else going for me here in Newcastle so I agreed.  We packed our belonginngs and went to the train station to put most of it on a the train so we didn’t have to carry it.  Turned out the cost of doing so was about the equivilant of a person traveling to Perth on the Indian Pacific so we ended up throwing away most of our belongings and started on a new adventure.

I don’t remember where it fits in the above timeline but somewhere there I turned 21.  My family decided to throw a party for me and naturally I had to be there.  I’d been drinking heavily the day/night before and felt like shit.  I took less pills then usual because I was going to be surrounded by family.  I suffered the 90min (I think) train journey from Newcastle to the station nearest the house of the family member that the party was being held at.  The plan was that I was supposed to call someone to pick me up when I arrived at the station but I was still feeling like shit so I decided to walk instead.  My only memories of the journey from the station to the house were as a passenger in a car and I figured it shouldn’t take too long to walk.   Every step pounded my head.  Every step of that 2.5km journey.

I’d arrived early at the party and it was soon noticed I was under the weather.  One of the family members joked about having a big night the night before and I laughed it off.  My brother and cousins were already there playing and wanted me to join in just like old times.  I had no interest at all in doing anything.  I decided to take a walk to the local shops instead and invested in some panadol (or panadiene or something) then went back to the house and lay down on the trampoline for an hour or two.  It wasn’t long before I leapt off the trampoline and raced to the toiliet to throw up.  I felt a lot better after that and started mixing in with the activities.

As I recall it was a good party, there was a pig, or something, on a spit, plenty of beer and a few people turned up that were very unexpected.  One was a mate from school I hadn’t seen in three or four years the other was my Mother who I hadn’t seen in I don’t know how long.  We did the typical family thing and ate and, those drank, drank, and generally had a good time.  As is usual a game of cricket ends up being played out on the road.  The road was a dead end street so traffic was rare.  It was fun having all the family involved.  I went home at the end of the day with fond memories.

Several years later one of my Aunties, married in, pulled me aside and asked me if I was on herion or something.  I was thrown for a number of reasons, firstly she is about as a straight laced person I’d ever met and secondly, herion?  It certainly wasn’t my cup of tea.  She then showed me some home video they took of me early in the day and I agreed with here that very much looked like I was on something like herion but assured her that that wasn’t my thing and that it was simply a case of having a big night the night before.

I’m not sure why but I tended to be a bit of a problem child at home and, mostly, a well behaved kid at high school.  I wasn’t, usually, rude to teachers, I followed their instructions, mostly, and only rarely got into fights with other students.

One year, I think around year 9 or 10 which would make it 1984-5, there was a massive fruit fight in the Math’s quadrangle.  Fruit was flying everywhere and I had a great time watching it but didn’t take part in it because I knew that doing so may get me into trouble.  It seems there are varying degrees in taking part in a fruit fight.

I don’t recall who it was now but someone asked me to throw them an orange that was sitting near me my feet.  Keeping in mind that I didn’t want to be part of the event as such I rolled the orange over to him justifying internally that that wasn’t really taking part in the event.  It seems that one of the head’s of department didn’t share my view.

A number of the guys that were involved with the fruit fight were caught and called before one of the head’s of departments for reprimanding.  It seems that they were quizzed about who else was involved.  I never found out who it was but someone told the teacher that I was involved.  I was questioned about my involvement and told them honestly that all I did was roll an orange across to someone that had requested it.  The teacher in question decided that my punishment should be the same as the rest and I was to get ’six of the best’ as they referred to it.  ’Six of the best’ was a term they used whereby the teacher whipped your open hands with a cane, three on each hand.

I thought that this was completely unjust and told the teacher as such.  I refused to take the punishment and left the teacher’s staff room.  I figured that maybe there was some justification for rolling the orange but it certainly didn’t warrant the maximum punishment.

I lived with my father and at that time my mother lived in the same suburb.  For a period of time she looked after us before and after school while dad was at work.  I decided to walk the 2-3km to her place to plead my case and she’d get me out of the punishment.  That said I still wanted to go back to school that day because it was sports day and I didn’t want to miss out on playing volleyball against some other school (we were doing quite well at the time).

I’d convinced myself my mother would back me up during the walk from school to her place.  Turns out I was wrong.  She told me to go back to the school and take the punishment.  What a let down.

The whole process took a number of hours.  The bus that was leaving to the school we were playing volleyball against left was leaving soon so I made my way back to school and approached the teacher.  I told him that I was ready to take my punishment but felt it was overly harsh under the circumstances.

I’d only had the cane once before and at the time the teacher described it as ‘the tickler’ (I was in primary school at the time).  ’Six of the best’ sounded like it was going to hurt a great deal more so naturally I was scared.  Still not a fan of pain to this day.  After a few attempts at the teaching swinging the cane at my palm and me moving it I managed to keep my hand in the line of fire and was surprised at difference between the perceived amount of pain and the actual amount of pain.  I wasted no time keeping my hand held out for the remaining two whacks then quickly produced my other hand for it’s three.

As soon as the punishment was finished I rushed out an on to the bus for this week’s game of volleyball.

I’m 39, living alone and Iron Maiden is playing loudly on iTunes. I am employed and live in metropolitan Victoria.

I went to the doctors a little over six weeks ago and was advised, again, that I should give up drinking.  He suggested I shouldn’t give up ‘cold turkey’ and referred me to another doctor the following Monday.  I reduced the amount I was drinking between the two doctor’s appointments.  The insomnia was a bastard.  Over a period of around 56 hours I managed to get about two hours sleep.  I was hallucinating, paranoid and a little scared.

I went to see the next doctor and we discussed reasons for giving up drinking.  I think one of the prime reasons is around as my children grow up.  I have four kids from two separate marriages.  The younger two live locally and the older two live in Perth.  Along with that I was hoping to lose some weight and generally get healthier.  Next step is to give up smoking but one step at a time.

He said that the typical reasons for people giving up drinking were harassment from their spouse, employer or Police/Court.  My wife (at the time) asked me to give up drinking a couple of years ago.  I made an attempt.  For about 30 days I mostly didn’t drink.  On three occasions I did drink.  For me it came out of the blue but shortly after she suggested we have a trial separation.  I saw no point in not drinking then and picked up where I left off.  At this time I was still living in Perth.

Shortly after this my employer was acquired by a larger company and later that year the opportunity to relocate to Victoria was offered and I accepted it.  I figured I could fly back to see the kids from time to time and keep up with them via snail mail/email/phone calls etc as well.  In a strange twist the later of the two ex wives, and the youngest two children, moved to Melbourne to be closer to her direct family.  This felt odd at first but it meant that I could see the youngest two children more frequently.  Shortly after they arrived we organized for me to have custody of the children every Saturday.  That’s currently not the case, Liz feels, and probably rightly so, that my mental stability may not be great for a little while.  The timing of me giving up drinking and discussions regarding custody  came at an awkward time for reasons beyond both of us.

Several weeks earlier a man around my age working in a field similar to mine threw his daughter off the Westgate bridge in Melbourne.  Apparently he as was having issues at work.  For what it’s worth, at that time I was enjoying my job.  I think I still am but my current medication is making me a little moody and from time to time it gives me the shits.

Hopefully the regular custody can resume again soon but right now I need to sort my shit out.

I pondered moderating my drinking in the past and that didn’t work for me.  I’d considered only drinking every second day, or not on week days, or not on days that were followed by a work day.  In each case I made an excuse to drink daily.  According to one of the doctors if I didn’t give up drinking I’d need a liver transplant within five - 10 years.  That’s a bit shit.

He prescribed me Valium to help me reduce daily stresses and to sleep at night.  He also prescribed me Campral.  We talked about drinking and it’s damages to my body for a little while before the session ended and he told me to make an appointment for next week.  The next week I got another prescription for Valium, we talked some more.  He told me to try and make the Valium last two weeks and come back and see him again then.

The Valium didn’t last two weeks. On the day that would have been my 21st alcohol free day I was out of Valium and talked myself into having a drink.  A bottle of Jack Daniel’s later, and the next morning, I called in sick and told my boss I’d be seeking a different doctor because I thought I needed more then the occasional visit to a doctor and some drugs.  My boss was very supportive.

I went to another doctor who gave me a prescription for more Valium and referred me to a Doctor who is a specialist physician in addiction medicine.  Additionally my employer has an agreement with a company that offers counseling and we get the first three visits for free.  Turns out it’s the first six visits but I digress.  This was the counselor that  suggested I keep a diary detailing how much alcohol I was planning on drinking that day, what medications I was planning on taking and what my goal for the day was.  At the end of the day I’d then enter the actual alcohol/medical consumption and whether or not I met my goal.  She was also the same counsellor that suggested the idea of the brain dump of my teens, 20’s and 30’s to help find a pattern behind why I was drinking.

Today is three weeks since Jack Daniel’s day.  So far this attempt at not drinking has lasted six weeks with one let down.  Off to the laundry, boring housework must go on.