Chapter 11 - A child is born

Sheila had a difficult pregnancy. In fact, when she was about seven months pregnant, she went for an appointment, and the doctor told her that the baby was dead.

She was devastated, but she decided to go back a couple of days later when her regular doctor would be in, and he said there was nothing wrong with the baby. We never found out why the first doctor said the baby was dead ...

Finally, one March day, I was sleeping as I worked nights, but my sleep was interrupted when my wife’s best friend, the one who had set us up on our blind date, showed up at my door, and told me to “get your butt to the hospital.”

“You’re a father.”

So I got dressed, and went to the hospital, where I found that Sheila had almost died during the labor from high blood pressure, and so my daughter arrived via C-section and was in an incubator while she was sleeping the experience off.

As I result, I saw my child before she did ...

We named her Sabrina.

To me, she was perfect, but we would learn she had some ... difficulties ahead of her. She couldn’t have tags on her clothes, she was beyond hyper, she would have troubles with hand coordination ...

Despite these problems, she was (and is) a wonderful girl, and I’m glad she exists.

Not long after she was born, on the urging of Sheila , I bought a mortgage on a house. I was also able to go back to school, this time to be a Licensed Practical Nurse, and it seemed like I had “arrived”, as it were.

But we have come to the part of my journey that’s the hardest for me to relate, even harder than talking about my abuse.
Because what happened next was entirely my fault.

The downward spiral started with me failing the course, but I was able to get work as a Nurse’s Aid, which kept me going for a while. But the unaddressed problems I had - the gender issue, the rape, and top it off a manic-depressive episode - combined to erode what little foundation I had, and I collapsed into myself.

Basically, I shut down, like I had done as a kid.

But now, there were consequences ...

I stopped being able to pay the bills, especially the mortgage, and I only “woke up” when my brother called me to tell me the mortgage people had contacted him because he had been a co-signer on the mortgage.

The mask I had been trying to build was torn away, and what was underneath wasn’t pretty.

My brother arranged to pay back the money we owed, and basically bought us out of the house, giving Sheila the money. She took the money and put the down payment on a new place, and my brother sold the house basically just getting enough to cover what he had paid for it.

As for me, I can hardly describe how horrible I felt. I had badly hurt my brother and had put my family at risk of being homeless.
So when Sharon asked me to leave, I didn’t fight her.

I went to live with my mother, who was taking care of my grandmother in a place in the north side of Edmonton.

And that’s where things changed again ...

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