Change: chapter 2

everything changed quickly after this.



My dad began to date and my mom became the poster child for guilt trips. She cried and i leant an ear to her worries that were so much bigger than mine, so much heavier. I felt guilty doing anything with my dad and i especially felt guilty enjoying time spent with him and my brother. Mostly this was because my mom instilled this fear in me. That if i didn't show her where my loyalty was then she would become sad or angry, and i was so tired of seeing her sad and angry.





To this day i refuse to let anyone make me feel this way again. To make me feel like i am responsible for helping them or fixing them. I refuse to allow someone to make me feel guilty. In fact guilt trips no longer have an effect on me. i tune them out. I act now from the heart, not manipulation.



So you can imagine what happened when my dad met someone else. Shit hit the fan. I remember hearing her screaming in the next room while she was on the phone with my father. It was about him introducing her to Patrick, my little brother.



I used to play this game when there was screaming like this so that pat wouldn't notice or in least not pay attention to what was going on. I would start singing at the top of my lungs to popular songs but change the words so that it sounded funny, like " don't break my bum, my itchy itchy bum, i just don't think you understand" stupid i know but it worked. i would always get a laugh from Pat and as long as we were laughing then everything was fine.



I almost lost a tooth once because of one of these moments, i was doing a stand up/ dance routine on a table i used as a stage, to stop my brother from crying. i fell off and went right into a wall. I think that was the biggest laugh i ever got.



When i met Teresa, my dads girlfriend, for the first time it was at center island. Center Island is a ferry ride away from Toronto, on Lake Ontario. Half the island is an amusement park the other half is housing. We met Teresa and her daughter at the swan ride. Alexa was the same age as me, which at the time was 6, and my total opposite. i considered her my arch nemeses, enemy numero uno, her mom came in at a close second though.

I was a scruffy kid. My clothes didn't match and i didn't care. My hair went down to my butt. I had these horrible bangs that went straight across my forehead but long enough to get into my eyes all the time. Because i have a cowlick right in the front of my head, the bangs stuck up slightly there. I was too thin and too tall for my age, and i was always dirty. My clothes always had stains and i always had some form of dirt from playing outdoors smeared on me. I am also a klutz so there were always bandages on me from my latest fall down the stairs.

You know that movie "it takes two" with the Olsen twins? i related most to the orphan and alexa was the priss.

She even jokes now about my outfit that day we met. I was wearing a pink shirt with a mouse on the front and purple shorts. She told me that the outfit had made her cringe at the time, shes kind of a fashion fanatic.

She always looked good, well kept. Her hair was always shinier than mine, her clothes always matched, she wasn't too skinny and she wasn't too tall. She had good grades in school and the boys always had crushes on her. i was usually beating some boy up, she was dating them. She was polite and parents loved how responsible she was. She never fell, she never dropped things, she never lost anything. I once lost a cheque for a thousand dollars that was suppose to be transferred from my mom to my dad, but in my defence who gives a six year old a cheque for a thousand dollars anyway.

She always scored the goal or won the race, i had allergies so playing sports was never something i was good at. She didn't have a brother she had to share with so she had all the toys you could want, more barbies than me too and i prided myself on the box full of barbies in my room. I used to take them out and count them. i remember i got the Cinderella barbie for my birthday but i wanted jasmine, don't get me wrong Cinderella is cool and all but jasmine had some man running after her instead of the other way around as it is in most Disney movies, so in my books shes the best princess there was. Alexa had the jasmine doll though, i saw red when she showed it to me all proud with herself. I think you get what I'm getting at. In my mind she was better then me. I hated her.

Teresa and Alexa ended up moving in with my dad, and i saw them on weekends. Alexa's father was M.I.A. and so my Dad became a father figure to her. He never gave her more attention than me, he was good at sharing his time with all his kids. And I was always good at sharing, i was taught alot about sharing when pat came along, but my dad? well that was a little too far for me, i was not going to share when it came to him. And she was not about to share her mom, or her toys for that matter which later turned into make-up and clothes. This constant battle with each other for space, identity and parental acceptance continued until we were 17.