It had been twelve years since I had left my parents and I found myself thinking about when if ever I would see them again. I imagined that I would be seeing a frail old man or old woman and suddenly realizing that they were my parents. This thought would lead me to call them up and ask if they were interested in talking. They thought about it and decided that they would allow this to happen.

You would think that after this much time had passed that they had come to some sort of understanding and accountability for what had caused the breakup of our relationship but they hadn’t and it became very clear very quickly that I had made a huge mistake by making this phone call.

During this initial conversation it was clear that they were very open to my apologizing for having caused them so much pain and they would be gracious enough to accept said apology, that wasn’t going to happen. I asked my Father why he felt the need to always tell me what a fucking idiot I was to which he replied that I was like that kid in school who was smarter than everyone else so he needed to punch me down a few begs for the sake of what, these unknown kids who felt threatened by my intelligence or was is him who was threatened by it? No matter what, it was very clear that we were not going to have any constructive dialogue nor would we ever repair this relationship.

My Mother kept saying that she really wanted it to be like it used to be, you know when they said jump and I asked how high. I told her that how it used to be ended with us divorced so how did she think it would end differently this time. She also kept saying she would really like to talk just not right now but she would let me know when, that never happened.

So what I was left with was visitation rights, they could go on pretending it was all back to what it used to be and I bit my tongue. The fact that I was even able to be in the same room as them was quite remarkable for me, I had come a long way in order for this to happen. The initial divorce left them with custody of the rest of my relatives, the new visitation rights allowed me some access to my ex-brother-in-law and my nieces and nephews. A funny thing with abusive relationships, instead of bringing the victims closer together it makes all of them retreat and hope that someone else will bear the brunt of the abuse and that usually was me.

The following year I got pregnant for the first and only time in my life. Our baby died within a day of my maternal grandmother. A little side note; Maya kept a bedside vigil with me during the time I knew I was pregnant, which was at seven weeks, I became so ill. On the Wednesday, she abruptly left my bed and never came back, on Friday I found out the baby had died two days before, at ten weeks, she knew. My grandmother had died the night before in Comox, BC, at the age of 94. My Mother and Father had gone out a couple of days before as they had been told she was in very bad shape; they waited to drive home instead of calling me to let me know she had died. I let her know that so had my baby. It took my Mother ten days to travel ten minutes to our place to wish me condolences.

My grandmother had to pay my Mother to come out and visit her in the nursing home, earlier that summer my Mother refused to come out for her birthday so my grandmother fell ill, real or imagined I’m not sure. It did force my Mother to go out and see her mother who made a speedy recovery. So over the summer my grandmother had problems with her breathing and needed to have her chest x-rayed. My Aunt who was the person in charge of caring for her mother and who was the beneficiary of all of her money decided not to pay for the ambulance to take her mother to the hospital for the needed x-ray. My Aunt had talked to my Mother about this and they both agreed that it was time for their mother to go so they suspended her heart medication and waited for that to do the inevitable and so it did and so she died.

My Mother and her sister did not feel it necessary to make funeral arrangements and nothing was done save having her cremated and her ashes taken back with my Aunt. This was August; I didn’t hear anything more about any funeral until the day before, now April. My Mother told me that her sister had made arrangements to have her ashes buried at sea and all of the family had been invited via my parents address, apparently my Mother didn’t feel the need to pass these on. Her rationale behind this was that the funeral happened to coincide with her birthday and according to her too many bad things have already happened on her birthday. This left me rather confused because I don’t have any memories of these bad things so I asked her what they were to which she replied Waco Texas massacre and the Oklahoma City bombing.

We would stay together five years when just days before our 25^th wedding anniversary they stopped any contact. I have never known why or what prompted this and I never will.