Puddlejumper

I couldn’t relax at the airport. I know I’m starting menopause and when my ibs flares, that too makes me feel flushed and hot. Then there’s the act of blushing. I was worried I was over the temperature threshold and wouldn’t be able to get on the plane.

I was wrong. I breezed through security after my tickets were confirmed and my bags were through security screening. When it came to the actual screening before the flight, my medical devices had to be properly scanned and I was allowed to sit in the cleared security area, where I promptly started to bleed from a cut that I got while packing. I sent a text to Black Ort that I was through that stage and he was still awake. I talked to two discord groups I’m in and told them where I was and people were cheering me on – the same people who had been there for me and cheered me on for months.

I knew my kids were going to be pissed. I knew they would never forgive me, but I had to do it.

The plane started to load and they temperature checked me. I was clear. I walked to the plane and got in and sat alone in my row. I took out my phone and fiddled with it, letting people know where I was and what I was doing. More cheers from my discord buddies.

The engines started up and I started to focus on making a tik tok about what I was doing. I was just doing the video taping of it. I would put it together later. You can’t hear me crying, but I was.

I was crying that I was finally away from my prison.

I was crying that I was finally on the first part of a trip that might give me a chance.

I was crying that I was finally free.

For over a decade, I had lived on that island with my ex and the kids in order to keep them safe from both child services and the abuse and mental fuckery my mother would have done. We had three choices to live at when the island was chosen. Our social worker at the time told us that they were not going to allow us to live in that run down trailer for one more month – this was the end of September 2010. So, we had to find a place to live or else the kids would go into foster care, I would be forcibly shoved into a transition shelter, and my ex would be forced to live on the streets.

Yes, child protective services had that much power and the landlord was spouting stupid stuff about how she was providing housing to low income peoples.

Place no 1 was the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. We both rejected that outright.

Place no 2 was the city where my mother was living. My mother, who had, on December 12th, 1998, threatened to remove any other children I ever had from my care and chase me through the courts to get custody of them all. Fat chance that, really, because child services was on to her little number and would ask if I had any contact with her any time they showed. My name was red flagged because of her, so I had to always think twice about what some idiotic social worker would think when it came to raising my children. I was forever looking over my shoulder, worried someone would show up and force me to hand over my children or else.

You can’t parent that way.

If I was a drug user or an alcoholic or someone with a diagnosed mental illness, yah, sure, I would have deserved some of that treatment. Child protective services workers seem to enjoy getting off on causing as much distress to the parents they supposedly are there to help. I met up with a few charmers in my years dealing with them. Instead, I was and am the survivor of a parent who may have had DID or some other things on the spectrum of mental illnesses. The damage she did to me is still reverberating in my life. I’m no doctor so I can’t even hazard a guess at what was going on in my mother’s head. I can only state that I suffered for it.

I digress.

Place no 3 was a duplex on the island. This was the best of bad choices but his family was there and they could help support us. We fought with child services that was what the best plan of action was and reluctantly, they agreed.

Other things happened during that last month on the mainland too that fried at my sense of security, parenting ability and more.

We got on the ferry at o dark late – the last one for the night, and on Hallowe’en, we travelled to our new home, staying one night in a hotel.

As we travelled, I could feel the prison walls coming up around me. It would cost money for me to get off the island. I couldn’t simply start walking and end up somewhere else on the continent. I was stuck with a deep ocean and straight around me. It didn’t have bars or walls, but it was still a prison.

My prison.

And for almost 8 years, he did more and more unspeakable things to me, and then whined to his friends that I was the abuser.

I never tried to murder him by testing his allergens with the food he ate.

I never sat on the edge of the bed and begged my spouse not to call the cops on me for sexual assault.

I fought back.

In fighting back, others would see that as abuse.

I fought, because I had to live.

That plane I was on, that little twin engine puddle jumping prop plane was my ticket out, and as I sat on it, I was crying my eyes out.

I was free from my prison.

I had not only survived.

I lived!

The landing in Calgary was perfectly smooth. Black Ort had paid for concierge service to enable me to be wheelchaired around the terminal because of my bad leg. There’s no way I could have walked all that with my bad hip. The woman wheeling me around was phenomenal. She helped me get through customs. She helped me get through security. She even got me to where I could buy something to drink and I picked up a stuffie there to cuddle too for the last leg of my flight.

I got onto the next plane…

And then…

cried.

In 4 hours, I would be on the soil of the country my father was born.

In 4 hours, I would be too far for my ex husband to ever touch again.