What would my dream home be like?
I don’t know.
I never lived in a place that I would call a “home”.
And I never lived in any place that I would call a “dream home”.
The houses I lived in were all fucking traumatizing nightmares, and I don’t mean that they all had the same fucking paint scheme no matter which base they were located on. Living in an abusive dysfunctional family in military housing on military bases was the traumatizing nightmare.
I grew up living in Private Married Quarters on Canadian Forces Bases.
And with my rage prone alcohol fuelled father, these weren’t homes.
They were houses.
It’s where I kept my shit.
It’s where I slept at night.
It’s where I was absolutely terrified to ask my father for help with school homework as that would launch him into a rage and fury.
From the time my mother left in 1977 until September of 1985, I never had a birthday. In 1985, no doubt due to my father’s rampage in the PMQ during the summer of 1985, I had a “birthday” of sorts. A small cake and a $20 bill. And a promise that he would never forget my birthday again. That was the last birthday of mine that he ever acknowledged. I guess once he realized that the base military police were not going to inform the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto about his massive meltdown in the PMQ in the summer of ’85 he didn’t have to pretend to give a shit about me any longer.
My alcoholic grandmother living in the PMQs and raising my brother and I didn’t make things any easier. If I had to take a wild guess, I think that my father got his mental issues from her. As much as he would claim that she was an alcoholic that was cruel to his children, he was the exact same.
When my father received his final posting in June of 1990 to go back to CFB Edmonton in anticipation of his retirement, he and my stepmother bought a house in Morinville, AB.
I lived in an actual house for the first time in my entire life. Not a military PMQ. Not a rooming house where I rented a room after I moved out of the PMQ on CFB Downsview when I was 16. An actual house, with walls that you could hang pictures on without fear of pissing off the base construction engineers.
Yeah, my stepmother had me booted out within a week of us moving from CFB Griesbach to Morinville.
She apparently did the same with my brother when he finished his sentence at the St. John’s Training School for Boys in Uxbridge, Ontario and moved to AB to stay with our father as Scott was still only 16 when he was released.
So yeah, never really did live in a real home as a kid.
I’m happy with my bachelor apartment.
It’s not too big.
Growing up in my father’s house it was either “go the fuck outside and stay the fuck outside until the lights come on” or ” get the fuck up to your bedroom and stay there” or “get the fuck to school”. There were no weekend nights playing boardgames or watching Disney on TV or any other family style of activities.
And that’s why I like my apartment.
I’m either sleeping all day, or I’m at work, or I’m out and about trying to keep my brain from ruminating over and over about what I could have done differently in life.
My apartment, just like the PMQs, is just a place where I store my shit, and go to sleep.
Beeshive 