I hoard toilet paper

There I said it. I collect toilet paper. And not that scratchy cheap no name stuff. Definitely not the Green planet friendly tp. That stuff is worse than the tp at the govt funded buildings. I mean Charmine, Cottonelle,  Royale, and other baby soft brands. If they are on sale it comes home with me. Stuffed under handbags, in the back of the closet, in the kids’ washroom.  I buy the kids’ Store brands or other sale but still quality brands because it’s cheaper and they have no sense of the word waste as teenagers.

I know why I buy it. I understand buying on sale is a good idea. That being thrifty is the way to become a millionaire. That is not why I do it. I have this fear hidden deep in the darkness of my consciousness. I am afraid of using paper thin, sandpaper rough, one ply tissue. The kind you would be able to steal from the local library. Sounds ridiculous right. Wrong. I was so broke – a whole different blog story there for another time… I was so broke I would sneak into the public library and stuff a half used roll into my backpack.

I can still see clear as day me sitting on the toilet. My black canvas satchel with its cold metal buckles on my lap. Trying to get that giant commercial size roll out of the case without making noise or breaking it. The metallic taste of fear on my tongue. The desperate need for tissue at home.

So now I have toilet paper. Good toilet paper. So soft it’s a kittens fur wiping your bottom. According to commercials. Or maybe so soft bears love it. Hoards of it in my closet, in the bathroom, in the kids bathroom. And I bought more today because it was almost half price. I am sure it will be double when I need it. So I buy more. I buy it for the sale not because I can’t help myself. I tell myself I’ll be good and buy only one giant bulk bag, not the maximum limit. That would be silly right! 🙂 Then I stress all the way home if I should have bought more while it was on sale. Or if I spent too much buying things like toilet paper on sale when I didn’t need it yet. Either way, I end up with a stomach ache.

So there it is. Why I hoard toilet paper. And probably food on occasion. Definitely speaks to my dislike of wasting anything. Throwing away anything when it can be donated. For I will never forget having to steal toilet paper.

Fear or was it

I know I have been writing about my single digit years but last night I remembered something and thought to share. My teen daughter is totally loving scary movies and Insidious 4  came out recently. She just had to see it with her friend, another avid fan. As I was driving them home from the movie they talked how they wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink. That they would need large cups of coffee to start the day at school. It made me smile and also  reminded me of when I was so terrified I couldn’t even close my eyes.

I was thirteen and had just left the community. I was done with the overbearing control that was welded with the expectation that no questions would be asked. I was currently sleeping on the floor in the guest room across the hall from my aunt and uncles bedroom. Dad had been dead a few months now and life was supposed to be back to normal but I just couldn’t.

I was angry, depressed, and lost. Life didn’t matter. The world should have stopped the day that he died. Instead I was on the floor in a strange room, with a strange family that was ‘family’. My future was being discussed in hushed tones without any thought of talking to me.

My heart race as I lay on the floor in the dark, the hall light slipping in through the unlatched door. It felt as though there was a giant boulder on my chest. The weight was unbearable. It was hard to breathe. The weight of it was suffocating me. I closed my eyes hoping to sleep to ignore this awful feeling. But when I closed my eyes all I could see was my fathers body all mangled and broken. His body choking on the blood and lacerated organs. I would open my eyes wide and try to think of giant fluffy puppies. I would close my eyes and the image of his body laying there eye bulging out would pop into my mind. Like a vivid picture, as though I was there. I would gasp air trying to breath trying to think of anything but that. In exhaustion my eyes would drift closed and his body would be falling and  falling and falling crashing down. His voice calling out to me would jerk my eyes open again. There was no escape from the pictures in my mind or the weight of pain and agony on my chest.

I slept with my Bible open on my chest for months. The only way I felt remotely safe enough at night was with my Precious moments Bible on my chest. The actual weight ( in hindsight it is similar to a weighted blanket ) of the Bible eased my constricted chest. Helped me take in a breath and try to block out those horrible images.

This went on for days, week, months. My depression depended. My anger grew. No one reached out to me, instead they worried and prayed. What happens is Gods will.  As an adult with children, having made it through I just would love to go back and  shake some people and say  ‘WAKE THE FUCK UP’. Actually there is much more I would say but I will leave it at that for now.

 

Why did I bite the man

How come you bit him my parents asked. “Because he said I could,” was my simple answer. Earlier I had been sitting on the stairs coming up from the basement. I wasn’t allowed downstairs but I was halfway so technically I was obeying. The men lived in the basement once their cabin burnt down. We all ate meals together and worked together as a whole.  This man that I recall feeling close to yet had loathing for had come by me on the steps. Maybe I was waiting for him. Hard to know what my little five year old brain was thinking.  I have no recollection of asking him. The only memory I have is sinking my teeth into the soft flesh of his hand between his thumb and forefinger. Once my teeth clamped down I just wanted to keep biting harder and harder not letting go. A voice in my head said I couldn’t. It would hurt him I thought. I need to let go I thought. Yet my jaw was locked into the bite. I don’t recall him making a sound. I just clenched my jaw, sunk my teeth in trying to hard not to go too far. Not to bite too hard. My teeth marks were there to stay. Little teeth indentations in dark shades of purple. I don’t recall having any repercussions from that action. I suppose the fact that I had asked permission and he’d said yes was enough. As a youth I wondered what would have caused that want in me as a young child. Did he do bad things to me? I would never know.

 

As a youth of the streets my mother would cry out for prayers for her wayward  daughter. Why was she gone, why did she deny the Lord, why was she a herion addict and drug user, as loose woman. Ironically I never touched herion, didn’t really do hard drugs, didn’t drink often and always choose to do it safely where some pervert couldn’t get me. My mother and the leaders of the school never once mentioned I had been denied return to the fold. Never admitted to the community I had come back begging to live with my mother to be one of them again. Promising to be a devote follower and never question them again.

So I wondered. Mother wondered. Others wondered what could have happened to me as child to cause me to turn my back on God, on life in the community, on my family. Who could have hurt me so. Was it the man that I bit, some other man who lived in our home. No one  not even me thought maybe it was being turned away from my own mother. Being sent away as an unwanted bothersome thing. No one thought what internal damage that trauma might cause my already aching heart.

I will never know why I bit him. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I may never know why I did many of the things that I did. I now know that the biggest hurt of all even more than my father, was being turned away by my own mother and the community I was born into.