Day Sixty-four - Under pressure

I neglected to mention a part of my life during this time - my family life. Having moved full time to my grandparent's in the very early '90s, and shortly after that seeing my brother arrested and sent to jail to do a three and a half year sentence, was very hard on my family. To make things worse, also around this time my mother, who'd quit her long-time job at a TV station to go to another, new TV station, ended up losing her job not very far into her time there. All this sent her into a deep depression, though I couldn't rationalize it at the time. It would only be when I started going through my own depressions that I started to recognize the patterns and the behaviour. I guess I sort of realized she was down, but not ever having seen someone who didn't have a job, I just imagined that this was how normal life was for them. I mean, it was something I fantasized about as a kid, that whenever I was an adult I'd sleep as late as I wanted, and pretty much do nothing all day and somehow still get paid for it. What did I know?

But to get her out of that stupor she was in, my grandmother convinced her to go back to university and get the law degree she'd always wanted but never was able to get before. All the while she was taking her law degree, and excelling academically, I'd be far less great at school, as I've illustrated. Maybe it was my way of coping with what we were going through, to experience that extreme detachment from school. As my brother was doing his time in jail, we would always visit him on the weekends - I confess I didn't go every single time, it was never easy for me. It was never easy for any of us, I know, but sometimes I just couldn't. The weight of it all was sometimes far too big a burden for me to carry. But he did his time, and for all acounts he was model inmate, and when the time came for him to be released, we naturally welcomed him back home with open arms. Ah, how could I forget? My father had been absent for a while after he and my mother split up, but maybe a year before my brother got arrested he resurfaced, trying to prove he could be the father he never was - at least not to me. I made the most of his newly acquired generosity, and managed to convince him to buy me a Nintendo Game Boy, though when I brought it home I had to say he'd bought it for my sister. My grandmother had, wisely, warned me about how my father might try to buy our affection. In truth, and at least for me, there's no amount of money in the world that could have bought him my affection. Not in any lifetime.