#23
When I was thirteen I woke up one Saturday morning and discovered a strange man sitting at our table having breakfast. Mom was still in bed.
He told me his name was Bosco and he was going to live with us now.
You can imagine my reaction. I didn't freak out, it was more one of those "Say what?" kind of moments. Oh and there was storming--I was a thirteen year old girl, after all. I stormed up to my mom's room to confront her on what the guy had just said.
It was true.
Bosco lived with us for six years and he was an evil, bad man.
#24
I did not really love highschool. I was frustrated by the 'he said/she said' mentality of it and couldn't wait for everyone to just grow up. I thought University would be my ticket and I looked forward to it like crazy.
#25
I was treasurer of my graduating class's student council.
#26
I went to grade thirteen.
Bet you didn't know that in some places in Canada (and Ontario was one of them) that kids who wanted to go to university had to go to grade thirteen, or have five years of high school. Weird, eh?
If you didn't plan to go to university, then you could graduate after grade twelve. But if you did want to go to uni, then yeah, you needed to graduate from grade thirteen!
#27
When I was in grade thirteen, so I was eighteen years old, my Mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was liver cancer and they gave her 0-6 months to live. I found out from the evil Bosco. I thought my life was going to end right there.
#28
When I graduated high school I thought maybe I might become a veterinarian. Either that or a lawyer. Ha! Quite the spread there, eh?
In the end, I did end up going with political science. I went to the University of Guelph Ontario in ... you guess it! Guelph, Ontario. I refused to believe that Mom was really going to die, so I went ahead and went to school. Guelph was about two hours away from London, where I lived with my Mom.
#29
Not long after school started in the Autumn of 1987, Mom's health began to decline rapidly. I went home every weekend to be with her. Pretty soon my weekends were getting longer and longer, lasting from Thursday to Monday, because I couldn't wait to get home to her and hated to leave her again.
Remember my story earlier in my 40 Somethings when I told you about the near-suicide and my saving arm in the rearview? Fast forward to a Thursday afternoon when I dashed into our apartment already talking a mile a minute about all the fun I was having at school and everything I was learning--particularly from a political philosophy professor I was really enjoying.
Mom was sitting on the couch, her face jaundiced and drawn and she looked up and smiled at me.
"My goodness. You're all grown up!"
And you can probably guess what happened then.
