Ch 2: Laser Hair Removal and My Childhood years

         Good morning, evening, afternoon blogger followers,


          I intend to try to make a post once a day, if for some reason I miss a day it is possible I was busy or had something going on, but for those who are new to the blog it is an ongoing narrative and will flow more like a story or book than some of your typical blogs.  Perhaps someday I will get a book deal and be able to use the notes I have written here  ;).  I'll start today by saying I've started taking a few moments for myself again, which I believe is important, a couple years ago I went to a Buddhism class on Meditation and Pacifism.  Great teachings to deal with stress, the old adage our parents used of 'count to ten' when we were mad or upset really does help, it's about focusing inward, shutting out your surroundings and finding your connection with the world by focusing on your breathing to be more in tune with the world.  Now granted I know monks and others who meditate for half an hour or hour or a longer period of time, but for me I take the five to ten minutes I can get sometimes and go through the practice to clear my mind and try to keep myself in a positive attitude.  Overall everyone is going to have their own coping mechanisms but it's an important reminder that these be in place along with family and friends who will support you because sadly there are many in the world who will not support you and who may even make your life miserable just because of who and what you are.  So across religions the general attitude tends to be to be able to turn the other cheek, forgive those who have done you harm because holding onto that anger does nothing but hurts yourself.

           The second thing I want to touch on while it's fresh in my mind was last night I went for my first hair removal treatment, I'm going to laser hair removal.  And I have to say OMG it was one of the most painful things I have ever done, and I walked out of there and was like I'm paying another person to inflict all this pain on me? why? Then I think about it and am like, 'well once every 6-10 weeks isn't so bad, and hopefully the results will be permanent once we finish with a few treatments.' And the reality is women do 'crazy' things for beauty all the time that inflict self pain on themselves, I mean even corset training can be painful though I have yet to start doing this and some of the shoes women fit into for the sake of fashion.  Not to scare you away from the process, but more to make you aware that there are major gender differences that many people don't think about.  But I'll keep you posted on how the process works and what my results are. 

             For those of you who are curious about the process, I had just my face done for now, it takes about ten minutes and if you can withstand the higher strength of laser your supposed to be able to get better results.  Now when it's over the pain does not linger too bad, and I had very little redness in my face, though these results vary depending on your skin tone and how dark / fair your hair is.  Now after the treatment it still looks like you just shaved and have some stubble, I was told that the dead 'burnt' follicles are in the skin and should naturally get pushed out and fall off within a couple days.  Again I'll keep you posted when this happens.

           So, when I last left off we were discussing my upbringing, my family life and my vivid childhood memories.  Now moving forward a bit in time as I said other than a few incidents my younger childhood was pretty uneventful.  Granted there were birthday parties where I asked my parents if I could only invite just the 'girls' and there were small identifiers that were passed over not just by outsiders but by myself as well.  I mean I had the equipment, I was built as a boy, so I was supposed to be a boy right? Lots of societal and peer pressure to act and behave a certain way is developed at these young ages, and if we convince ourselves that the others in our lives are correct then we have a hard time getting negative reactions from the outside world with still knowing that we are loved and ok on the inside.  So, we move forward to Middle School, I'm about fourteen, my brothers are ten, there's still just the three of us, but now my parents are fighting more often and one day my mom packs us up and tells us we are going to stay at Grams for a while.  Still young and naïve, didn't really think anything of it at the time, but then we got to Grams, stayed a couple nights and then when it got to be almost a week, we started asking when we are going home again.  My mother wanted my father to move out of the house and didn't want us in the house around him anymore, shortly after they were separated and went through the divorce proceedings.  They had joint custody, we did the every other weekend thing going from one parents to the next. 

         My mother was still depressed and removed, by this point we were cooking a lot of our own meals, washing the dishes and doing most of the household chores.  She was working two jobs for a short period of time, so that did affect her availability, but we still didn't have a lot of quality family time.  I kind of took on the role of 'father' to my two brothers, I was working in a lumber yard myself for a few hours after school each day, and the responsibility to make sure my brothers finished their homework, ate something nutritious and were generally looked after kind of fell to me.  In a lot of ways this forced me to grow up too quickly, mature and deal with things that I wasn't ready for, but I went along and did the best I knew how.  When my mother started dating again, I had some run ins with the law, once I refused to help shovel our driveway, and then I felt guilty and went outside to help at which point my mother didn't want me to help anymore, so I yelled and swore at her, she called the police, and I hid in my closet with a baseball bat.  Of course I was hiding out of fear more than anything, and when the police officer got there and peered into the closet with his flashlight, I folded, put the bat down and went to apologize to my mother.  I had a fight with my step-father to be in a car, and got out of the car at almost midnight to try to run the rest of the way home, of course they were following me slowly in the car to make sure I was ok, and I got picked up by the police and spent the night at my fathers place even though he wasn't there.  My friends and I had the police called on us because we decided to go for a walk at one in the morning and my friends parents got freaked out and worried for where we were, so we all had to go home, of course I think they thought we were out doing drugs or something, but we were being teenagers out walking through the woods trying to scare each other in the middle of the night.

         All in all, no serious incidents.  Now when we spent time with my father, he had a new girlfriend who was not good for him at all.  We would go and stay at her apartment, which she was getting social assistance or something and living off of the system with her own kid, who was a little terror.  But they were doing more and more drugs, drinking and popping pills, smoking marijuana, most of the time at least it was out of our site, but still when they came out to interact with us we knew what was going on.  I guess my father in a way wanted to 'save' this girlfriend, but in the process just got sucked down into her hole with her.  I would say these incidents had more negative impact on me than any of the run ins with the police.  Finally my father broke up with this girlfriend, and began dating this girl he had met online, she came out from Wisconsin and stayed with him for a while.  She was fun to be around, though she was closer to my age than my fathers which was strange, but still she was a positive influence on us and my father.  Not really sure what exactly happened and why she went away, but she decided to go back to Wisconsin and according to my father later called to tell him she was pregnant and wanted to keep the child.  My guess is that my father may have known before she left, and they had some arguments about whether or not to abort the child, and she left to protect herself and keep the child.  Current Day, my father eventually moved out to Wisconsin to be with her and try to raise this half-brother I have better than he did us.  Whether he is being success full or not I have no idea, I rarely talk to my father anymore, and really have to say that even to this day at twenty-eight would love to have a positive male role model in my life. 


to be continued...