Chapter 43: Book 1, Living Room Conversation

This night we do not have the TV on, opting instead just to socialize. Moira switches the topic of conversation, saying, “My parents are so frustrating. Mom asked me to take a month off work to be a councillor at our church summer camp. She is trying to tear me away from all my friends and hates me sharing my boyfriend. Dad loses it on her every time she brings it up. Neither one cares about what I want. Mom is trying to take me away from my friends, and Dad wants me to sell myself. I don’t want to go home anymore. Even my brothers and sisters are starting to hate me. Dad gave them all my chores so I can spend more time with you. You should have seen Mom when he did that.”

Kim gets up and hugs her, insisting Moira take her spot, cuddling with me. Then Kim gets on the couch and cuddles into Moira.

I try to comfort Moira, saying, “Your siblings still love you. They’re mad, but they still love you. Give them time. Your family isn’t used to having money. I’m sure you know something each one of your brothers and sisters wants, but can’t have. Buy it for them.”

“I don’t want to buy my family’s love. It should be enough that we are family.”

“Things aren’t that simple. Your siblings are mad because they don’t see you pulling your weight. You need to show them that there is a benefit to them taking your chores. You are pulling your weight but in a different way than they are. If you just buy them things and they come to expect it then, ya, you are buying their love. Buy each of them something important to them, then explain that it is a you scratch my back I scratch yours situation.”

“I would still feel bad for Celeste. She turned 16 in September, so Mom and Dad said she could start dating. We used to share responsibilities taking care of the younger kids. Now she is stuck home because I am not there.”

“How old are your brothers and sisters?”

“Celeste is 16, Eugene 13, Katriane 12, Suzanne 10, Iven 9, Garner 7, Felicity 6”

Kim is a bit startled by that. She is used to single-child families. She asks, “Is that a family or a hockey team?”

I let her know, “Religious families are often big. My dad’s mom had 13 children. By 1992 she had over 100 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. That is when we stopped counting. Her youngest two sons hadn’t even started producing children yet.”

“Why do you always say dad’s dad or dad’s mom? You rarely say grandma or grandpa unless you are talking to them,” Moira asks.

“Both sets of grandparents got divorced. I have four grandfathers and three grandmothers. Besides, the lingo in my family is a little strange. If Dad is talking to my mother and referring to my sister, he doesn’t use my sister’s name. He will say, ‘your daughter.’ It kind of explains why I was neglected. It is like even in their speech, they have some sort of detachment.”

“Which are Gran and Grandpa,” Dahlia asks.

All my girls have accepted my grandparents as their own.

“Gran is Mom’s Mom. Grandpa is her stepdad. It is kind of cool come Remembrance Day. Do you know that you are allowed to wear your father’s and grandfather’s medals? If I were to pin them all on, I wouldn’t be able to stand up. Mom’s Dad was French Foreign Legion and fought with the Free French. Dad’s stepdad was Canadian artillery. Dad’s Dad was the WW2 version of Rambo.”

Dahlia asks, “What do you mean, Rambo?”

“He was sent into the Aleutian’s behind enemy lines and worked alone, as a sniper. He is the Grandpa that just moved here with Dick. Do you know how our government claims we have never sent a conscripted soldier to war? That is a lie. Our government started conscripting soldiers in WW2. The units they were formed into never left Canada. After basic training, all the best shooters weren’t sent to infantry school with the rest of the conscripts. They were sent to a special training school to become snipers. Then they were sent behind enemy lines. Grandpa was a conscript. He never mentions any of the people he trained with, nor does he tell stories of the war. I think all his friends were killed.”

“Wow, he must have a lot of medals,” Kim exclaims.

“Actually of the three, he has the least. Medals require an officer to witness what happened. Grandpa worked alone. He only has his theatre of operation medal.”

“His what,” Carol asks.

“It’s a medal given to indicate which war zone you were in. You only get it if you were in the war zone for more than four months. I got a funny theatre op medal, one time. It’s called the General Service Medal. I did a tour, but it was spread across three war zones. My unit spent six months consecutively in one war zone or another, so they wanted to give us a theatre medal, but we didn’t qualify for any.”

“Where were you,” Moira asks

“We started in the Gulf of Oman, in a support role for the Afghan War. Technically Afghanistan is landlocked, but it was considered part of the same war zone. We also spent some time in the Yemeni and Somali Civil Wars. I suppose we did a few days in Iraq and the Persian Gulf too.”

“Afghanistan is a ways away from the Gulf of Oman. How can you support a war from so far away,” Kim asks.

“We went after gun runners, smugglers, headed for Afghanistan, and terrorists leaving the area. We also captured a few drug runners and stopped human traffickers. That is how the Taliban and other enemy forces will fund their side of the war. North Americans are so stupid. They don’t think they are harming anybody by taking drugs. What they don’t know is they are funding our enemies every time they get high.”

“I thought all the drugs came from Central America,” Carol states.

“That is only in the movies. Most of the hard stuff comes from the Middle East and Western China. The best pot on the planet is grown right here in BC. Heck, most drugs never see Central America. The southern US border is heavily guarded. Why risk getting caught when you can come in through Alaska without any risk? Shortly after 2000, the yanks decide we weren’t going to have an open border with them anymore. They claimed it was because drugs and terrorists were coming through Canada to get to the US. That was a lie of omission. The truth is the drugs and terrorists were entering Canada through Alaska and then heading south. The US made it sound like we were a bunch of fools that never screen anything coming into our country.

“We have an open border with Alaska. Even if it weren’t an open border, we would have no way to patrol it. There is more than 1500km of border, and NOBODY lives there. There aren’t even any villages. Dawson City, the big city on the border, has a population of 1000. If we hired enough people to patrol the border, it would be too expensive for Canada. If the US did it, all they would have to do is move resources they already use for border patrol. Another reason why we can’t do it is there is no infrastructure. We don’t even have villages up there. The US does. There are many cities in Alaska, but the only real city in the Yukon is Whitehorse, and it is nowhere near the border. Let’s say we could recruit that big of a border force, and we had the infrastructure to keep it maintained. The border force would be bigger than our military. There is no way we could pay the men.”