Room

i've just finished reading 'Room' by...... About a young woman who is kidnapped and held captive for 7 years in a shed in a her captor's back yard. She has a child, who is 5 when they manage to escape. my daughter, Raven commented, coincidentally, just before i read 'Room', on men who isolate their spouses and children - comment made in reference to her father, who dropped the 3 of us- her elder brother, her and me, pretty much to fend for ourselves in a cabin on the banks of the Yukon River then went off to live his wilderness adventurer fantasy. i hadn't thought of it in quite this way before. then i read 'Room', and was astonished at how deeply the story affected me. and, though the isolation in our case was somewhat voluntary (mostly because i hadn't enough sense or self respect to NOT agree to go along with it) there are many parallels. we were entirely dependent on him for everything. it was quickly established that i had no 'right' to ask for anything more than very minimal basics. (we're talking fetch the water from a creek in a bucket, heat the water for laundry on a wood stove after you've chopped the firewood yourself and wash the clothes by hand minimal basics.) a bag each of flour, rice and dry beans and a rack of dried salmon you caught, cleaned and salted yourself to make meals from minimal basics. a pole nailed to two trees to hang your butt over in -50 Celsius and call that an outhouse minimal basics. i didn't earn any money, so i wasn't entitled to have any to spend. i'm a good cook, because life in the Yukon bush taught me to make do with very little. i don't need a recipe to make bread or biscuits or pancakes or muffins.... or most anything really. and to this day, i really hate to see good food wasted or thrown away. it was so cold in that cabin sometimes, that we wore our parkas and snow boots inside all day. knobs of frost nearly an inch thick formed on the heads of nails driven into the INSIDES of the log walls. and he was there sporadically, working and eating in town, taking periodic adventure jaunts up the river. eventually, i'd had enough. i walked out, 5 miles overland through the mosquito infested, up and down thickly forested hills with no road or trail on a very hot August day, carrying a 2 1/2 year old child and a backpack, 5 months pregnant. i'd miscarried that spring, and half expected another miscarriage to result from the trip out.