The uniqueness of someone’s story can only be measured through the eyes of experience. Age defines who we are measured against the backdrop of our experiences in life, and the lives of those closest to us. As we grow older and share experiences with more and more people outside our inner circle, we discover things that shape us, define us, and determine the kind of person we will ultimately become.
What happens when the experiences we have from the outer edges of our memory are so tangled in confusion and pain that our mind decides to bar those memories from surfacing? Can we ever truly discover who we are or who we were meant to be? Facing painful memories can be both liberating and terrifying.
My memories are fleeting and entirely random; arriving with clarity or as flashes of vagueness; rarely are these memories happy, at times feeling distant and unsettling. These lay the groundwork of who I am today, and what I have learned from these memories has made me the person I am.
My desire to anticipate things was the only way I was able to survive. If I could analyze things and make a move before they happened, I could quite possibly get through another day. Much like seeing everyone’s hand at a game of rummy; you would know not to collect clubs if your opponent’s hand was full of clubs. Not that I like to cheat at cards, but the analogy came to me and made me think of playing cards. I suppose that this is also where my desire to organize things stemmed from. I could create harmony and order in my own little world even if things around me had gone completely out of control. And having said that, I also suppose that this is where my desire to have everything clean came from also. If things were clean, organized and in harmony my life would be the same. Or so I always hoped.
If I close my eyes, I can recall that day as though it were only yesterday. The feeling of overwhelming helplessness, the like of which I had not felt before. It shouldn’t have been a new feeling after all of the sessions through the years, but somehow, I could tell that this one was different.
It was a fall Vancouver day, gray skies and always the hint of rain in the air. The park that I stumbled to was deserted of course. All the children were on their way to morning classes. This park had been my typical route on my way to school. I would chatter with my friends as we walked to our high school. This morning, the park had become my refuge.
I had no idea what I was going to do, but I realized for the first time in my life, that I was not going to be able to go back. This is how Carol found me; sitting on the swing, tears streaming down my face.
Carol was my age, 15 and lived with her parents in the last house that bordered the popular park. She didn’t make a habit of leaving late for school, but today she rushed out hoping to make up the extra minutes by running part way to school. Instead she ran right into the middle of a family’s terrible secret.
I had never thought of our family as any different to the many families living around us in the government assisted housing project. My mother was a single parent although at that time the term ‘single-parent’ wasn’t used. Our family unit would have been described as, a divorced woman with two teenage children. It would have been expected that someone in my mother’s position would have to rely on government-assisted programs, so we weren’t looked down upon. Ours was the plight of many families sharing the large housing complex, known as “the projects”. The name made the distinction easier for everyone. Row after row of shoebox-shaped buildings painted a dreary off-white, each unit housing people who are living proof of the tragedies that befall ordinary people.
I don’t recall the actual conversation that took place when Carol came upon me. I just remember her taking me into the house and presenting me to her mother. That would have been all that she would have known to do because children aren’t expected to have answers to complex questions; this is why we have parents. The fact that I had only one parent had no real impact on me. I knew that my father lived in California somewhere but he had never made any effort to contact us.
The Vietnam War had caused our family composition to change. My father was in the United States Navy and was stationed at (the later to become famous through Tom Cruise’s movie TOPGUN), Miramar Navy Base. When my father had gotten the word that he was to join the US troops in Vietnam, my mother had decided that it would be easier for her to handle my father’s absence, by moving herself and my brother and I to Vancouver, British Columbia. That was where my mother’s family lived and somehow my mother felt that she needed their closeness to get her through this stressful time.
That was many years ago now, but the madness really began in earnest after we had made the move to Vancouver, not that I would have recognized it as madness, nor that perhaps I had just started to realize it was madness. Children don’t have the tools to deal with parental mental illness.
The ignorance of childhood no doubt shielded me from any realization that my mother was different. I assumed that all children had parents that went into “moods”. The fact that these moods had become more extreme never really hit home with me, until that morning in the park.
Now I had to explain to another parent, why Carol had found me sitting despondent on the swing in the park, when I should have been making my way to school. If all children faced these moods that their parents went through, surely it was only a matter of time before other children would populate the swing in lonesome despair; the mind of a child ill-equipped.
But somehow, when I had been thrown out of the house that morning, I knew within myself that these moods that my mother experienced weren’t normal. But I was only a child and parents had the absolute final word. How could I begin to explain this to a stranger? Would Carol’s mother not simply take the position that I had been a misbehaved child that had been reprimanded? Would she believe the confusion that I was faced with wondering what I had done to deserve my Mother’s wrath?
The drive to the Social Assistance office isn’t clear in my memory. This is where Carol’s mother decided that I needed to go after I had started blurting out my story. I remember sitting in the car with Carol saying nothing but feeling that my mother’s wrath would only increase once she found out what I had done. No one was going to believe my story once they talked to my mother. She would tell them what an awful child I was and then I would be back in her bedroom sitting on a box, with my back against the cold wall.