To my parents, Frank and Sheila,
for giving me the gift of life, and for doing the best they could given the resources they had.
To Karen McNeill,
for seeing the good in me before I saw it in myself, and for helping me realize that my life was worth living.
To Warren Macdonald,
for showing me that I had wings, and could fly.
The Alchemy of Grief
Although I knew the broad contours of Margo’s story – the troubled childhood, the bouts with addiction and depression, the redemption through climbing and community – I didn’t fully appreciate her book prior to my own experience with indelible grief. Yet the cause of an individual’s suffering need not be as dramatic and obvious as the abuse and addiction Margo depicts. Smaller disappointments and slights too can leave us reeling. Perhaps therein lies the value of Margo’s words, for they reveal certain truths universal to our varied experiences as imperfect human beings facing an uncertain world.
Each of us travels a unique path punctuated by joy and sorrow, triumphs and setbacks both large and small. We gravitate toward joy, as we must. We seek the warmth of a loving partner, the comfort of family and friends. We celebrate our successes at work. We delight in those magical moments in the mountains or wherever we play. But we are conditioned to avoid the sorrows. Pain is seen as failure, an unnecessary step backwards. Suffering is to be avoided, shunted off to some dark corner where we hope it will stay. It seldom does.
Who among us hasn’t lost a spouse, a parent, a close friend? Who hasn’t been disappointed in love, or devastated by a life-altering illness? If we haven’t thus far, we likely will, and sooner than we’d prefer. Someone within our circle almost certainly tolerates a loveless marriage, agonizes over an ailing parent, regrets a lost opportunity. How are you doing? We ask, though we don’t really want to know the answer. We shy away from acknowledging each other’s struggles, from offering a sympathetic shoulder on which to rest. We hope to inoculate ourselves. There but for the grace of God go I. Yet when we turn away, we not only dismiss that which makes us uncomfortable, we deny our own suffering and allow it an unseen power over our lives.
With a direct and brutal honesty, Margo peers deeply into her dark corners and takes us along on her journey to peace and enlightenment. She reminds us that the path is seldom straight and never easy. She knowingly engages in self-destructive behaviour, yet time and time again resurfaces and recommits herself to healing. She never gives up: she takes two steps forward and three back. She does the work. Eventually she falls “…into the abyss that had been waiting for me all my life.” From this nadir she rekindles hope and climbs back toward the light.
As we all inevitably must. In October 2017, my wife Julie and I found out that our only son, Hayden, and the love of his life, Inge Perkins, had been caught in an avalanche in Montana. Both were buried. Hayden dug himself out and searched for Inge, to no avail. He took his life a few hours later, disconsolate and alone. Since then I’ve felt unmoored from the world. It is still incomprehensible to me that Hayden’s life, so full of love and promise, is over, and I wonder when, if ever, the weight on my soul will lessen.
Margo’s words give me hope as I navigate this river of grief. She provides a guidebook to the wilderness of desperation. More than anything, All That Glitters helps me understand how essential are these periods of sadness, these disappointments, these times fraught with angst and uncertainty, for it is on the forge of grief that we transmute suffering into joy.
—Michael Kennedy, October 2019
When this book was originally released in the spring of 2011, the Arab uprising was in full swing, the hunt for Bin Laden had come to an end and Donald Trump was just a hotel owner/reality TV host.
In the fifteen months it took me to write this book, I told myself I would never publish it, after all, the topics I cover are loaded with stigma and in some cases surrounded by a conspiracy of silence. But when the manuscript was ready, I pressed send and felt a wave of relief that I had taken control of my personal narrative for the first time in my life. The judgment I feared never materialized, but support, encouragement and validation did.
In the intervening years since its publication, I’ve watched study after study come out in support of what my lived experience had already confirmed: that mental illness is rooted in the seat of the emotions, that it is inextricably intertwined with stressful events that happen in our lives, and that the treatment is far more complex than a prescription of talk therapy and pharmaceutical drugs.
In fact, the prescription is more closely related to mountain sports (i.e. activities that bring us into the present moment and ground us in our bodies) than I ever could have imagined when I was introduced to ice climbing while I was still addicted to street drugs. Since my book was released, nature bathing and wilderness therapy have sprung up as healing modalities in their own right. Doctors in Scotland now prescribe nature as a cure for many ills, and movement is scientifically proven to be the most natural and safe means of elevating the level of neurotransmitters in the brain. All this to say that far from discovering anything new, I had inadvertently stumbled upon something as age-old as humanity itself.
The genesis of this book occurred in the Mountain and Wilderness Writing Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. I had gone there to write a book about the tragic loss of a climbing partner, and instead emerged with the bones of an inner journey so personal I wasn’t sure I could ever share it with the world.
I will forever be grateful to Diane Morriss at Sono Nis Press for taking my project on and allowing me to retain control over a very personal story. When her warehouse burned down and she gave me back the rights to my book, the only solution seemed to be to self-publish under my own banner.
Until I met Don Gorman at Rocky Mountain Books and felt the same level of trust that I had with Diane.
The book you are holding in your hands has a history befitting the journey described in these pages: it has literally risen from the ashes and been reborn.
Margo Talbot
November 2019
Canmore, Alberta
I would like to thank all of my psychologists, psychiatrists, and clinical social workers, particularly Elaine Spencer, who seemed to understand me as though she had lived my life. Everyone mentioned in this book, whether they appear as saints or sinners, helped me grow in ways I never would have had I not encountered them in the exact form and at the exact time that I did. Though certain names have been changed and circumstances altered to protect certain people, they are forever imprinted on my soul for their contributions to the person I have become.
Life has been my greatest teacher, aided and abetted by the best minds in trauma healing and spiritual transformation: Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, Eckhart Tolle, and Caroline Myss.
Thanks to Rocky Mountain Books for giving my memoir its second wind. If my book ever gets judged by its cover, Paul Zizka gets the credit for gracing the world with unparalleled mountain photography, and Chyla Cardinal for turning his image into a cover more beautiful than I ever could have imagined.
Special thanks goes out to Ken Wallator, who lost his battle with darkness, but gave me the gift that keeps on giving…
The Stage
As I stood on top of Mount Vinson, the highest peak in Antarctica, I was overcome by a sense of inner joy. It was February 2006—a lifetime away from what I now realize was the turning point in my life. As I watched Rob, my client and climbing partner, take photos from the summit, my mind drifted back to March 1992.
The cop who had busted me stood outside my cell door, throwing his keys into the air and catching them over and over again. “We know who you’re involved with, and we know why you take all those trips out to the coast. You’re not fooling us with your story. We’ve got enough information to put you away for a really long time.” I ignored him. If the cops knew as much as he said they did, I would be looking at a serious prison sentence. But maybe he was bluffing, trying to get me to break down and rat on somebody higher up the ladder. He eventually left me to contemplate what my life had boiled down to.
The view from Mount Vinson was breathtaking, even as memories cascaded through my mind, taking me back through the decades of my depression and addiction, of breakdowns and therapy. I was surrounded by the things that had given me the greatest solace during those times: nature in general and mountains in particular. There had been a time when rage and pain, fuelled by a childhood of neglect and abuse, were all that I knew. Getting thrown in jail turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it became the impetus to turn around and face that pain. It was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life, but the most worthwhile. I chose to undo the damage and begin again with choices I’d never had as a child. I decided that the events of my past could only control me if I let them, and this I would no longer do.
Novelist Tom Robbins said that it is never too late to have a happy childhood, and I am living proof of that. Now I go to drugstores to buy glitter makeup and bubble gum, spend my leisure time actively in fresh air, and dance for hours at parties because I’m just happy to be alive. My friends are not addicts, I don’t live on the street, and my parents exist in a faraway mist that no longer rules my life. I have known darkness and have chosen the light.
My mind returned to the present and the minus-fifty-degree temperature that was its defining feature. I motioned to Rob that we needed to begin our descent to the shelter of high camp. He had conquered Mount Vinson, the sixth peak in his bid to do the seven summits. This climb meant a lot to Rob, I was certain. But I was just as certain that he had no idea what it meant to me.
A full moon hung in the sky on the night I was born. March 27, 1964, was also the day an earthquake rocked the west coast of Alaska. I popped out on the opposite side of the continent, in Fredericton, the capital city of New Brunswick. Although my parents had prayed for a boy, I emerged as their third daughter. Karla was three months shy of her third birthday when I was born, and Jane was sixteen months old. My mother picked my name from a list of bingo winners she saw on TV, removing the silent t at the end of “Margot.”
“It was superfluous, and therefore pretentious,” she told me years later. “Besides, I didn’t want people to think you were French.”
French like my father. Born in Quebec City, he spent his early childhood there, until his mother became too ill to care for him and his three siblings. At the age of four he was put into a Catholic orphanage in New Brunswick and never saw his parents again. His mother was French-Canadian, and his father was described as a drunken sailor or a drunken Indian, depending on who you talked to. My grandmother had run off with him when she was seventeen, and her family had disowned her. After she died, the family paid the church to destroy the birth records of her four children.
My parents didn’t get too far into their marriage before my mother learned to wield these truths to her advantage. Whenever they argued, or whenever one of her daughters exhibited any untoward tendency, she would blame everything on the bad genes in my father’s side of the family. And, the facts being what they were, he would have had a hard time defending either himself or his lineage.
My mother was a force to be reckoned with. She grew up in Minto, a small town that existed solely as a creation of a coal-mining company. Her father was a miner, and her mother had a greater capacity for churning out children than she had for taking care of them. My mother was the eldest, and she stepped in as surrogate mother to her nine siblings.
My parents met in 1960 and fell madly in love. My father worked for the Department of Agriculture in animal husbandry, and my mother was putting herself through nursing school. They seemed the perfect couple: my dad was tall, dark, and handsome, and my mother was considered the beauty of her high school graduating class. But the seeds of their future problems were as firmly planted in their psyches as they were invisible to the outside world.
My parents took a two-week road trip when I was five months old. My father was restless, and his nerves weren’t strong enough to allow him to be around us kids much, so he convinced my mother that the drive would be a good break for them. My mother found a woman from a neighbouring town who would look after her daughters, and with that my parents set off on their trip. When they returned ten days later, they dismissed the babysitter. The next morning, when my mother came into my bedroom, I lay motionless in my crib and showed no sign that I recognized her. My mother could not get me to make eye contact with her or respond to her in any way. Weeks went by before she could get me to smile.
When I was a year old, my parents bought a house in Riverview, a small town about two hours away from Fredericton. My dad was glad to leave his job with the government—it was too predictable and had become boring to him. Instead, he figured he’d try his hand at being an insurance salesman. My mother refers to me as a model child during this time. She tells stories of how I was like a sack of potatoes on the floor. Whenever she put me down, I would not move from that spot; in fact I would barely play with my toys. In September 1966, when I was two and a half years old, my brother Frankie was born, and my parents finally had what they wanted: a boy.
One of my earliest memories is of a family visit to Oromocto in the spring of 1967. My mother’s parents lived in this small town, a two-hour drive from Riverview, but we rarely visited. My grandparents didn’t think much of my dad. They mistrusted him: he was an orphan, and therefore of dubious heritage. My father didn’t feel welcome in their home, and all of us children felt the same way. As soon as we arrived, we were relegated to a back room to amuse ourselves while the grown-ups sat around the kitchen table imbibing their favourite adult beverages. The women were mostly teetotallers, but the men drank like there was no tomorrow. Billy, my mother’s youngest brother, was especially renowned for his drinking prowess. Apparently he and his friends operated a still in the woods behind their childhood home from the time he was eleven. Roseanne, my mother’s sister, was the one relative who took any notice of us when we visited, and she would make a fuss over us the likes of which we had never seen.
On the early visit that I remember, I had just turned three. Roseanne and I were alone in the house except for Uncle Billy, who was watching TV in the living room. We were in the kitchen, where I was helping her make “mini-pizzas”—slices of bread covered with ketchup and chopped-up hot dogs. When Roseanne discovered we had run out of cheese, she called to Billy, telling him that she needed to step out for a few minutes and that he should watch me while she was gone. Twenty minutes later she returned to find Billy chasing me around the kitchen with a ten-inch butcher’s knife in his hands. While I was screaming, he was laughing maniacally. As Roseanne ran over to pick me up, she yelled at him, “You useless drunk! Can’t we trust you to do anything right?” He continued laughing, but at least he put away the knife.
In the far corner of our kitchen, a bench was set up in such a way that there was only a narrow opening between the bench and the wall. I would cover this gap with a blanket and crawl inside. I dragged other loose blankets and pillows in there and brought my stuffed tiger in to keep me company. This was my hiding place, my secret fort. Tiger and I spent hours in that fort, playing and napping and talking about what life would be like when I grew up. We dreamed about all the places we would visit and the people we would meet. Mostly I was left alone while I was in there, except when Mom would get down on her knees, come to the opening, and try to coax me out. She said it wasn’t good for me to be spending so much time alone—I should be playing with the other kids in the neighbourhood, or at least getting some fresh air.
Mom started locking me out of the house to encourage me to play outside, but it didn’t work—I just hung on to the door handle, crying and begging her to let me back inside. I was confused: I didn’t want to play with other kids, and fresh air meant nothing to me compared with the peace and quiet of my secret hiding place. Still, by the time I was five I had traded the fort in the kitchen for real forts in the woods behind the house. At first I went there with Peter, a boy from the neighbourhood. We would build forts out of branches and leaves and play inside these for hours. Eventually, though, I found myself alone in the woods, venturing farther from the house and building shelters on my own.
When I started school in the fall of 1970, my mother enrolled me in the first French-immersion program in the country. My teacher was an Acadian nun who lived across the river. I was an intelligent child and I loved school; I especially loved it when Sister Legere came around to review my homework, something she did every day. Each time she stopped by my desk, I could tell she was pleased. I was a dutiful child who took my studies seriously because I knew that one of the only ways I could get my mother’s approval was to get good grades. I’d had nothing but straight A’s since I started school.
I liked Sister Legere. She was calm and gentle, and one day she asked me questions about my life at home. I was happy that she was taking an interest in me, though I didn’t know how to answer most of her questions. She put a big blue star on my paper and smiled at me. Just before she left my desk, she gently brushed my hair away from my face, and I could feel myself freeze up inside. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been touched in this way. Although I pretended everything was normal, I could feel my face getting hot as an unidentifiable feeling rose up in me. Luckily there were many students in the class, and within moments Sister Legere had moved on to the desk behind mine.
With each passing year, it became clearer to my sisters and me that my little brother Frankie was my mother’s favourite. She spent most of her time with him when she was not cooking or cleaning the house. If any of us mentioned this, she would tell us that Frankie needed her more than we did because he was a boy and did not pick up on things as quickly as we did.
One day when I came home from school, Mom was sitting on the couch reading a book to him. I paused in the hallway as I watched them cuddled up on the couch. Frankie looked over and caught my eye. He turned back to her and said, “Mom, how come Margo never smiles?”
There was a moment of silence before she replied, “Oh, I don’t know. Some people just don’t smile as much as others. It doesn’t mean they’re not happy.”
I learned when I was young that expressing my needs only got me into trouble. My mother ruled the household with her eyes, and I became adept at avoiding her ocular daggers. My feelings at that time were of overwhelming sadness. I felt alone and had already learned that it was futile to try to reach out to my parents. The only way to gain my mother’s approval was to bring home good grades and help her with her chores. My parents owned apartment buildings near where we lived, and from the time I started school I was helping my mother clean them after school and on weekends.
This contrasted wildly with the treatment my brother received from my parents, and it was more and more obvious to my sisters and me that he was their pride and joy. It seemed like Mom only spoke to us to tell us how to pick up after ourselves or which chores needed to be done. When we asked her why Frankie never had to do any chores, she told us that boys took longer to mature than girls or that their arm muscles didn’t develop as early, and that would be the end of the conversation. When Frankie started school, my mother sat with him every night and helped him with his homework. Early on, my sisters developed an attitude of not caring, but for years I continued trying to win my mother’s approval.
Dad relied on Mom to do the parenting. The abandonment he had endured as a child had deeply scarred him. He had no idea how to raise kids, having no role models to draw on, and his temper prevented his disciplining us in any balanced way. He began finding ways to be away from home, first through work and then by helping neighbours with chores—fixing their roofs and mowing their lawns. Eventually he found solace in going out drinking with his friends.
By the time I was in Grade 2, my father was working as a travelling salesman, selling vacuum cleaners. He was always on the road, which is where he preferred to be. Whenever he was home he would tell stories about how he sold vacuum cleaners to lonely old women, farmers’ wives, or schoolteachers, who would often cook him a meal and give him a place to stay for the night.
Dad was great at his job: every year he would win the “salesman of the year” award as well as every prize in between. (This was how I got my first bike—a pink single-speed with a banana seat and ape handles. I was seven, and it took me days to figure out how to ride it on the street in front of our house.) He also won many trips, mainly to popular resorts such as Florida and the Bahamas, so he and my mother regularly went on vacations. It wasn’t easy to find someone to babysit four children for two weeks, but my mother always managed to find someone via word of mouth.
In twenty years of therapy, I learned two things that I believe to be immutable laws of psychology: depression is repressed anger, and anger is repressed sadness. At some point in my early years I learned to stuff all of my pain deep inside, but it was only a matter of time before this was bound to surface in some way.
The first time I remember acting out my anger was when I was seven years old. I was sitting in Dad’s favourite chair, a black leather reclining armchair that was in the living room close to the front door. I had a pad of paper in one hand and a pen in the other. My parents were supposed to return from their latest trip to Barbados that day, and they were late. I was upset that they had gone away and left us in the care of yet another complete stranger. I felt like my parents didn’t care about me, that they were too busy to spend time with my sisters and me when they were home, and that they spent any leisure time they did have away from us.
I put the pen in my left hand, with the tip facing downward, and began to lift my arm up, then let it drop down, rhythmically poking holes in the armrest of the chair. When the armrest on my left was full of little holes, I switched the pen to my right hand and repeated the action on the other side. My parents arrived in the driveway only a few minutes after I had finished disfiguring the chair. I knew what I had done was wrong, so I got out of the chair and pretended to be playing with some toys as they walked in the door. It was hours before my mother noticed the chair. She asked each of us children who had done such a thing. At first I stayed silent, but eventually I had to tell her it was me.
“But why would you do such a thing?” she asked, reasonably enough. “You know that’s your father’s favourite chair.”
I lifted my shoulders up to my ears and lowered them again. My anger welled to the surface, and I tried to hide it. I stayed silent, but inside my mind I was screaming: How come you only notice me when I’m doing something wrong?
One of my favourite TV shows was Grizzly Adams. The show’s main character, a frontiersman living in exile in the mountains, was the first man I actually envisioned myself living with when I got older. I loved his ruggedness and his self-sufficiency, traits I wanted to emulate. It wasn’t lost on me that he bathed only when he wanted to, and then only in a stream or a lake. I had always hated having to bathe, and I was astonished to learn that I would need to perform regular body maintenance for my entire life: not just bathing, but brushing my teeth, combing my hair, and shaving my legs.
Around this time I realized it was unusual for a mother to still be in bed when her children returned home from school in the afternoon. I didn’t piece this together on my own but learned it from dialogue I overheard in the schoolyard. Other girls my age talked about the things they would do with their mothers—helping to cook, going shopping after school or on weekends. My mother didn’t do any of these things with me. Instead, she would rise from her bed around four in the afternoon and open the heavy curtains that kept out the daylight. She would walk down the stairs to the kitchen, where she would smoke cigarettes and listen to the radio. My mother was interested in just about every program broadcast on the CBC. And because she slept all day, she would be up all hours of the night, listening to radio shows and cleaning and vacuuming the house. Up to this point, I had thought this was the way things were for every family. But once I realized that this was not the case, I began taking more notice of it. I remembered a time when my mother did seem to be up when I got home from school, or was only occasionally still in bed, but I couldn’t remember how long ago that was. I now began wondering about it, but I knew enough not to ask.
When I was ten I contracted pneumonia. My mother, a nurse, decided that it was just a chest cold, so after a few days off from school I was sent back to classes. My cough persisted and eventually got worse, and the teacher sent me home again. I was frightened by the coughing spells because it was becoming hard for me to breathe. My coughing displaced so much liquid in my chest that when I tried to inhale, it simply rolled around in my chest, causing a tickling sensation in my lungs that would start a whole new round of coughing. One morning I went into such a coughing fit at home that I thought I was going to die. There was nobody else in the house, and I was more frightened than I had ever been in my life.
Later that evening, as I lay in bed coughing, I heard my father pleading with my mother to take me to the hospital. “That’s no normal cough, Sheila, and she’s been out of school for weeks now.” My mother insisted that it was nothing, that it would be gone soon enough.
I still had the cough ten months later. Finally my mother gave in and took me to a doctor.
“How long has your daughter had this cough?” he asked after he had finished examining me.
I noticed my mother tense up at the question. “Well, I guess it started about ten months ago,” she replied.
The doctor’s eyebrows went up, and his forehead furrowed. “She’s in the latter stages of pneumonia, so the worst is over,” he said with some restraint. “I’ll write out a prescription for penicillin, which should take care of the rest of it.”
My mother couldn’t leave the doctor’s office fast enough, and not a word was spoken between us about the past ten months of illness.
Later that evening, I overheard the conversation between my parents. My father’s voice carried through the house: “For Christ’s sake, Sheila, you’re a nurse! How the hell do you mistake pneumonia for a common cold?”
My mother replied in her cold and dismissive tone, “I don’t care what you think, Frank. There is no way anyone could have known that she had anything other than a common cold.”
Dad offered me my first beer a few months later. He drank a brand called Alpine, whose label featured a beautiful graphic of a snow-covered mountain. After opening a bottle, he poured most of it into a glass for me and handed the remainder, in the bottle, to Frankie. This didn’t go over well with my mother, but Dad thought he was teaching me how to handle my liquor. “Do you want her learning how to drink out on the streets, Sheila, or here at home where she is safe?” I didn’t pay much attention to their fighting; I was too busy appreciating my first glass of beer. I loved it. I’m not sure if it was the taste, the effect of the alcohol, or simply the fact that I felt really grown up having more than just a sip of the golden beverage.
Shortly after this I remember finding a Cosmopolitan magazine lying around the house. I flipped through it and discovered an interview with Katherine Hepburn. In the article, Katherine spoke of how she liked to live her life as a man would, with all of the attendant freedoms. In the accompanying photo, she was sitting in a lounge chair in faded jeans and a white-collared shirt, her hair unbrushed. I decided there and then that I too was going to live my life as men did, and that I wasn’t going to waste my time caring about how I looked. I flipped through the remainder of the magazine and realized that the models who appealed to me most were the ones with windblown hair, not the ones who were perfectly coiffed.
My father loved Western movies, and as a result I grew up seeing just about every Western that was ever made. “I was born in the wrong century,” Dad would exclaim, to no one in particular, both during and after every film. Apparently The Godfather fit into his exclusive club of respectable movies, and when I was eleven we watched it on the television in the living room together. Although I vividly remember being shocked by the scene with the horse’s head in the bed, I otherwise loved the film. The scenes were exotic and the characters vivid.
A few weeks later my father asked me, out of nowhere, “Margie, what do you want to do when you grow up?”
Without a moment’s hesitation I replied, “I’m going to live in the mountains and work for the Mafia.”
“Well,” my father replied, “you’d better be careful. Those guys are dangerous.”
My mother hated cooking and had a quick recipe that she would often make us for dinner: “meal in a dish.” She would open a few cans of Campbell’s tomato soup, throw in some hamburger and whatever vegetables were in the freezer, turn the burner on low, and let the concoction simmer over the next two hours. Once it was ready, we were free to come into the house and eat. Since there was no schedule, we rarely sat down to dinner together as a family.
In April 1975, one month after I turned eleven, my parents made a point of telling us that we would be eating in the dining room at six that evening and that we all had to be there. As we were used to running our own schedules, this was no small feat to accomplish. We met in the dining room at the appointed time, just as Mom was serving up spaghetti and meatballs on the “nice” table usually reserved for adult company. Once we were all seated and ready to eat, Mom and Dad told us that they had an announcement to make. After an awkward preamble, Dad said, “Your mother is pregnant. She’s going to have another baby in a few months. She’ll need your help with this, so I expect you to help her.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. His speech sounded like a bunch of abstract words. But over the next few months, as I watched my previously limber mother barely make it up the stairs to her bedroom, I began to understand what my father was trying to tell us—to tell me—although I was still unsure how I could possibly be of any help. My mother, now thirty-seven, was on the cusp of having her fifth child. It was clear that she could barely take care of the children she already had, let alone add another one to the brood.
Five months later, Richard was born. From the moment Mom brought him home from the hospital, he was the joy of my life—so much so that I felt he had been born just for me. I no longer felt alone; his arrival created a level of well-being that I had never experienced before. My two sisters had already entered puberty and had lives outside our home that left little room for the family. In contrast, I was a loner. I had no friends, so Richard became the centre of my universe. It was late September when he was born, so I was back in school, but I spent all my time after school and on weekends with him. He was cute and funny, and by the time he started to walk, he strode around like a miniature football player. I took him everywhere with me, and I liked being around him more than I did anyone my own age. When my mother wasn’t in bed she doted on Richard as much as she did on Frankie. But that didn’t bother me. My days of trying to win her approval were quickly coming to an end.
My sister Jane recently told me that our family was always afraid of my anger. I can’t remember exhibiting it in my younger years, but I do remember the day the power dynamic shifted between my mother and me.
It was the summer after I turned twelve. I was upstairs having a fight with Karla and must have used some of the colourful new words the boys on the street had taught me, because the next thing I knew my mother was coming up the stairs with a brush in her hand. When she reached the landing, energy that I had never felt before welled up inside me. I grabbed the brush from her, throwing it over her head and down the stairs. My mother looked shocked, and I was prepared to physically fight her if I had to. She was staring straight into my eyes, and I could see she was afraid of me. This was the first time I was aware of the power of my anger. I realized this was the key to pushing back the oppressive world that had been closing in on me since I was born.
When I realized that my mother could no longer control me, I ran wild. The shift happened so quickly that my mother thought (and still thinks) that I went crazy. But in my view, this was my first step toward breaking free from constantly trying to win her approval. Before, I had been a quiet, obedient child; now, suddenly, I began living out on the streets, drinking, doing drugs, and hanging out with older boys. Dad threatened to send me to a foster home so that I could learn to appreciate having a family, and Mom wanted to call the cops. But they could only pretend to discipline me, as I was completely beyond anyone’s control.
I laughed in their faces and cried behind their backs. Now I know that, deep down, I just wanted love, and because I wasn’t getting it at home, I went looking for it in the streets. At the time, I was completely unaware of the reasons for my behaviour. I supported my habits by bootlegging to minors with the help of some older boys. I was kicked off every sports team in school, but I didn’t care: the world was fucked, and I was hell-bent on breaking every one of its rules.
While my code of conduct around my parents was silence, my behaviour elsewhere spoke volumes. My tribe of dispossessed children became my family, and I began to live by my own laws—laws that sprang from the unspoken anger that was always just below the surface.
Interpretation of Dreams