When I think of my childhood I remember the earliest days first, when I was about 3 years old, living with my mother and brother in an apartment complex in Lasalle. While it may not necessarily have been intentional, my mother liked to sleep in a lot, she would often leave my brother and I to our own devices, so we'd sneak out of the house and wander around the neighbourhood together before she woke up. We were what parents today call, "Free Range Kids".
Like I said, it wasn't intentional, but it happened anyway.
This is my favourite memory from my childhood: three years old and wandering around the 'hood with my five year old brother, Keith, or sometimes wandering around by myself. The only time we ever had an issue is when my brother and I scaled the wire link fence around the communal pool in early spring and a couple of nearby adults came running to keep us from jumping in or doing something equally silly. We were fully conscious that jumping into a pool filled with junk and mud and winter thaw was probably a bad idea. We didn't need to be told that it was dangerous, we already knew. Children are nowhere near as idiotic and irresponsible or incapable of rational judgement as adults would like to believe.
We also used to wander around Belmont Park, up in Montreal North, before it was shut down. Belmont Park wasn't like La Ronde, where you have to pay admission in order to get through the gates. At Belmont Park you could walk right on in and wander around taking in the sights and sounds without having to pay admission, so it didn't matter if you were rich or poor, either way you could walk in and experience the energy and joy of Belmont's carnival.
These were good times in Montreal.. late 70's, early 80's.. the hype and excitement of the '76 Olympics had revived Montreal's '67 Man and His World exhibit. The city was full of tourists and money and booze and joie de vivre flowed freely throughout the entire city. The Old Port was bustling, the night life was electric, people were happy in Montreal.
I haven't felt the same positive energy in Montreal since the early 80's, almost 20 years, not until Gerald Tremblay became mayor and began his pro-festival and Quartier des Spectacles programs. I've heard a lot of slack from some people regarding Mayor Tremblay, but if you were in Montreal in the 70's and 80's you'd remember what the city was like back then and understand that the mayor is bringing the city back to life rather than stifling creativity and public works the way Pierre Bourque did. Bourque destroyed this city! I have seen nothing but good things since Tremblay became mayor. If Montrealers need to point the finger at anyone, point them at the Italian and Jewish and Irish mafia, they're the ones defrauding Montreal and building sub-par public works while demanding the highest pay possible. Tremblay can only do so much, he's one single man trying to lead and care for almost 4 million people.
But I digress.
These were good times in Montreal, and the happiest moments of my childhood.
***
It gets darker from there on in.
In 1980, just after my 3rd birthday, after my last summer of being a Free Range Kid, the government stepped in and removed my brother and I from my mother's custody and placed my brother and I in foster care. Our first foster home was in Notre-Dame-de-Grace, a place called Hawkins Home. All of the terrible stories you hear about foster care, kids being locked up and put into solitary confinement, kids being strangled and sat on and abused in ways that never leave noticeable bruises, kids being refused food as punishment, kids being taunted and teased and insulted and belittled, ahh it all happened at Hawkins Home.
Hawkins Home was a short-term placement foster home, meaning kids weren't supposed to stay there for more than a month or two. But my brother and I got lost in the shuffle somehow and we ended up staying there for almost 6 months. All because my mother liked to sleep in and we liked to wander around the neighbourhood without adult supervision, which is what it all comes down to, pretty much.
My mother was neglectful but not outright abusive, with the exception of the time she tried to drown us when we were babies because she wasn't able to cope with being a single parent. She had absolutely no support system and, like many parents at their wits end, considered killing herself and her children to save us from suffering. I get that. But the fact remains, she didn't actually go through with it, and this one incident is the only abusive thing my mother ever did to us in our early childhood. There was really no good reason to take us away from our mother. Some nosy neighbours complained about us wandering around the neighbourhood alone and that was that, the government took us away from a relatively benign Free Range lifestyle and locked us up with the violent child abusers that ran Hawkins Home.
You have to understand, also, that there is serious conflict between English child protection services and Quebecois child protection services. They are even run by different agencies, or at least were when we were kids. The Quebecois system refuses to help anglophone children regardless of the amount of abuse or suffering anglophone children experience. If you're an anglophone child in Montreal you're shit out of luck if you need protection. The government will simply "forget" about you, send you home, or place you in high security juvenile detention centres until you finally give up and decide to go back home to your abusive parents all on your own. It's one of the most horrible consequences of the Quebecois sovereignty conflict: anglophone children are mangled and abused by the very system that is mandated to protect them.
In any case. After Hawkins Home my brother and I were placed in a foster home run by a strict and cruel Catholic nun named Carmelita Currie. She wasn't a monster by any stretch of the imagination, she simply did not believe in "babying" children, she believed in the "tough love" approach. Which really translates as abuse by withholding the affection and love and nurturing a traumatized child requires in order to heal and become a productive member of society. I respect Carmelita, she did the best she could with the resources available to her at the time, but she was still a hard cruel woman who straightened out quite a few kids, but also abused quite a few children as well.
Thanks to the affluent and wealthy Catholic community, Carm's foster home was well funded. We had the best of everything; nice clothes, a top notch education, health care, and healthy meals every day. It was run like a boot camp, which is probably why some children who stayed at Carm's eventually joined the army and police force. It was a natural graduation from child boot camp to adult boot camp. We were institutionalized.
I won't go into great detail, but will only say my most traumatic experiences at Carm's were when Father Dave would come to visit, which would traumatize the boys, who then in turn took their anger out on me, the only girl in the house. What stands out the most are the seances and ritual abuse where Father Dave would take the children and perform religious ceremonies.. I have one particular memory where he tried to evoke demonic entities by chanting latin phrases, using me to channel whatever gods or spirits he was trying to communicate with. In simpler words, the dude tried to possess me with demons. He did the same with the boys, but usually behind closed doors, so I can't speak for their experiences.
Sister Carm refused to listen to us when we complained, and for all her intelligence didn't see a correlation between the kids' night terrors and Father Dave's visits. When we complained to her of abuse she told us we were lying and making things up to tarnish Father Dave's reputation. Father Dave told Carm, and I can almost quote verbatim as I heard him say it several times, that the boys were "misconstruing his affection for them because they were starved for male attention and as such didn't know the difference between abuse and innocent affection". But of course we knew the difference. Affection doesn't terrorize children.
I had nightmares for quite a while after moving into Carm's, as did my brother, for very good reason. My biological family is atheist and we were never exposed to religion until we moved into Carm's, so being inundated with violent imagery and ideology, being exposed to paintings of people being beaten and bleeding and hung on crosses, and threatened with that same punishment if we were "bad", yeah, that's some terrifying stuff for full grown adults never mind children. Catholicism in and of itself was a traumatic environment to be raised in, the added ritual abuse only exacerbated the trauma.
It's not that I believed in demons or spirits that was so disturbing but rather that a grown adult was using children for their own means. I felt like a rag doll being thrown around, passed around from person to person, situation to situation, and I had no say in the matter, I was powerless. It was also surreal to understand, at 5 years old, 8 years old, 10 years old, that I was more aware and emotionally mature than the very adults who were supposed to be caring for and protecting us.
***
Children say, "that's not fair!" and they're right, it isn't fair.
Adults say, "that's the way life is" and they're wrong. Living in terror isn't the natural order of being. Oppression is a manmade construct, not universal law.
***
My brother acted out more as the years went by at Carm's and no one stepped in to help us, gradually escalating until he finally broke down and started attacking anyone who picked on him. He was a quiet, gentle kid and he was teased and picked on a lot by his peers in school. He was a geek and a loner, and he was a strong, intelligent, attractive child too, he was the perfect target for school bullies. But he wasn't a pushover. He would take the bullying for weeks, sometimes months on end, every single day at school, until he finally blew up at them. And when my brother blew up... he EXPLODED!
My brother and I are similar in that way. We're quiet, gentle people, until people attack us, and even then we can take a beating without lashing out. But if that line is crossed, when it goes from bullying to outright violent assault, we fight back, and we fight back hard. If you punch us once we'll punch you ten times in return, and we'll make sure it hurts, to make the point that we may be meek and gentle, but if you hurt us, we'll put you in your place so you never think about hurting us again. Extreme self-defense.
So it shocked teachers and social workers when my brother would be bullied for months on end, months! And then he'd go from being this sweet, gentle kid to this angry child full of rage. He wouldn't just punch his attackers, he'd tear them apart until someone finally pulled him off his attackers' backs. And I was the same. And it scared our teachers and social workers. But it was their own damn fault for allowing us to be bullied and refusing to protect us in the first place. If adults wouldn't protect us then we would damn well protect ourselves.
But being a little girl who lashed out at bullies, and being a little boy who lashed out at bullies are two completely different situations. I was consoled and understood, while my brother was punished and abused even more. By the time my brother was 12 years old his teachers had had enough, and Carm had given up on trying to help him, and the government decided to remove him from foster care and placed him at Shawbridge Boys' Farm, a high security juvenile detention centre in the Laurentians. He was only 12 years old and at that time one of the youngest children to ever be placed in Shawbridge. He was a child placed with 16 to 18 year old violent offenders in one of the most horrendous and abusive juvenile detention centres in Canadian history.
I, for my part, stayed at Carm's until I was 14, the longest any child has ever stayed at Carm's.
I was there for 9 years.
***
Somehow (I blame genetics) my brother and I escaped our pasts and grew up to be responsible, kindhearted, productive adults.
When my brother was 17, a hardcore punk begging for money on the streets of downtown Montreal, he met a kindhearted man and they started discussing computers and sound production. Keith had been taking sound production courses at Dawson College, and was one of those types of kids who could take apart a toaster and build a radio out of spare parts. He's brilliant. He is, in my opinion, a genius. He impressed this guy so much that this man hired him to work on some IT projects at the company he managed, Aon Canada. My brother did good work and was hired as a permanent employee. Keith stopped living on the street, found an apartment, met a girl, and settled down. He worked with Aon for more than a decade before branching off and starting his own IT company.
When I was 17 I moved into my first apartment and found a job cleaning tables in the food court of Cavendish Mall, in Cote St-Luc. A year later I moved out to British Columbia and landed a job as a credit manager for Custom Paper Ltd., a small family-run paper company located in Richmond, BC, where I worked for a year. I still have fond memories of Custom Paper and the Batcheller family, they're pretty nice people and it was a pleasure working for them. I then moved on to The Personnel Department, where I worked as an administrative assistant and accounting clerk for several years, building up experience until I qualified for a compliance job at Scotia McLeod, a subsidiary of Scotiabank. A few years later I also branched out and started an ethical accounting firm, which I still run, part time, to this day. Unfortunately a lot of the work I do is pro-bono and I ain't rich, but it's a conscious choice. My work is honourable, which more than pays for itself, karmically.
***
But when I think of my childhood, I skip over all the bits in between. I remember my brother and I wandering around Montreal together, three and five years old, free and curious and happy, and unsullied.
The Bible got it wrong. In the beginning wasn't darkness.
In the beginning, there was light.
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