Never washes off.

It's tricky to write about my childhood when I know my Mom reads my blog.  I love you Mom, and I so appreciate all your encouraging words.  But I need you to imagine that you are writing about your own childhood and that your Mom is reading it.  I know, the thought of Grammy using a computer made me giggle too, but stay with me here.  This is my disclaimer to you and only you: you are not allowed to take anything I write about my childhood personally.  I mean it.  This is not the only post I will write about my perspective growing up, so grab a kleenex and get comfy.

I don't consider myself a glass-half-empty type of person.  I always trust that things are going to work out because I've had countless times in my life where I had to give myself over completely to that trust because it was all that was left.  I learned at a very early age that life continues no matter what happens, but in the end it may not look the way you were hoping it would.  

I've mentioned before that I didn't grow up with much.  "Didn't grow up with much" is almost a euphemism.  My Mom raised four kids on her own and we were on welfare for most of that time.  I'll try to give it some perspective...  We rented crappy houses and we never had a car.  If we were getting somewhere, we were taking a bus, bumming a ride, or walking.  I walked a lot and I daydreamed while I walked.  I daydreamed a lot.  We always had a roof over our heads, but sometimes just barely.  I can't imagine how tough it was for my Mom to find a place big enough for five people with the inadequate amount of money she had to work with every month.  And once rent was paid, she had to feed us, and remember, I had three older brothers.  I eat potatoes only a few times a year because frankly, I ate so many potatoes growing up that the last thing I want to eat is a potato.  I'm a vegan now, but when I ate meat I could never understand the appeal of chicken wings.  I would see people downing pounds of wings at a restaurant and shudder.  Chicken wings are cheap.  I ate a lot of chicken wings and drumsticks growing up and I never, ever bought and/or cooked a chicken wing or drumstick once I left home.  Ever.  And food was not thrown out willy-nilly in our house.  Burnt toast was only thrown out if it was charcoal.  The fact that we scraped off the burnt top layer of the toast instead of throwing it away probably explains why I actually really like moderately-burnt toast.  It also probably explains why I like to have five of everything in my pantry and fridge: it makes me feel secure.

When I was thirteen, we were evicted when the house we had lived in for a few years was sold, and everything changed.  My oldest brothers Keith and Kevin were old enough to move out on their own, so my Mom didn't need to worry about housing them, but my brother Phil was only sixteen.  My Mom couldn't find anywhere suitable for us.  Phil ended up on his own and I had to move in with my best friend Kate and her family for a few months.  I can't imagine what it was like for my Mom, having to go to Kate's mother and ask her to take me in.  My Mom ended up living in the basement of a family we knew.  She had a room to herself, but she was basically living with this other family.  It was a terrible time for her.  I had fun living with Kate; I got off the easiest.  Phil was just out there, floating around.  Sixteen.

We couldn't stay this way forever and eventually, my Mom rented a room in a depressing motel.  She and I had one big room with a kitchenette and two beds.  I was fourteen, sharing a room with my Mom, and I didn't want anyone to know where we lived.  I lied to a lot of people about it, I never invited anyone over and only my closest friends knew.  Whenever I was walking somewhere, I would look into people's houses and imagine what it would be like to have a house.  Actually, that was something I can always remember doing, from the time I was about six years old.  Walking home after school, daydreaming about having a real house that belonged to us, that we didn't have to rent.  My most common fantasy as a kid was winning some kind of contest where the prize was a tonne of money and buying my family a house.  


The motel was near my high school, but it was also right on a busy highway and going "home" became the last thing I wanted to do.  It was around this time that I started staying out all night and worrying my Mom to death.  I don't think she could really blame me, but I still look back and imagine her waiting up all night, wondering if I was OK, both wanting and dreading the ringing telephone.  During this time, my Mom looked desperately for a better place for us to live, but we just moved to another motel.  This one was in a far better location and it wasn't so dreary, but it was still just the one room.  

I was fourteen, I took my first job bussing tables and my grades went into the toilet.  My Mom started cleaning rooms in the motel and sometimes I helped.  Phil would show up some nights and sleep on the floor because he had nowhere else to go and it was cold out.  The memory of him sleeping on couch cushions on the floor just breaks my heart.  He was seventeen, with no place to call home.  What was that like for him?  And I was the lucky one who had a roof over my head and a pull-out couch to sleep on.  Is it any wonder that this was the time in my life where I started experimenting with cigarettes, alcohol and drugs?  And what could my Mom do about it, with no stable home to offer me?  She was just trying to keep us housed and fed.  That was the challenge every day when she got out of bed.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Things turned around a bit when I was sixteen and the owner of the motel we were living in offered us a suite in a house that he owned.  A real house, for the first time in three years.  I will never forget moving into that house; it was modest and kind of falling apart, but we might as well have been moving into a mansion.  My own room, a proper kitchen, a proper living room.  It was amazing.  But the biggest bonus of all: I didn't have to feel embarrassed to tell people where I lived.  I could have friends over.  By this time, Phil had moved to Kelowna, where he met his wife Liz and started a family.  He never moved back to the coast.  Life regained some normalcy.  I re-focused on school (even though I was now over a year behind - I wouldn't graduate until I was nineteen), and discovered my love of photography, which changed me and in some ways saved my life.  Hours spent in the dark room printing black-and-white photographs was far more appealing than getting high with my friends.  

Seventeen.

Time-lapsed self-portrait when I was nineteen.

So why am I re-hashing all of this now?  Mine was by no means a hard upbringing compared with some of the atrocities and tragedies in the world; I don't walk around thinking that it was.  But I was one of the poorest kids I knew growing up and that left an imprint on me that never washes off.  I'm a success story of the welfare system, although I sometimes wish I had become a doctor or something to really blow the stereotype out of the water.  And because I know a lot of folks who are raising kids in similar financial circumstances, and I know sometimes they must wonder what I'm about when I talk about Peter and me buying a house and owning a car; the things I daydreamed about growing up.  It's important to me that people know that not only can I relate, I can close my eyes and be there.