Welcome to My Life.

I grew up in a little town in central Ontario. I had wonderful loving parents and my sister and I were provided for, we were not in need for anything. Life was great at home, a tourist resort on a hundred acre lot of forest and a thousand feet lake frontage. My problems in life began when I started public school. Being harassed, bullied, and ostracized for the most part except  when I went get on my bike to visit friends on the reservation about five miles from my home. I became a loner for the most part and spent most of my time either in the forest behind the house or out on the lake with one of my dads row boats, just spending the day exploring the lakes many tributaries and doing some fishing.

I had very few close friends but I did meet this girl at school, her name was Helen, a street fighting tom boy. We kind of ran wild for a time, and of course that certainly went a long ways to making most folks tongues wag about the two trashy kids running around loose about town.

As I got into my mid teens I knew that I needed to escape from the oppression and prejudice I was receiving from the wonderful folks of the community, at school and the wonderful folks of the church who probably thought I was devil possessed or something anyway.     

In 1961 at 15years old I ran away from home. Note, outside my mom and dad few people were even aware of my absence during those two years fore the exception of my antagonists at school.

I took twenty dollars from the cookie jar and slung my bag over my shoulder and ran away from home, hitchhiked my way from the sticks of central Ontarioto New York City. You see, I joined those there dirty hippie that I had heard most folks back home call them. I had heard so much bad stuff about but still yearned to learn more about what appeared to me as free souls. After arriving in New York I walked into this restaurant to order something to eat, having to use some of my precious $20.00 which I knew would not last long in the big city.

After completing my meal I started to walk out of the restaurant when I heard a couple of girls laughing and I turned to look. There were four hippy dudes sitting at one table, as I walked by I purposely dropped my small pouch of change on the floor, making a loud enough clunk for one of them to hear. This handsome looking kid with a goatee leaned over gracefully like and picked up the pouch and called my attention. Giving me back the pouch he invited me to sit with them. After a mea and a good chat getting acquainted I was accepted and left with them in their VW Micro moved into the commune. Almost immediately after I moved in I fell head over heels in love with this wonderful blond haired blue eyes boy, Sweed, who played the Hawaiian steel guitar.

My greatest contribution towards living and sharing the commune with the others was making arts and crafts. I would go with a group of other girls to the down town area to sell our products. It was rather an exciting experience, especially when we saw a policeman coming and we would quickly collect our wares and make a quick disappearing act in a flurry of laughter and giggles as we ran. Good exercise and adrenal rush I would say.

So we made our way around the many different down town streets of New York selling our goods to drum up money to use for expenses to keep the commune a functioning community. The other girls and I worked well together in the commune, each had their own job to carry out and we just did them.

We were the home makers, the housekeepers, cooks, dishwashers, washing and mending clothes, and even performed small house repairs and such. Working with those runaway girls was good experience for me for when I would be working as a social worker thirty years hence. A lot of fun, we could think and do stuff for ourselves when ever we chose to do so without being told to by someone else. It certainly was a learning experience for me, one I would never get to enjoy again for a good many years, if ever again unfortunately. For two years I had managed to work harmonically with both the guys and the girls.

Unfortunately I knew I had to leave New Yorkin ’63 when the revolts and demonstrations started and the harassment from the law. I had to return home. As much as I loved James I also knew that I was not ready to make a commitment and had no desire in prolonging me having to move on, my moving on was inevitable anyway. It would only make the situation more painful if I waited till later.

When I got back home I went back to school and upgraded my schooling to first year college. Then I took a course in architectural and mechanical designing through an adult retraining program.

That didn't do much towards obtaining a good paying job. I worked at a couple of different places in my profession, then every thing just dried up, much thanks to the advent of computers taking over and doing the same work as an engeneering draftsperson in a fraction of the time. So I got a job working at a local dynamite factory, good money but heavy work. Let's just say I have at times struggled picking up sacks and containers of stuff that were nearly as me, I weighted all of 115lbs at the time and some of those sacks weighed up to 100 lbs. There was no way I was going to let the guys think I couldn’t do it.

In my early twenties I had the ambition and honestly tried to get some really unique ideas started, like for example go carts with knobby wheels on a dirt track. At the time I owned a small resort inherited from my parents. I already had a trailer park, and a boat rental business and forty five acres of land to develop the go-cart track.

But unfortunately not being very experienced in the loan business to finance such a project to get my projects going, my idea blew away with the wind. I might as well be whistling in a hurricane in the dark. So the go-cart business went down the tubes. I also copiloted a bush plane with this guy I met across the lake from me. Even drove transport for a while. But even for those days being female didn’t slow down my ambitions none. I didn’t give a rats backside what people thought.

 

Through the 80's I got married and had three children, 2 girls 1 boy. Five years after that our relationship just went sour. It had deteriorated to the point of abuse, I had to go so I packed up the kids and went to my friends place on the res. Wasn’t long my ex found where I was and the kids were lifted by children’s aid. I lost the property, an inheritance left me by my mom and dad that was evaluated at half a million dollars. Finding myself alone with nowhere in particular to go. I wnet home and picked up a few things then left again, with my drunken, psychotic, bi-polar ex throwing stuff at the car. That was the end of six years of mental and physical abuse, I hoped. I woke up the next day with my feet stuck out the window of my car in some bush in North Carolina which turned out to be a bear sanctuary.

I worked at a whole mess of low paying, temporary jobs at farms like mending fences, painting houses, house cleaning, cleaning out barns, fruit picking, working in restaurants and I just wandered about from place to place with my truck and camper like a Gypsy. But I did cover a lot of real estate seen a lot of different places and ‘men,’ “hee, hee,” J many different folks, each place I arrived at had a different personality. I traveled half of eastern US and Canada.

It wasn't until about 18 years ago that I discovered why folks thought I was a mite odd and were kind of reticent or uncomfortable around me. I had learned from experience to learn to keep certain seeings, knowings and feelings I picked up from others to myself. It came to a point where the consequences of sharing my knowings with someone were just too frightening, so I kept it to myself, like I already had to do so many times before in the past. I would repress it and the best way I discovered to do that was by drinking copious mounts of alcohol. The demon within had to be quieted. I just simply wasn’t aware that not all people had these feelings and not knowing I just had to continue to repress this sometimes seemingly uncontrollable urgent need and desire to run out onto the street pulling at my hair screaming.

I didn’t know of any other human that could possibly know about this curse, except maybe a priest. I shuddered at that thought. I thought of what I had already thought about that some would call demonic possession or something to that affect. I had no desire to relive that again. I met this wonderful pastor at the Anglican church where I worked in the basement in a drop in center for street people and the homeless.

After some deliberation with the pastor she put me at ease, guaranteeing me I wasn't crazy, going to hell, nor was I demon possessed. She recommended me a shrink who was my mentor for nearly twenty years. 

Cynthia ©