About Me, Part 5: Upside Down

My pre-teen years were very turbulent. My parents marriage became rockier; they separated once and then divorced in 1980, the summer before I turned ten. For the first time, I felt the kind of heartache and loneliness that accompanied a major loss. A year and a half later, my mother and I moved into my grandparents house as she prepared to move to Ontario in search of work and where most of her friends had moved away to as head offices packed up and moved to Toronto. She moved in January 1982. I followed that September, just before I turned twelve.

The effect of all of this was like having my world smashed repeatedly, a world that had consisted of friends and a familiar neighbourhood. My sense of myself was very vague. With so much going on around me, I didnt really have a clear sense of myself. At twelve, having been raised by overprotective family (who no doubt saw me as being weak and as an appendage), I was quite naively about most things. My friends (in grade six) had begun to mature and their conversations were about things I had never heard before. When I moved to Ontario and entered Senior Public (middle) school in grade seven, this gap between me and my peers who were growing more sophisticated would be much wider.

To be continued ...