Prelude

The woman who would become my grandmother was barren. She was 30 years old, and married at time where she was already considered an ‘Old Maid’. She did not marry the man she loved; she married the man who came along after the man she loved moved on without her.

She was second last of eight children, born to a British WWI veteran and his common law wife. In the days of the great depression, and being second from the bottom, there isn’t much love left to go around, and so adapting, my grandmother was cold, stolid, reserved and unfettering.
She spent four years serving her country during World War II, lost her parents very early and committed to never repeat the past.

After two years, and almost a dozen failed attempts to successfully hold a pregnancy past the first trimester, she resorted to adoption. First, an abandoned baby boy from a remote Northern little community of Fort Nelson; second, a baby girl, from the Métis Indian Reserve in Yellowknife, Yukon. The baby girl would be my mother. Subsequently, my grandmother would effectively conceive not one, by two children. Separated by only one year, the sibs would ultimately come to begrudge my mother.

Biologically, my mother was born of French Canadian father, Cree mother and both of them, raging alcoholics. In 1952, and on Native Reserves; Mumps, Chicken Pox, Measles and Tuberculosis swept through these peoples lives, which their healers knew nothing about and by which vaccines were short to come on a Canadian First Nations Reserve, as well as small Canadian towns. My mother was affected greatly by Tuberculosis. Having been misdiagnosed on and off until she was eight, the clincher was when she was finally diagnosed (misdiagnosed) with Rickets.
The only course of action in 1960 was to be body cast for a period of up to one year, and intense drug therapy. By the time my mother was nine years old, she was a narcotic drug addict. She never grew taller than 4 feet 11 inches, had to re-learn how to walk, how to sit. Her spine is perpetually crooked and possibly, her brain cooked to pulp.

My grandmother coddled and indulged her. Whatever her fancy, my mother was embellished.
Without a shadow of a doubt, my mother received more than 110% of my grandmother’s attention. Whether or not my mother milked it at this age is my mystery, but the other children will only see it their way.

My grandmother’s other children were thriving. They were intelligent and did very well at school, were quite active in sports in the community and by all accounts were flourishing in their social development having more than their fair share of peers. It did not go unrecognized by most, with the exception of my grandmother, who was too preoccupied to take notice.

By the time my mother was 15 years old, she was involved in local ‘gang’ activity and numbing down her emotional pain with illegal drugs, as the pharmaceutical kind were no longer at her availability. Hanging with the wrong crowds, befriending boys who were not fit to socialize with my grandmother’s daughter. Using her strengthened manipulative ability, my mother could easily persuade my grandmother to look the other way at many times.
My mother was pregnant for the first time when she was 16 years old. Somewhere, somehow, she met a young man who was with the American Navy and posted at a Vancouver, BC port. His family expressed interest in adopting the baby and raising it themselves, but my grandmother would not hear of it. It was a disgrace what my mother was bringing to her family, but the Salvation Army would take care of it, with their wed-less mother’s adoption program.

One can only ever imagine how my mother felt about all of this.

Between the birth of her son, at 16 years old, and her second pregnancy at 21 years old, my mother turned to a life of prostitution to help her fund her drug habit. More than just smoking marijuana, my mother was a full blown heroin addict and I was born a bastard.

My grandmother had not seen my mother for five years and was shocked but relieved to discover her alive yet horrified that she would show up at her doorstep with a six month undernourished, drug addicted baby. The baby’s wrists were red, raw and dented from having been tied up to the radiator, under the window in the bedroom of her mother’s apartment which she shared with three other people, one, presumably her pimp and the baby’s father. A confession my mother donated to my grandmother in a plea bargain conversation, to again manipulate and guilt her way into yet another convoluted request. My grandmother accepted the appeal with attached conditions.

My mother would come back for the baby in two weeks, after she sought solace with a Women’s Drug Addiction Counselling program.

She returned two years later. I was alone.