Coming Together

By Sky TwoRivers

Coming together is a memoire of my healing journey, filled with my stories and life lessons. I am so grateful for the stories of others that helped me find the light and truly hope to give a little back so that maybe my story makes an impact in your life. I have been working on this book for years and I have put my heart and soul into this project with the intention of making a difference in the world.
The story is pieced together through my personal diaries where I offer advice on healing and openly discuss the issues that I faced. I grow with the evolution of my true story, and as it comes together, we come together. It will bring tears to your eyes, laughter to your lips and love to your heart. Join me as I lead you through my personal spiritual journey to an honest healing of my heart; through my decent into abandonment, abuse, death, drugs and deep sadness, followed by my ascension into healing.

I am sharing my words and love in order to help light your own journey. My intention while writing this book is to help you find your own questions and seek your own answers for healing. We are each other’s beacons of light and love. We are students and teachers to one another and we move between both roles throughout our entire lives.

It is important to break the chains of pain that many of us live with. Pains that have been passed down from our parents and from their parents. We carry these chains without healing or acknowledging what’s holding us back from truly being happy. We heal by acknowledging the traumas within our own lives. Our ancestors play a very important role, having a healthy you generates a healthy future for our children.

I would like to give a very special thanks to Layla Bartole and David Lefort for the time and dedication they contributed to helping me bring this project into completion. It has been a real gift. The birthing of this book was way more of a challenging than I ever anticipated and having the support and encouragement has been wonderful and greatly needed. Thank-you, thank-you!

I dedicate this book to my beloved twin brother Matthew who helped me grow in more ways than I ever imagined. Thank-you for the teachings and unconditional love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sky TwoRivers
• Release date: Dec 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301891191

Book preview

Preface

Each and every person has moments in their lives that they can say made them the person they are today. The defining moments can be both good and/or bad – sometimes people say they’re very fortunate for their circumstances as their lives have always been filled with joy. Others may say their lives have only been filled with pain and suffering. Some have lives that have been filled with both joy and pain. I would say that I’m in the middle with both joyful and painful experiences in my life, but in my darkest moments, I couldn’t remember what joy looked like and couldn’t imagine that I would ever find happiness again. My pain felt so enduring that finding the energy to go on felt to be an impossible task.

In my darkest moments, it was difficult to remember what a happy life consisted of. Giving up seemed to be the easier choice. Finding the will to continue on and move forward was difficult because I was severely heartbroken and, in the depths of my pain, I prayed each day for death. I cried at my desk. I cried while walking to work. I cried myself to sleep. Tears flowed out of me for days, nights, weeks and months. I think that if I were to add up all the tears, I’d have shed a river, maybe two.

I’ve finally stopped crying, which at many points I didn’t think would ever happen. Healing was an up and down process. There were times where I thought I was all healed and that everything was going to get better only to plummet back into pain and spiral down feeling more and more sorrow with each setback. This brought on great feelings of discouragement. I thought I would never see the light again.

The thing with pain is that we can hold onto it if we like; we can squeeze it inside ourselves and never let it go. It takes strength to let it go and I didn’t have the energy to get out of bed to stop crying, never mind finding the energy to find my happiness. Happiness became the definition of something everyone else had but me. My darkest and saddest moments were spent alone and being alone made me feel even more in despair. I felt that no one truly cared about me or my pain, or that no one would even take notice if I faded into nothing.

When I was a child, my mother wouldn’t let us watch shows like Cinderella or Snow White. She didn’t want her children to think that someone would come along and save them. She believed that fairy tales did more harm than good. Maybe if I had seen them, I wouldn’t have wished for it so much. I hoped that someone would whisk me off my feet and make everything better. This wasn’t to be the case. I had to save myself and my only reason for change was that the life I was living was not working. It was only causing me more pain. I had to be my own knight in shining armour. It reminds me of the old saying, If you want something done right you need to do it yourself. and you do. Your own personal happiness and contentment comes from within. It doesn’t come from others and it certainly doesn’t come from objects you buy from a store. No one can make you feel complete but you and it comes from making better choices, steadfast determination and a heck of a lot of work.

Research, and of course, my own personal life experience indicates that we often repeat patterns in life until we’ve learned the inherent lesson. Often they reflect the lessons of our parents and our parent’s parents and so on. Sometimes it provokes us to revisit our roots in order to make better sense of it all and to understand how we got there. Essentially, getting to the bottom of it; to break free of past restraints helps us to move out of these patterns and stop repeating mistakes over and over again.

I see many similarities between myself, my mother and my grandmother; however, I see many differences as well. When I think about the pain that I’ve suffered, knowing my mother’s story and her mother’s story, we share many of the same experiences and pains. Although, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about pain, one should never compare one story to the next. It’s unfair to them and to you. It’s not a competition of who has more or feels more as we all feel it differently and have different lives, but we can certainly share our stories to help guide one another through it.

Growing Up

I was born in little town called Thompson, Manitoba. I’m the youngest of five children. Well actually, I’m the second youngest if you’re counting minutes because I have an identical twin brother that I’m six minutes older than. Some may argue that we’re not identical because we are not the same sex; however, the doctor that delivered us will tell you otherwise as there was only one placenta. This means that we shared the same sack making us identical twins. The placenta was sent to the University of Winnipeg to be studied and the results confirmed that, yes, indeed we are identical twins. Matthew and I were the second set of twins to whom my mother gave birth. The other twins are a boy and girl as well and my sister is also six minutes older than her twin brother. They’re fraternal though as there were two placentas. In birthing order, I have an older sister and then one year later my mother had twins and fifteen months later she had me and Matthew.

My mother had four children in diapers at one time. She’s the pillar in our family, the captain of our ship. Finding the correct words to describe my mother is difficult. There doesn’t seem to be enough words to properly express how great she is or how I feel about her, and getting her to believe it is even more difficult. A sentence that I use to describe her is that my mother gives all that she has and, when she has nothing left to give, she gives some more. My mother had all three births naturally. As she puts it, she didn’t want to harm our little bodies; however, now she says she would have taken something for the pain should she have known all the poisons her kids willingly put into their bodies. From the day we started eating everything was homemade; she didn’t want us to consume any preservatives or packaged food.

Instead of putting us in front of the television, she created activities for us, made us books and crafts. Her thoughts were that if you had time to watch television, you had time to read a book. We had a pretty firm upbringing. In this sense we had to show respect at all times. There was no talking back, no acting out when we went shopping with our parents, and certainly no asking for stuff in the stores the way some kids do. We had to listen to our bedtime rules and we had homework hour after school. She laid down the rules from the beginning, but with five kids you would need to unless you wanted to get completely walked all over. My mother still comments on how well we behaved as children. She says teachers would call and say what a delight we were and how our friend’s parents enjoyed having us over. But don’t let me lead you to believe we were saints because we had our faults and yes, acted out on occasion like any other children. My mother was the one who made the rules and we followed them because, when we didn’t, my father would enforce them.

My father was a man that you didn’t mess with as he was the disciplinarian and gave the spankings with the leather belt or his hand, and he made sure it hurt. When he spoke we listened. He was stern and got angry when we misbehaved. He was loving and caring. In our early childhood my father played a big role in our lives. I remember as a child he would play music and I would dance on his feet. Or when he was driving he would turn the music loud and sway the van back and forth to make it dance. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure it was such a safe activity, but I still hold it as a very fond memory. He was very social. We had company at our house on a regular basis. Far back as I can remember, our house had an open door policy – everyone welcome. On Fridays my father cooked steak dinners. That was something that happened in our house for as long as I can remember. He was an excellent cook and we loved the meals he prepared. He always took pride in his dishes.

As for my brothers and sisters, from a young age we were the best of friends. The five of us are so much alike and yet so extremely different. We all look alike, though not as much now that we’re older. Looks change as you grow. When you see us you know that we’re related. Matthew and I definitely look identical. I’m the feminine version and he the masculine version. Our main differences are eye and hair colour. My mother had two twin strollers. I can only imagine how she pushed them both together. She said we used to brag to people, even to strangers on the street, about the fact that we were twins. She said we were very proud of our brothers and sisters and talked about each other all the time. As children, the five of us wanted to do everything together. When it was time for bed, we would all sneak into my older sisters’ room and lay horizontal and sleep together. She use to make up teddy bear stories and we’d fall asleep to them. My parents enrolled us in recreational sports together; they placed us girls with our twins and most of the time we’d be the only girl on the team. We were always placed in the same classes together. We excelled best being together and quite frankly, we never wanted to be apart.

My family lived in Thompson, Manitoba until Matthew and I were four years old. I don’t remember much of it as I was too young, just bits and pieces. Most of my memories were of the summers when we went to my grandparent’s log cabin at Paint Lake. These memories were happy and innocent. Swimming in the lake; my grandfather making flap jacks and flipping them high in the air; fishing for pickerel; playing with my cousins; being surrounded by my aunts and uncles.

I remember being terrified in the boat with my grandfather. We had to take the boat to the cabin as it was on an island. I never felt safe on those trips. It may have been because of the one year my grandfather was filling up the boat with gas and it blew up while still at the dock. I was always terrified of my grandfather’s driving in water and on land, yet till the day he died, people would exclaim what a great driver he was. I suppose, but only if you like driving really fast, having your heart in your throat and having no sense of control as a passenger. Maybe the fact that you arrived alive made him a great driver. This experience has been one that’s followed me from childhood as I somehow seem to date men that think they’re race car drivers too, and I get to be the frantic passenger begging them to slow down.

When I was four, my mother got the boy next door to babysit us. He sexually abused me how many times and for how long I really don’t know. I only realized this as the truth when I was twelve. It was kind of like putting the stray pieces of a puzzle together. Some of it I remember in flashes and some of it came to me through dreams. When I told my mother, it confirmed her worst fear. The only parts I remember were my babysitter bringing me into my bedroom, closing the door laying me on my bed, coming towards me. The rest of my memory to what happened in the bedroom is a blank, but I do recall having a sore vagina more than once and complaining about having lots of pain and one time I even got pin worms.

My mother took me to the doctor and she was asked a series of questions about where I had been and if I had been around any men alone, but he never came out and said anything. He had known my mother most of her life and knew that she would never physically hurt me. Neither of them thought any more of it.

This is where piecing the story comes together as I was having dreams of being molested as a little girl. I woke up and it felt so real. I was distraught and so I went to the living room where my mother was and told her of my dream. I described the boy that babysat me as a child. My mother started crying and was beside herself with the abject realization of what had truly been going on. She realized in that moment what had been happening to me and what the doctor was getting at when he asked those questions. She apologized and apologized as though it was her fault. How could she have known? It wasn’t her fault.

My mother still blames herself for all the pain her children have suffered. I wish I could make her understand and realize that she’s only one person and in control of her own actions. The harm others have done to us has to be on the onus of those people and not her.

I bring up this story with no warning to you as a reader, though as a child, I didn’t receive any notice that it would happen to me. Although, I talk about this memory quite lightly, it’s something that affected me on a very deep level. It’s tainted a lot of my interpretations and the way I’ve lived a lot of my life. Many children are sexually abused at very young ages and don’t have anyone to turn to or anyone to help them understand what happened to them. Often, memories are suppressed or completely disregarded, which is what happened with me. I believe that I must address this experience for what it was to enable my own healing. I need to repair what was damaged and replace what was lost with new intention. As is the case for many people that have suffered sexual abuse, we’ll continue to suffer unless we learn to release the pain.

***

When I was four we moved to Calgary for work as Thompson was a small town, and of course there was more money and opportunity in a bigger city. It was essential for us to move, especially with such a big family. My mother tells me that she never wanted to leave Thompson as her whole family was there. It was difficult to pick up and head to a city where she had no connections. Raising five children is difficult with a network never mind doing it all on your own. From age four till eight I lived in Calgary with my family. Again, I don’t hold a significant cache of memories, but the things I do remember have stuck with me.

An unpleasant memory when we first moved to Calgary that is vague was of another babysitter. Both my parents had to work to support the family and we needed someone to mind us during the summer holidays. She used to hit us and lock us in one of the bedrooms right after my parents left and we would have to stay in the room all day long. If we made any noise, she would come into the bedroom and hit us to shut us up. She would not feed us or let us out of the room. I remember banging on the door begging to go pee. Sometimes she would come to the door and yell at us to shut up, and even if I told her I had to go she wouldn’t always let me. She would make me hold it. I recall an incident where I had to pee my pants because I could no longer hold it. Then, just before my mother would come home, she would let us out of the room.

I think we were scared that if we ever said anything, we would get it worse. Little did we realize that my mother would have never let it continue if she’d found out. This went on until mid–August. The last day she babysat it was my eldest sister’s birthday and my mother had made her a cake. We were supposed to have a day of celebration and eat the cake, but of course, as soon as my mother left, she locked us in the room and ate the cake with her boyfriend. I guess this was the final straw for my sister. She crawled out the window and ran all the way to my mother’s work to tell her. When the babysitter came to check in on us she discovered my sister was gone. She stole mother’s jewellery, some other belongings and was gone before my mother and sister got home. She was never seen or heard from again.

The last year we lived in Calgary we had a street block party and the centre of the party was happening from our backyard. It was one of the biggest events I would attend in my early years. It took a great deal of preparation and was planned for quite some time. Many people attended and some came from out of town for the big event. There was a scavenger hunt for the children, a piñata and all sorts of games and prizes. There was loud music. We had a pig on a spit in our backyard. That part freaked me out! Especially watching it turn with an apple in its mouth. There were kegs of beer, tons of lawn chairs. The streets were all blocked off. There were adults and kids everywhere.

In the early part of the morning, everyone was busy completing tasks preparing for the big event. I volunteered to go to the store with my uncle to get ice. Although he wasn’t really my uncle, he was my dad’s cousin’s cousin and, at this point, I’m only referring to him as uncle for you to understand what I thought he was to me. He lived in Saskatoon and drove all the way to Calgary for the big party. I’d met him a few times before and I really liked him. I would hang off him whenever he came to visit.

We got the ice without a problem and were coming back to deliver the ice. Our backyard faced a big open field so I guess he decided that he would hop the curb and drive to the back to deliver the supplies. While en route, he saw a chipmunk and chased it. I cried for him to stop but he continued trying to hit and kill it. I don’t recall if it was successful. I only remember being very upset and him laughing. He thought it was so funny. Eight and horrified that someone could be so cruel, I decided in that moment that I didn’t like him anymore. How could he hurt an innocent animal for no reason at all? I got out of the van not saying a word, and I didn’t speak with him for the rest of the day.

At the time I loved ballet and everything about it. I wore my ballet suit for the entire day and early part of the evening. At dusk, our neighbour insisted that it was time for me to put on some warmer clothes. I went into my room, removed my ballet suit to change and, while standing naked, my uncle opened my door and entered into my room. I told him to get out of my room. That I was changing. Instead he came in and closed the door. I asked him to leave again. He didn’t listen. He came towards me and pushed me onto my bed and lay on top of me. He stunk of beer and had rough stubble on his face. He forced his tongue in mouth. I can still recall the taste of beer and stubble hurting my face. His hands were grabbing and all over my body. I had this feeling of suffocation. I kept squirming trying to make him stop and then I said Oh no! I think someone is coming you better leave. I just wanted him off of me. I told him to go to the bathroom and promised to meet him there so that we wouldn’t get in trouble. He finally agreed and left.

While he was molesting me, the lamp beside my bed got knocked over and it didn’t have a lamp shade. The heat from the bulb burned the carpet. I picked up the lamp, got dressed and went to find my babysitter – I was worried he would touch my sisters. Together we went and found my sisters.

I don’t know how I knew that he would get in trouble or that he should leave the room or why I had the instinct to tell him that I would meet him in the bathroom. It brings me back to question what I blocked when I was four. Now four years later, experiencing the same dilemma of being violated, I tried to change the outcome of the situation. Is it the previous experience that guided me to make such a decision? I’ll never know. What I do know is that these sexual traumas affected me subconsciously in many aspects of my life.

He waited in the bathroom for a long time. I know this because there was a long line–up outside the door and people had started banging on the door for him to hurry up. I never told my parents, nor did my babysitter but she was a kid too. Long after the incident I remember just sitting there on the floor feeling the burned spot on the carpet thinking about what he had done. When we moved and the room was empty, the only thing that was left behind was the scar on the carpet. That image has stayed with me.

The party ended in chaos as my father and his brother got into a physical altercation for the entire street to witness. I guess you could say the evening ended with a big bang. When I woke up the next day, I went into the backyard and there was broken glasses and blood on the patio stones. I had a horrible feeling about the entire event. That fight severed the relationship between my father and his brother for the next ten years. All of us kids were really sad to lose touch with him. We’d planned on being in his wedding and it would have been our first wedding ever. This was the beginning of losing touch with my father’s side of the family, as eventually we lost touch with his family all together.

The same year there was a recession in Calgary and the economy was plummeting. During that time, my parents took a trip to visit close friends in Ottawa, Ontario. My father was offered a job while on the trip, and we moved shortly afterwards. It took us one week to drive from Calgary to Ottawa. Kanata is where I grew up and lived the next eighteen years of my life.

When we arrived we stayed at my parent’s friend’s place until we found our own home to live in. We referred to them as our aunt, uncle and cousins as they were my parent’s long–time friends from Thompson. They were at the hospital the day we were born. Arriving at their place was the first time I recall ever meeting them though. It was kind of weird calling them aunt and uncle at first, as they were of Scottish decent and had very strong accents.

The first year we lived in Ottawa my father worked for a private company. Eventually my parents opened their own business. My father was an electrician and Kanata was booming. There was lots of work and money to be made. My parents got their own shop and opened up an electrical store beside a takeout pizza place. When they worked late they would send home pizza, which was a great treat.

We were very independent children. By the time my oldest sister was eleven, we would stay home and mind one another. The business required my parents to work long hours. My mother would work in the shop doing all the books, working with customers, and organizing work schedules. You name it, she did it and, when required, she’d go on–sight and help my father.

Both my parents were working really hard for a successful business and it was working. We moved into this large five bedroom house with a huge back and front yard. It had two living rooms, four bathrooms, an office and a finished basement. This was luxury especially for such a big family. Prior to that, we were living in a three bedroom townhouse. In this new house my parents could entertain. It was a very good time for us. In fact my father befriended a man who owned a company that built homes and my parent’s company wired all the houses. I can drive around many areas in Kanata and say that my dad wired that house or he wired those street lights.

My father began coming home less and less and drinking more and more. His temper became shortened as the years passed. He would blow up at little things. I remember him getting us out of bed in the middle of the night to scold us because the house was messy. Inside our home, life had begun changing and it was not for the better. Although my father’s behaviour was not the most pleasant, we did seem to have an active happy functioning life.

Bye Bye Daddy

After a few years of success, money problems resurfaced and we moved back into a three bedroom townhouse. At least this is what I assumed. Tension was definitely becoming more apparent and our family life did not seem right. My father was always at the tavern drinking and he was around, he wasn’t pleasant. He was mostly angry and edgy. The tavern was just around the corner from our house, less than a two minute walk. One evening, Matthew and I had gone to the store, which was attached to the tavern. My father was there and waved for us to come inside. We visited him for a few minutes, and then he offered to drive us home. We said no. We both hated getting into the van with him when he was drunk. He yelled at us to get in the van so we did. He drove home like a maniac. His speed and reaction was clearly not in sync. He slammed the van into the garage door, which stopped the van. The van put a large dent in the garage door. Each day afterwards, I would look at the dent and remember.

My father became accustomed to drinking on a daily basis. It was rare to see him sober. He would also drink and drive – many times with us in the vehicle. He took all the back roads to avoid the police. This I knew at my young age. I recall being really terrified in the van many times. One snowy winter morning my sister and I woke up early to shovel the drive–way for my father. When we got outside the van was in the driveway. It was completely totalled. We ran inside to ask what happened. My father said a Mack truck cut him off and he crashed the van trying to avoid being hit. I questioned his account. I’d witnessed many times when he made drunken mistakes, such as turning down one–ways in the wrong direction, swerving the vehicle and speeding. Coincidently, he quit drinking for about a month after the accident.

Two weeks before my twelfth birthday, my dad left for Toronto to bid on a job. This would be the very last time I would ever see him. He was supposed to be back in time for my birthday. I received a phone call instead. I was very sad that he did not make it home in time. He told me it would be soon. But it was not soon. It was never. After my birthday phone call there would be no more except for one. My father called collect and I answered. My mother was sitting right beside me, when she discovered it was him, she told me not accept the charges. The operator said Do you accept a collect call from… and then my father said ‘Reg.’ My mother told me not to accept the call, so I said no. My heart sank. I knew my father heard me say no. I didn’t want to say no, nor did I understand why I was saying it. After I hung up the phone, I was upset with my mother and asked why I wasn’t allowed to accept the call. She said I can’t talk to your father right now. I was very upset. I felt terribly and so guilty for saying no. All I could think was he heard his little girl refuse his call on the other line. I didn’t understand.

The rest of November and December went by with no word from my father. It was certainly taking him a long time to price this job. My mother was acting differently. She wasn’t herself. The house didn’t feel right. Something was happening.

Christmas morning there was still no sign of my father. Then there was a knock on the door. It was a man that we’d never seen. My mother let him in the house. He wanted to speak with us children. He was a social worker. He came over to tell us why my father was not going to come home for Christmas. He would be the bearer of bad news and tell us that my father committed a despicable sin of sexual abuse within the family. For the privacy of those involved, that part will be left alone.

The social worker spoke to us about the situation and said that, for our protection, we would not be seeing him again. In that moment, we all knew we would never see him ever again, and we didn’t. After the social worker left, my Scottish aunt and uncle came over with a ginger bread house and presents. Presents? What do you mean presents? We were in disbelief and complete shock, but then of course the bigger picture started to make sense – his anger, his excessive drinking and his never being home. This was the first and only discussion we ever had about it, at least as a family. From that day on, our lives were changed drastically. This would also be the end of happy Christmases in our house. Christmas time would always be tainted. We all went through that week of holidays in a complete daze.

On December thirty first there was a big envelope in the mail. It was my father’s hand writing and was addressed to the entire family. I was the only one home. I opened it up and inside it had letters made out to each of us. I read my letter. It started off – "Dear Danielle, You will always be my little cutie pie." I was my father’s little cutie pie. It was my pet name and mine only. One which I never heard again and I missed. The letter continued to say how he loved me and it discussed my personal traits. At the end, he said I would make a good nurse and help lots of people. At the time I wanted to be a nurse. He ended the letter by stating he was proud of me and signed it. I knew in that instant that it was a suicide letter. He was saying good–bye.

Matthew was the next family member to come home. We shared our letters with each other. Matthew’s letter started off by saying To my number one NHL goalie. It was a dream that he later had to give up. Two days after receiving the letters, we received a call from the hospital in Toronto saying that my father had attempted suicide. He took over sixty pills washed down with an excessive amount of alcohol. This was a lot to take in at the age of twelve. We were no longer innocent carefree children and we no longer had a father. We had to go back from holidays to school and pretend like nothing had happened. None of us told anyone what had happened. This was not a divorce where your parents break up. This was like a death, although it couldn’t be mourned like a death, as he was not really dead.

After my father left, my mother confided in close family friends for support and they, in turn shared this information with their children. They had a daughter who was my age. We went to the same school. Too young to understand her actions, she divulged this to fellow classmates. It didn’t take long for it to hit the ears of our peers at school. At the same time the students were swapping gossip, my mother had to declare bankruptcy, go on welfare and move us into social housing at the other side of town. School became very a difficult place and, within six months of my father’s departure, Matthew and I were both expelled from school, but for different reasons. Both were unjust, but in reflection it was for the better.

I got expelled for fighting. It was lunchtime and all the kids in my grade hung out in the field and chatted. One of the girls in our group of friends suddenly threw a quarter at me and told me to go fuck my father and buy a loaf of bread. I was shocked and mortified – I had not talked to anyone about what was going on in my life and, all of a sudden, this girl announces it and humiliates me with everyone around. In horror and disbelief, I charged at her. Her friend who was known to fight stepped in before I could do anything. She punched me twice in the face and busted open my lip. She was wearing a big heavy metal skull ring that broke on my lip; I still have the scar. The school bell rang and everyone ran inside. My boyfriend at the time gave me a disgusted look and said I can’t even look at you. Then he went inside with the rest of my friends.

I was stunned, disgraced, angry and sad; I wanted to crawl under a rock. My friends left me while a guy that I never hung out with offered to keep me company. We walked to my sister’s high school to see if she could give me bus fare to get home. Her high school principle intercepted us in the parking lot and brought us back to our school. When I got back, they put a chair in the janitor’s closet and left me there with my bleeding lip and bruised ego. The nurse didn’t look at me, nor was I offered any help.

Eventually, I was brought into the office where the other two girls were. The principle asked for the story; the girls told the principle that I was drinking all the time and having sex with lots of boys. I was shocked by their explanations and said that it wasn’t true. The principle, also a family friend, said it was probably better if I left the school. I was given a box to empty out my locker. When I was emptying my locker, the bell went. Everyone saw me packing my things, including my so called boyfriend. No one spoke to me. I felt so helpless, humiliated and ostracized. Matthew and I were now a problem for the school because we had a secret that made people feel uncomfortable. It was just easier to get rid of us than face us or reach out to us. We were really good kids before this; parents and teachers all loved us.

Once my lip healed, I joined Matthew at our new school, but at this point we had already changed drastically. We no longer looked like preppy kids wearing polo shirts and tapered pants. We wore all black, started smoking and certainly didn’t look like the rest of the suburbanites. We undoubtedly didn’t feel like them either. Our worlds were different. Matthew wore big cones in his hair and sported fourteen–hole docks; he was going for the Sid Vicious look. After the fight I changed overnight. I wore all black, shaved the back of my head, bleached my hair and painted my lips with bright red lipstick. We looked like two downtown punk street kids. It was hard to believe we were twelve and in grade seven. Looking back at pictures, you could tell something was wrong, although through all of our pain, we were always very respectable to teachers, parents and others around us. In fact when we got to the new school, everyone thought we were cool. It was a fresh start, as it was a new community, new faces and no one knew of our circumstances.

After my first week at school, eight girls shaved the backs of their heads. We started trends. My mother was completely horrified. Our hair and clothing changes didn’t last long though, only for the remainder of grade seven and maybe some of grade eight. Being in style was more important; however, the pain remained. Grade eight went relatively well. But Matthew and I had grown up much faster than others our own age. Our perception of life wasn’t the same as other thirteen year olds living in the suburbs.

I became loud and bossy. Matthew wasn’t loud like me, but he was angry and certainly prejudged. In the beginning, he got in trouble for doing nothing. It was the way he looked. It wasn’t what he was doing, because he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was a confused lost sad child who was wearing his pain for everyone to see.

After a while, he started to be the person he was being treated as by acting out and rebelling. We would talk about it, even as it began. He felt Why should I try? I’m in trouble for doing nothing. I might as well start getting into trouble. The high spirited Matthew was taken from him when he was twelve, never