I was born to a teenage mother in a small town outside of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I enjoyed the first three years of my life, living with my French-Canadian grandfather, and my mother in my childhood home. My first memory is of eating pablum. Please don’t feed that to your children- or at least add some sugar. It literally tastes so terrible that I had an emotional response so strong to eating it that it was embossed in my tiny baby memory.
I remember pulling the dials off the old radio, chewing on them, them and basically anything else I could get my sticky, chubby hands on. I am glad that led paint was no longer being used in kids’ toys by then. You can see the radio in the background. It is at my head-level. And here I am, perched on my favorite unicorn.
I remember climbing up on the kitchen counter and pulling the powdered chocolate out of the cupboard, making a huge mess trying to mix myself some Nesquik, and trying in vain to clean it up prior to hearing my grandpa’s footsteps coming down the stairs.
I remember lots of toys, and visits from grandma and grandpa, cousins, aunts and uncles… and then I remember moving boxes. Moving boxes piled so high that you could climb on top of them. So, I did that. Then, the gigantic pile of moving boxes collapsed under the weight of my three-year-old body. And a few days later, my mom, my dad, and I moved to a tiny apartment a few miles away.
We had hamsters, that my mom did not particularly like- since their cage/ tubes were difficult to clean and maintain. So, they were given away only a couple of months after we got them. RIP Poto & Koto, I hardly knew ye. There was a park a couple of blocks away. I remember asking my mom if I could go. She said “maybe later.” When my mom says maybe, it’s really no. I learned this from a very young age, about the same time I noticed that Santa’s handwriting was the suspiciously similar to mommy’s handwriting… So, I went to the park. It was only 3 blocks away, and just as I was about to cross the busy, 6-lane street- and I was totally going to make it- suddenly some big man grabbed the back of my overalls and picked me up by them! And that was the first time I was ever in the back of a cop car. He drove me home- and I still didn’t get to go to the park that day!
Anyways, I just wanted to share a tiny sliver of my childhood with you. I am going to keep sharing- on here and on YouTube. I hope you enjoy my journey.