Oh Dad, poor Dad

Sometimes it takes a lifetime just to figure out what happened to you as a child. I don't know to what extent this may be the human condition: popping into the world via parents whose motives in having you remain obscure for most of the time you are in their company. After you leave the house it gets even harder to figure them out. At least in my case. I moved in with a girl I met in university- her boyfriend helped with the move. My parents stood watching, speechless, as the bushy haired Jewish boy carried my desk down our front steps and loaded it into his car. July 1, 1970. And we drove away.

I was free for the first time in my life. I didn't know I was still indentured to the scientists who paid my parents $3000 for me in 1956 and were intent on getting a return on their investment. Which could partially explain the look on their faces as we waved to them.

"Your parents seem to want to control you more than is normal and healthy," David opined. He was my savior in ripped tee-shirt and blue jeans.

"Really?" I had never known any other type of parenting but come to think of it, he was probably right. Maybe they were just old fashioned. They were older than most parents. I had always attributed everything to their advanced age - their grey hair, health problems, anxiety, controlling behavior. It was all due to being born too near the beginning of the century. So I thought. But was it really?

Or was it the fact that they had not wanted children, and were about to separate when they found out they were expecting, and later enrolled us in the secret program (under duress, probably) -- only to discover they had sold us to a monstrous gang of eugenicists. To whom we now owed money or even our lives.

That kind of thing can cast a shadow over your childhood even if it's never mentioned and you have no way of knowing.

Except in moments of reckoning eg when you move out leaving them holding the bag - effectively you are defaulting on a loan that shouldn't exist. That is illegal to begin with and based on blackmail. Taking someone's children for secret research and a promising career when in fact the goal is to create a controllable robot -- until the child rebels and walks away from the deal and the parents are caught basically helpless, between the scientist creditors and the absconding child collateral. They hadn't seen this coming or planned for it.

Our modest bungalow at 202 Dauphin was bought with money the scientists paid for me in 1956.  Lacking only a white picket fence, it was meant to be a secure home but instead was the scene of heartbreak and deception. I went back there a few years ago and 24 hours later felt a heaviness in my chest like a heart attack.

I loved my parents. They were good people but I didn't want to be them.

And now I see how in the years that preceded my prison break, they endeavored to protect me from the consequences of their mistakes, because there was a price tag attached to their daughter. When I left home they owed my handlers the money they'd already paid on me. That was the fine print in the contract they were bound by --

Of course they never told me that. And of course my dad had every reason to hate those scientists because they had tried to kill him. Not only that but they had ended his career in music on the smoking altar of rock and roll.

And not only did he have to fear for his life but  ours while hiding the danger he had put us in. Supporting our deluded belief that everything was normal and we were a happy family or if not exactly happy at least okay .. when in fact our existence was secretive, grim and we were all living on borrowed time. My life was a loan that could be called in at any moment if the doctors decided it was time to collect on their investment.

So it's not surprising my dad hated rock and roll - and the boys who played it. And didn't want his daughter marrying a Rolling Stone.

While my mother sank into depression and illness, he recovered from his brainwashing, at least enough to resume his place at the head of the family. He continued for years to block her plans and hopes, chauffeuring me to school and back to make sure I wasn't seeing anyone. Or going downtown.

“You're NOT going to McGill!” He knew what kind of place it was, under the Ivy League facade.

When he died I was 23 and living with a friend in Hamilton, working the night shift as a proofreader. After the funeral, I came home and dreamed I went back to visit his open coffin. His corpse sat up, threw its arms around me and tried to pull me down into the coffin but with all my might I fought him off. "The dead are dead, Dad, and the living just need to live!"

The next night I dreamed he came to say goodbye. He'd accepted his death and was dressed up in an aviator uniform. Strapping on his helmet he stepped into his single engine plane and took off like the hero of Lost Horizons--

That was in November 1974. My boyfriend at the time worked downtown in an all-night magazine store. His name was Joe but I liked that he looked a little like Mick

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