My life began as a collaborative cooperation. I was adopted at two months after my birth mother agreed with her mother that she was too young at 16 to raise me. She herself was one of 12 children on a Saskatchewan farm. She stayed with her eldest sister, a nurse, while pregnant, during the 50s, and gave birth in May. Then shortly thereafter, met the man she married who wanted her to find her lost child and reestablish the family. However I was long gone to a “good home” and I grew up in Alberta.
It was a good home, with loving parents, I was their only child. I was sexually assaulted when I was 11, by a friend of the family, and again at 14 by another friend of the family, neither incident was known to my parents.
I became an asexual person throughout my teens and early adulthood, never dating, no sexual feelings, no desires, nothing. I was a transformation of a sort into a walled city of happy achievement. I got through high school, university and technical school plus 4 years of work before I experienced any sort of emotional breakthrough. Then it was a big one – I fell in love with a woman. Emergence and transformation all at once, I almost fell apart while falling open. I certainly heard my heart crack, in the best way.
I remember walking one night near the lakeshore, it was after midnight and I couldn’t sleep. All I could hear were the grebes and coots on the summer lake near my home, near where I worked. I walked in the moonless dark, wondering about the dream which had awakened me. I raised my hands from my sides, as though to fly and like magic, from the reeds by the lakeshore, a million fireflies rose as one cloud, alight. I stopped breathless. The light cloud turned and flew over me and then over the lake. It was a visit from the angels. I had been anointed.
Over the years since coming out, I have been in love four times. I’ve learned a lot over those years. Most of the learning has to do with freedom, my freedom. I am continuously emerging from a cocoon of self consciousness and shame and striving to become a force of nature, a centre of gravity and sense of humor, with a knapsack of dreams and a box of crayons. This doesn’t always work, but its something to do on a Saturday afternoon, Monday morning or whenever the black dog [read: depression] howls at the door.
It was a good home, with loving parents, I was their only child. I was sexually assaulted when I was 11, by a friend of the family, and again at 14 by another friend of the family, neither incident was known to my parents.
I became an asexual person throughout my teens and early adulthood, never dating, no sexual feelings, no desires, nothing. I was a transformation of a sort into a walled city of happy achievement. I got through high school, university and technical school plus 4 years of work before I experienced any sort of emotional breakthrough. Then it was a big one – I fell in love with a woman. Emergence and transformation all at once, I almost fell apart while falling open. I certainly heard my heart crack, in the best way.
I remember walking one night near the lakeshore, it was after midnight and I couldn’t sleep. All I could hear were the grebes and coots on the summer lake near my home, near where I worked. I walked in the moonless dark, wondering about the dream which had awakened me. I raised my hands from my sides, as though to fly and like magic, from the reeds by the lakeshore, a million fireflies rose as one cloud, alight. I stopped breathless. The light cloud turned and flew over me and then over the lake. It was a visit from the angels. I had been anointed.
Over the years since coming out, I have been in love four times. I’ve learned a lot over those years. Most of the learning has to do with freedom, my freedom. I am continuously emerging from a cocoon of self consciousness and shame and striving to become a force of nature, a centre of gravity and sense of humor, with a knapsack of dreams and a box of crayons. This doesn’t always work, but its something to do on a Saturday afternoon, Monday morning or whenever the black dog [read: depression] howls at the door.
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