Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
Quotes, idioms, maxims and the like have never been my forte.
I’m not what you’d call “well read”. I’ve read books from John Irving, Clive Barker, Stephen King, John Grisham. I’ve even read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
I didn’t have much of an exposure to music as a kid.
To be honest my interest in novels and music didn’t pick up until after I left home when I was sixteen. But even at that I never really gleaned anything that I would consider to be a quote that I “live my life by or think of often”.
The closest that I would ever consider to be a quote that I think of often is a lyric from a song that was released in 2011
“As much as I’d like the past not to exist…….
……it still does” – Lost in Paradise – Evanescence.
I like this lyric because it sums up an issue that I have.
I’m stuck in the past.
And there is no moving forward.
What I went through as a kid on Canadian Forces Base Namao is not something that can simply be moved on from.
It’s not that no one knew about the abuse.
Everyone knew what was going on.
Various parents on Canadian Forces Base Namao knew what the babysitter was doing as they made complaints to the base military police.
The base military police knew as when they questioned the babysitter and asked him who had shown him how to do what he was doing, he named captain father Angus McRae.
The other parents knew who I was and that I had been found being buggered in the babysitter’s bedroom as I was no longer allowed to play with the other kids on base. I was “dirty”
Just months after the abuse ended I was diagnosed with major depression, severe anxiety, haphephobia, and a host of other issues that would become so severe that I was supposed to have been placed into a psychiatric hospital for children.
But for some reason my military social worker, captain Totzke, along with my father, master corporal Richard Gill, were functioning as road blocks to my receiving treatment.
Even when my father was posted to CFB Downsview in Ontario from CFB Greisbach in Alberta, he made a promise that he would have me placed into psychiatric care in Ontario.
Nothing ever came of this.
Age 7 and 8 I was sexually abused by a very angry at the world 14 year old. This also included various visits to the chapel when the babysitter would escort me over. From age 8 until age 11 I was caught in a battle with my father and captain Totzke on one side and Alberta Social Services and various psychiatrists on the other side. One side wanted to help, one side wanted to hinder.
From age 11 until age 16 I lived on Canadian Forces Base Downsview with my father who was still having issues with his alcoholism and his hair trigger temper.
And from age 16 until the present day I’ve been surviving.
It’s not that I like living in the past.
It’s that I was never allowed to move on from the past.
The past is all that I have ever known.
All I knew was my father’s anger for having “fucked” with his military career.
All I knew was that it was my fault the babysitter abused my brother.
According to captain Totzke, it was my “homosexuality” that made me go along with the babysitter.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to escape the past.
It was that I was never allowed to forget the past.
When I was about 14 my father beat the shit out of me when Scott stole our stepmother’s car and went for a joy ride. Richard was kicking me in the back as I was trying to crawl under my bed to get away from him. It was my fault that Scott was acting the way he was acting because I let the fucking babysitter touch him.
Again, it’s not that I want to be stuck in the past.
It’s that I was never allowed to even consider leaving the past.
And with the modern day Canadian Armed Forces being hellbent on ensuring that the truth never comes out about CFB Namao I never will be allowed to move on.
But, even if by some miracle the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence were to admit that bad things happened to about 25 children on CFB Namao that should never have happened, this won’t change things for me as I’ve lived each and every day since May of 1980 wondering what the fuck I did that was wrong.
That’s 16,441 days or 45 years and 5 days since I was forced to live with this.
Beeshive 