Roots. Part Nine: 2011

2011 was an interesting year. I didn't do much in the way of designing but certain important things did happen so I will briefly recap this year and do it mainly with photos.

As of January, I often drove my mother an hour north of town, where my uncle and his family lives. My maternal grandmother had been diagnosed with cancer and it was terminal so I got my mom up there as often as possible (my mother is epileptic and is therefore forbidden to drive). 

March 2011 was rough. First, my son's grandfather died of emphysema. We attended the funeral and, the same night, my daughter and I boarded a night bus to NYC. A week after we came back, the family gathered at my uncle's home and we watched my grandmother die, one day before my birthday. I was working as a relocation consultant at the time and had clients in from Texas that I had to show homes to. I remember insisting on separate cars so that I could cry alone in my car, between showings. A week after that, as I was about to head off to give a tour of Montreal to another client, my daughter suddenly went from standing to lying on the floor with her eyes rolling back into her head. It was the single most terrifying experience of my life but, after days in the hospital, the doctors found nothing (we now know it's low blood pressure).

My 2011 trip to NYC was all about discovering lower Manhattan. Here is my daughter right before we entered Greenwich Village.

That March, things hit a new low with my ex. Not only was he absent at the hospital, when my daughter was there and did he not show up at my grandmother's funeral but, after telling me he was too unwell to celebrate my birthday with my friends and I, I ran into him on St-Laurent Street, healthy-looking and happy, having just gone to a photo shoot where he posed as a mod, his new thing. I'd also been receiving drunken texts at all hours of the night and it was in the spring that it got so much worse and stayed that way for months. 

In June, I wrote to him and told him I couldn't talk to him anymore. I needed space and I begged him to back off. He agreed and, for about six weeks, there was peace. 

I did so much during that summer. I went to Ottawa a few times, took my son and my sister to Quebec City for a day, competed with the dragon boat team I'd joined and spent a week in Toronto, with my cousin. 

Old Quebec:

I also went to a few small-town festivals on the West Island and generally tried to get into the car, leave town and discover as many new places as I could. I took my daughter to see the B-52's live at the Montreal Jazz Festival and took her to a few ska shows as well. This was also the year she started Rock Camp for Girls.

Here is my super stylish kid on our way to one such show. She had just turned eleven:
(Dress: French Connection, Leggings and hat: Ardène, Boots: Doc Marten's, Sweater: Unknown)

My daughter after her rock camp show:

By Halloween, a few things ended. Firstly, my ex' mother lost her battle with cancer. He went off the deep end and, in the weeks leading up to her death and in the days after, I received countless, drunken text messages. We had started seeing each other again in August but I was much more reserved about it all, now. We saw each other at a party, where he begged me stay but didn't want to communicate and during which he was not only drunk but high as a kite and denying both, as usual. When he tried to say goodbye to me, as I got into a cab at 4 a .m., I said goodbye to our mutual friend and gave him the finger without even glancing his way. I saw him two more times, once when he came over and once at a ska show and then that was it. He sent me one last, horrible, drunken text at 3 a.m. in January of 2012, telling me that he was so happy, he wanted to have his vasectomy reversed and saying, ,"You're all alone, now. Where's your soul mate? How does it feel to know that I'm so happy and you're not?!?" Lovely, no? All traces of the man I once knew and loved are gone and I guess that made it easier for me to get over him as well as I did. 

It was also around this time that I quit working as a relocation consultant and went back to working in an office, as an admin assistant. My car had sadly died and I couldn't afford a new one, given how little I'd been paid for the last year and so I became much more sedentary.

Halloween:

I finished the year in NYC, feeling strong, confident, motivated and happy.

The next Roots post will sum up last year and bring us to where I am now. I'm really looking forward to it because, after that, I can share all of the interesting things I've been up to as of late and talk about where I'm headed! 

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V-Day Un-Woes and Natural Born Quiller

i'm not a fan of st-valentine's day. not at all. and yet, some years, certain people do things that make me feel good enough about it. that is the case this year more than ever and i'm single so i clearly was not expecting that.

firstly, at my new office, everyone got truffles from the building owners and one of the developers went around and gave everyone more chocolate. i also tried my hand at table tennis for the first time in sixteen years and didn't suck, although that probably had nothing to do with valentine's day but it did happen at work and right before i handed out the truffles so just go with it...

last week, i got the sweetest surprise in the mail. my ridiculously talented friend, charlene, who owns the cleverly-named etys shop, natural born quiller, sent the kids and i some valentine's day treats:

she also sent me the beautiful bookmark you see in the third photo and sent my daughter the super cute bracelet in the last one. both gifts are from shanghai. 

i'm grateful to have this girl in my life for a series of reasons but especially because of how thoughtful she is! she remembers the craziest, tiniest details and hangs on to them until the right moment and then she surprises you like this. friendly gushing aside, check out her shop and add it to your favourites! what this woman can do with paper, man... i can't even make a paper airplane. just saying. 

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Roots. Part Four: On The Streets of Ottawa, A Year In Toronto and When I Became A Goth. 1996-2000

i moved out of my home in gatineau, québec and into my aunt's townhouse in nepean, ontario, an ottawa suburb, when i was sixteen. the change of environment was too much for me and, after years of not being allowed to express myself or be a kid at all, really, i went out all and crammed as much ridiculous teenage behavior as i could into one year. this and the fact that i had decided to take a year off from school after i graduated resulted in me being kicked out of my aunt's home after having lived there for just over a year.

i informed my dad that i was moving back in. he had finally broken up with his mentally unstable girlfriend of eight years but lived in the bottom of the duplex, while she occupied the top floor. we loaded all of my belongings into his minivan and headed east. what my dad hadn't told me became clear as we pulled into what seemed like the wrong driveway upon arriving at their home. he was moving me back in with my stepmom and the best part is that he hadn't told her. he just moved me into my old room, in that place, and let me deal with the immense scene she caused upon discovering me and all of my things in her apartment when she got home from work.

i was even more miserable than the first time i had had to occupy that room. the only differences were that now i was allowed to swear when we spoke, i was allowed to shower (she had forbidden us to shower when we were kids and, instead, made us take baths, claiming that we would "ruin the bathroom floor" if we showered), i was allowed to place my furniture the way i wanted it and i now smoked. i got a job at market fresh, in ottawa, and things really fell apart when she imposed an eleven o'clock curfew on me but work finished at ten, one province and two cities over. i started staying out at night, crashing wherever i could, and then coming home to shower and change when she was away at work. eventually, it all blew up and i was out, as we say, on my ass, at seventeen.

i was dating a twenty-four-year-old acid dealer and professional loiterer with a tattoo of lambert, the friendly lion, on his chest, and one on his back of a large skull with a green mohawk that someone was kind enough to give him while he had sojourned in prison. he was the second in a line of tall, lanky, tattooed, blue-eyed men in my life and liked to go by the name "tigger". tigger and i started out by sleeping outside, next to the rideau canal. when it started to get cold, we began squatting in a townhouse on kent street. a bunch of our friends had lived there and, when they got evicted, they left a key under their mat so that we could get in, drink the rest of the keg that was in the kitchen and get some sleep on the couch they'd left behind. when that option was no longer available to us, we crashed on couches, wherever people would take us in.

halfway through the winter, we decided it was time to find an apartment. we got one next to the infamous-but-waning hull strip. it was a newly-renovated two-bedroom for all of four-hundred-dollars a month. i worked and paid for rent and food while tigger went to school and we waited for his student loans to come in. i got a puppy from some street kids we knew. he threatened to kill it. then i found out he wasn't even going to school and so there would be no student loans. for additional icing on the cake, he cheated on me with a fourteen-year-old and spent the rent money i had been giving him on god-knows-what and i lost my job. i met a girl who would be my friend for a dozen years, she moved into the spare room, we got evicted anyway, thanks to tigger, and found a place in vanier, an ottawa ghetto.

here i am, in 1998, hanging out at the steaming bean café, on nocholas street, in ottawa. 

we settled into a routine and, by then, i had become someone everyone knew, downtown. i had also, overnight, become a goth. i suppose that i would have probably starting wearing punk garb as soon as i was out on the street, except that all the punks i knew at the time didn't bathe and i couldn't deal with the stench. that is honestly the only reason i dodged dressing like a punk at that age, wore sporty labels for a year and then, one night, became a goth.

i don't really know what happened but i must have been influenced by some of the kids i was hanging with downtown. i had always listened to all sorts of music so that's not what caused it... i was playing  around with my make-up one evening when i found myself with cat-eye liner and dark red lips. loving that, i ran to my room, grabbed a pair of fishnets, tore them up and put them on my arms. i threw on a bunch of clingy, black clothing, another pair of fishnets for my legs, my doc's, and headed downtown. at first i thought it quite funny that hardly anyone recognized me but that novelty soon wore off and it simple became a lifestyle, as i met up with other goth kids and became really good friends with them. what was interesting is that half the goth kids i knew were a year or two younger than me and still living at home, in suburbia, so i got to see what money could buy me and set out to find all of the same fashions at thrift stores and on sale. i did pretty well for myself, seeing as i could go to montreal whenever i wanted to and hunt through all the secondhand shops there.

until recently, that was the best year of my life. i fell in love with one of the goth kids and became best friends with his crew (we joked around, calling it a "mope of goths"). i finally felt loved and supported and, when my boyfriend moved to toronto to study massage therapy, i moved into a section of his mom's house for a low cost and got a job on parliament hill and another one at the national arts centre. if it wasn't the best time of my life, it was certainly the most carefree. it was the one year i got to be a teenager and i adored every minute of it. friends would climb up the balcony to my room, as i had only read about or seen kids on tv doing, i always had someone to hang out with, i was never teased and i felt beautiful and strong.

here is the crew at the celtic cross pub, on bank street, in 1998.

here i am with my then-chum, paul, smoking indoors (or at all, really!) and everything.

in the summer of 1998, my other friend paul and i went to montreal for a wedding. my mother had remarried and had given birth to a girl. here i am holding my new sister, geneviève.

after a few months and despite my misgivings and the fact that someone artistic and handsome had fallen for me and i for him, i left everyone behind and followed my boyfriend to toronto. that was one of the worst years of my life. i auditioned for theatre school but got put on waiting lists. i attended humber college and couldn't relate to anyone in my classes. i got accepted to theatre school in ottawa but chose to stay in toronto, with my boyfriend, even if we fought all the time. i was incredibly lonely, he hit on everything with a pulse, and we were broke. the only good thing that happened during this time (aside from me getting a job at a music store and meeting the chemical brothers), was that i started to design, as i had always done as a kid but, for the first time, i envisioned it all becoming something. not long after we broke up for the second time, i got pregnant. i was nineteen.

the chemical brothers and i, on queen west, in toronto:

my daughter's dad and i, new year's eve, nineteen-ninety-nine, in ottawa. i was a few months pregnant and he was visiting for the holidays. his mother had lent me the shawl so that i wouldn't get cold. 

january, two-thousand. pregnant with my daughter and about to go dancing at barrymore's, on bank street, in ottawa. 

a then-friend doodling on my arm, in my dad's basement, before going out. february, two-thousand, a week or two before i moved to montreal and four months before i had my daughter. 

i moved back to ottawa, where i took up german studies at ottawa u. i lived with my dad, my brother and his new, also-pregnant wife, in a house in the country. my brother was doing a lot of drugs at the time and he was very aggressive. my depressive moods would set him off and all of this pissed my dad's wife off so nobody really got along. there was no room for me when her kids came home so i was asked to sleep on thin boat mats on the floor, in a room covered in plaster dust and being renovated. i took the couch but that pissed her off too so we butt heads. when i said a certain music made me sad, she turned up the volume; if i coughed because i had a cold, she sprayed lysol all around me, casing me to wheeze and gasp. (we're cool now but those were some seriously shaky first months). i had to rely on my dad or brother for rides into town and, often, this meant going into ottawa at 6 a.m. with nowhere to go and only enough change for a coffee and toast. i would hang out at the main mall and at the library until it was time for school and then wait at another coffee shop until my ride home was ready. all of my old friends had dispersed a bit and those that remained drove me mad with their refusal to evolve. this lasted only five weeks before i'd had enough. i called my mother, who talked to her ex, who was looking to sublet his place in st-henri, in montreal. i packed up the few belongs i had and, three weeks later, loaded it all up into my uncle's pick-up truck and we headed for montreal, where i have been since.

that time spent in  downtown ottawa was the only breath of fresh air i got between one tough spot and another and, even though the memories are hazy now, i can evoke the carefree, happy state i lived in at whim and make any current situation seem better in doing so. it's also another reason i ended up deejaying at goth nights and that i still own a lot of goth and death rock clothing and will always feel a kinship to that subculture and its romantic and macabre aesthetic.

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25 Days of Etsy Christmas Gifts. Day Eighteen: Ontario

today's list features gift ideas from ontari-ari-ari-ari-oh! (my dad and his siblings used to sing that out loud every time they drove over the ontarian border, when they were young, and my brother and i did the same when we were little guys). 

i was born in montreal but moved to ontario for a year when i was seven. i returned for a few years, when i was sixteen, living in ottawa and then toronto, until i was almost twenty. my three best friends are in toronto and i love visiting both the t-dot (i actually get annoyed when people say that so i have no idea why i just did) and ottawa on a regular basis so i'm thrilled to share these ten ontarian etsy shops with you!

1. for classic contemporary home decor gifts, i recommend studio liscious, a shop based in toronto. 

2. meg mithcell, who runs priscilla mae, offers up what she calls "an artful celebration of women" and i absolutely love her cushions and totes. be sure to check out her toronto-based shop!

3. anista designs, also from toronto, offers over four-hundred-and-fifty fun, vintage-inspired items.

4. based in keswick, ontario, geek things is a shop you must visit if you have a geek and/or gamer on your list. i'd spotted this shop when i made a list just for this type of gift but decided to save it for today. 

5. we're back in toronto for vera viridis, a small but wonderful shop. i look forward to seeing what else vera comes up with!

6. also from toronto, we have meagan dibb jewellery. i know this would have fit wonderfully into my geek list but i wanted to support as many canadian shops as possible in this series and so here we are!  if you have a gamer on your list and you want to surprise them with lovely, wearable art, then this is for you!
*** please note that this seller does have four negative feedback ratings but they are all related to the amount of time it takes for items to arrive. a)keep that in mind if ordering and b)i know that buyers can sometimes exaggerate and have very unrealistic expectations with regards to how much time it takes for items to make it to other countries. i often had to remind american buyers that, even if we're neighbours, we're still another country and items need to clear american customs. buyers from elsewhere also don't understand that we don't automatically get tracking numbers. canadian sellers would have to charge american buyers too much for shipping in order to get a tracking number. communication is usually all it takes to clear that up, though...

7. in-bloom is based in london, ontario, and offers  over three-hundred original and beautifully handcrafted pieces.

8. back in toronto, we have the art and designs of ron & indy. be sure to check out their special offers!

9. if you live in the greater toronto area and you've got a holiday party to attend and you want to impress the heck out of your host and/or hostess, gucci's goodies dessert house has what you need, including some dairy and gluten-free options. check it out!

10. i really like soap star canada, based in cobourg, ontario. be sure to check out their seasonal scents-- mmm!

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