North of Normal- A memoir of my wilderness childhood, my unusual family, and how I survived both

by Cea Sunrise Person

  I cheated on my first husband with seven different men. When he and I finally split apart after two horrible years of marriage, I was so exhausted from my lies and guilt and confusion that all I wanted to do was drink my sorrows away. A nightly bottle or two of wine became my protection from the past that had hurt me, the present that disappointed me and the future that terrified me. I moved to Munich and embarked on a financially rewarding but creatively unfulfilling career as a catalog model, and spent my spare time partying.

  Four years later, at the age of twenty-eight, I awoke one morning with a horrific case of alcohol poisoning and dried blood on my right hand. The night before, I had done so much coke and drunk so much booze that I had beat the crap out of my boyfriend. But it wasn’t just the fact that I had lost control and unleashed a rage I didn’t even know I had that horrified me; it was the reason for my fury. In my stupor, I had mistaken my boyfriend for Papa Dick. A man I hadn’t spoken to in a decade, and yet it was he who I had struck out at in my darkest hour. I could no longer deny that I needed help.

  Brutally hungover, I picked up the phone and dialed the number I hadn’t called in months but still knew by heart: Mom’s.

  I ROSE FROM MY chair and stretched my arms, then walked slowly over to the bookshelf, perusing the collection of psychology and self-help books. Heather, my therapist, put down her pen and let an easy silence fill the room. She was used to my routine. I would often move around the room during our sessions, uncomfortable with her steady gaze upon my face and the constant expectation of disclosure. Sometimes I dreaded seeing her at all, afraid that my story would finally be told and I would have nothing left to say, forcing her to pronounce me either cured or hopeless. But still, I went.

  “As you were saying,” she said, her expression neutral as always. “You’re thinking of leaving Munich? Where would you move to?”

  “I don’t know. Canada. I mean . . . home, I guess. Although it doesn’t feel much like home anymore.”

  “Yes, and that’s one of your challenges. But you’ve also been in Europe for over a decade, so you would have to expect an adjustment period.”

  “Yeah, I know. I think I’m ready for it.” I glanced over my shoulder at her. “Thanks to you,” I added, and it was true.

  I had been lucky to find Heather, a British psychologist practicing in Munich. And after working together for six months, she had plenty of words to describe me: mother-attached, father-absent, male-abandoned, anger-suppressed, sexually-abused-and-overexposed, substance-for-love-replaced, parental-role-reversed, premature-responsibility-laden, innocence-deprived, guidance-deprived, role-model-lacking, hardship-enduring, stability-lacking, safety-yearning, and expectation-deficient. “Cool,” I had said to her once. “I love that there are labels for all this stuff. All this time, I thought I was so freakishly unique.”

  Through Heather, I learned new things about myself. When I told her about Barry, I assured her that the damage probably hadn’t been too deep because I’d almost thought of it as consensual. But that was the whole point, Heather said: it wasn’t possible for an eight-year-old to consent to such a thing, and the very fact that I saw it that way revealed the scars it had left. And my relationship with my mother, surely the source of most of my afflictions, was cast in a new light. “You felt you owed your mother something for sticking with you through your childhood,” Heather said to me once. “Did it ever occur to you that that was her duty and obligation?” I shook my head, shocked at my inability to see the obvious. As a child, I had held so much inside in an attempt to be strong that it would now take years of work for me to learn to express my true feelings safely. As a result, Heather had treatment suggestions for me beyond the usual talk therapy. Perhaps a staged rebirth would do the trick, she ventured, or an exercise in letter writing to all who had hurt me. But I declined, imagining my humiliation at both activities. I was fine, I told her. Thoughts of diving off Munich’s Friedensengel, “Angel of Peace,” statue in a moment of self-pity had passed, I’d sworn off drugs and casual sex, and I’d cut way back on drinking.

  “How are things with your mother?” Heather asked me now. “You are still communicating?”

  I nodded. When I called Mom on that dreadful morning, we’d made a pact: we’d agreed that our differences were probably insurmountable, but we would try to return to each other’s lives. I’d taken her on a holiday to get reacquainted, and it had been mostly successful.

  “Sure, yeah. Pretty good, I guess. I mean, she calls now, she seems to care and everything, so that’s good. It’s just . . .” Heather raised her eyebrows, waiting. “It’s just sometimes I feel like if she really loved me, if she really wanted to make a fresh start of our relationship like she claims she does, she would act a little differently. You know, like not try to tell me about her sex life, which she knows I hate. Or smoke pot in front of me. And her boyfriend . . . I can’t believe she’s still with him. After all these years, and all the pain he’s caused her . . . okay, so he finally divorced his wife, but my God . . . I mean, he basically stole my mother away from me when I needed her most, and he doesn’t even care! And he hated me! He tried to push me out of their lives to go and live with my father, who I barely knew! How can she think it’s okay to still be with him? How am I supposed to react to that? I feel like if I completely welcome her back into my life, I’m also welcoming all the pain and humiliation she caused me because of him.”

  “She will never be the mother you want. I don’t think you’re the only person in the world with that complaint. That doesn’t mean she can’t add value to your life.”

  “Yeah, I know. Anyway . . .” I turned back to the bookshelf and ran my hand over a row of spines. “I definitely feel more together. But I still feel . . . empty. Unfulfilled. I don’t know, I hate how cliché that sounds, but I guess I thought this process would be more . . . dramatic.”

  “It doesn’t happen overnight,” Heather said. “You’ve been living with certain beliefs about yourself and your family for almost three decades. It’s going to take time to undo that and see the truth.”

  “In other words, I have to get all the crap out before I can fit the good stuff in.”

  “Exactly.”

  I grinned. “Papa Dick would agree with that. When I was a kid, he always told me I had to get the poop out of my body before it could make room for nutrients. Man, that guy was obsessed with shit. This one time—” I stopped pacing, standing stock-still as I stared at a book with a yellow cover. Slowly, I pulled it from the shelf and held it before me. “Oh my God,” I said quietly. “Oh. My God.”

  “What is it?” Heather asked, lowering her notepad.

  I turned the cover toward her. “This book.”

  She pushed her glasses up her nose and peered at it. “Is the title familiar to you?”

  “Not the title. The author.” I dropped the book on the table. “It’s my father.”

  Heather stared back at me, the shock on her face a contrast to her usual professional poise. “Your father? Truly?”

  “Yes. He’s studied childhood brain development for years, and I knew he had become an expert in his field. But I didn’t realize he’d written a book. He probably told me at some point, but . . . I guess I pay about as much attention to his world as he pays to mine.” I collapsed into a chair and put my head in my hands. “Well. How the fuck do you like that. Here I am, lamenting on about my childhood, while the man who was never a father to me is out there writing books about raising happy, well-adjusted kids. I wonder if he even sees the irony in that.”

  I lit a cigarette and let it burn between my fingers, untouched. I didn’t really smoke anymore, but the feel of a cigarette in my hand somehow, stupidly, made me feel a little tougher. “You know, he and I have never even really talked about the past. He’s never asked, beyond the superficial. And in the meantime, he’s got these two other daughters at home who were raised with all the benefits of his knowledge. How could he write a book like this and not even show an interest in
how it applied to his own child?”

  “Maybe he’s afraid to hear the truth. Afraid that you’ll blame him for everything, and that the tenuous bond you share now will be broken forever.”

  “Yes, but still—”

  “Don’t mistake silence for lack of compassion, Cea. What he knows about your childhood probably hurts him deeply. And, being an expert in how his absence and your family’s dysfunction must have affected your development, he probably lives with the guilt of it every day.”

  “Well. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  She took the book from the table and looked at the cover. “I remember this. It impressed me.” She set it aside and picked up her notepad again. “Listen. If it’s any comfort, this is about you. Look at all you’ve been through, and yet here you are. Resilient, just like the title says. This may sound trite, but he would be proud.”

  “Yeah. Would be. I understand what you’re saying, but hell, I speak to the man two or three times a year. I’ve seen him, like, three times in the past decade. Not once has he visited me here, not once in all the years I’ve been in Europe, even though I’ve invited him. He acts all concerned when he sees me, and then I don’t hear from him for months. I guess that’s just the story of my family, right? Out of sight, out of mind.” I shook my head angrily, that old ripped-off feeling raging to the surface once more.

  Heather looked at me sympathetically. “I understand that your father’s behavior is frustrating to you. Clearly, you have some work to do with him. Do you think you’d feel comfortable discussing what we’ve talked about today with him?”

  “I—I don’t know.” I was growing weary of the sound of my own complaining voice. “Really, I just want to move on. I’ve made it this long without him, I just want to . . .” I waved my hand. “Anyway, like I said, I’m done with Munich. I’m twenty-nine years old; it’ll be another decade for me soon. I need a new start.”

  “That’s a big decision. Will you be able to continue your career in Canada?”

  “No. Not really, I mean. A little. I don’t care. Anyway, I’ve saved up a lot of money. I need to do this.”

  “All right. But do me a favor, okay? Focus on your healing for a while. Don’t jump into a relationship right away. Generally one chooses a partner after years of parental guidance and support, but you obviously haven’t had the benefit of a proper role model. For the first time in your life, you have the tools to make a wise decision, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get it right the first time. Think of your next relationship as . . . kind of like your first one. Right out of—What do you Canadians call it—high school?” She smiled, and I grinned back at her.

  “Don’t worry. The last thing on my mind right now is finding a boyfriend.”

  Heather nodded. “Good. You’re a very strong woman, Cea. I’m sure that whatever you do, you’re going to do just fine.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Hey, look at this one,” Mom said with a giggle, pulling a photo from the stack on her lap. “Look how young I was!”

  “Yeah, you look about twelve. Hard to believe you were already a mother then.”

  “Isn’t it? You would have been about the same age Avery is now.”

  I smiled down at my son, who was sitting at my feet with a toy truck in his hand. “Fruck!” he said, zooming it along the ground, and Mom and I burst out laughing. We were sitting on a park bench close to her house in Calgary, taking a photographic stroll down memory lane.

  “Avery is amazing,” Mom said, shaking her head. “I’m so glad you had him.”

  “Yeah, me too. Even if . . .”

  “What?”

  “Well, you know. Even if it doesn’t work out with James. At least we have Avery.”

  “Mm. Things are that bad, huh?”

  “Pretty much. I just . . .” I shrugged, wondering for the thousandth time how I had ended up in yet another miserable marriage that pinched at me like a pair of too-tight shoes that I was forced to put on each day.

  Against Heather’s advice, upon my return to Canada shortly before my thirtieth birthday, I had quickly latched on to the first man who had shown an interest in me, jumping in headlong and ignoring the many red flags that waved frantically at me from the beginning. Part of the draw was that James wasn’t interested in having a family. I don’t want children, I had said to him when we first met. Ever. I need you to know that. My childhood dream of having a baby girl had died long ago, when I realized how drained I was from the years of what felt like raising my own mother. Just the thought of a child, with its constant need for care and guidance, exhausted me.

  But four years later, I had woken up one morning with Papa Dick on my mind. I rarely thought about him, but I was searching for a reason for the gloom that had hung over my head for as long as I could remember. That morning, I was thinking of the last time I had seen him. He had been passing through Vancouver for a Thrival gig, so I’d picked him up from the airport and driven him to James’s and my place to spend the night. After talking briefly about Jan, Jessie and Dane—who were respectively missing, living in Calgary in a welfare walk-up, and still institutionalized—our conversation had turned to books. I told him about one I had just finished, and then he described an Eckhart Tolle he was reading. “It’s such a shame,” he said then, shaking his head sadly, “that no one in my family reads.”

  Confused, I cocked my head. “No one in your family? What about me?”

  He blinked at me. “My kids, I mean. You know, my real family. Let’s face it—you were always a bit too . . . commercial to be a Person.”

  I willed myself not to cry. Was he serious? Was he actually saying this? My grandfather, the closest thing I’d ever had to a father, didn’t even consider me one of his tribe? I opened my mouth to speak, but he beat me to it.

  “Say,” he said brightly, glancing around my kitchen. “You don’t have a basin around, do you? I just know I’m going to wake up having to pee tonight, and you know how I feel about modern toilets.”

  Ever since that conversation, something had niggled at me. It was no mystery that my grandfather and mother were part of the cause of my depression, but I also understood that I was thirty-three years old and it was time to stop laying blame—time to take responsibility for my own happiness. And if I didn’t belong to my family of origin, perhaps it was time to start one of my own.

  I had Avery when I was thirty-five, and from the moment he was born I understood everything I’d ever heard about the deepest love possible. But with his arrival, my desire to escape the unhappiness of my marriage was only heightened. I found myself thinking longingly about my own childhood, of the times it was just Mom and me, and actually wishing for the simplicity of life with an absent father. But I felt trapped by my son’s right to an intact family, James’s and my broken dreams, and my fear of striking out on my own. The cash I’d saved from modeling was long gone, blown away by bad business investments and lack of knowledge. How I’d ever thought I could handle any amount of money was beyond me, given my family’s history with it.

  So now here I was, seven years into my new life, standing in a playground with a young child, no money and escape on my mind. I sighed deeply and turned toward Mom. “I just don’t want to get divorced again, you know?”

  “Honey,” she said. “It’s not about how many times you get married or divorced, it’s about finding happiness. Doing what you have to do to get to the right place. I mean, look at my parents. They went to great lengths to achieve their dreams, and they made it—”

  “Mom, I know you think they were the most amazing couple ever, but even they ended up splitting when the dream turned sour.” I laughed humorlessly. “There was Grandma Jeanne, doing all the cooking and mending Papa Dick’s socks so he wouldn’t have to be distracted from living his wilderness fantasy, and meanwhile, what was he doing? Cheating on her left and right. As soon as he realized she didn’t idolize him anymore, he had to go out and recruit some new followers with his dick. It’s no wonder s
he left him!”

  “Cea, don’t—”

  “No, really! However you want to word it, that’s how it went down.”

  “Honey, he’s dead now, don’t talk about him like that—”

  “I know he’s dead, and I’m sorry!”

  I threw my hands to the sky, suddenly furious at the man who had let me down so completely in my adult years. He died of cancer just days before my last birthday, and although I had tried my best to cry for him, the tears just hadn’t come. How ironic that a man who had devoted his life to avoiding pollution, tobacco, chemicals, alcohol and sugar had been tackled in the end by the big disease.

  “I’m sorry I don’t miss him the way you do. I loved him, I really did, but he was so narcissistic! He was the only real father figure I had, but it was like I didn’t even exist after I left the wilderness! He never even wrote to me—”

  Avery stood up, truck in hand, and turned toward me. “Mommy mad? Mommy sad? Av-wee kiss better?”

  “Oh, honey, Mommy’s fine . . .” I opened my arms and let him kiss me on the cheek, then placed him on the ground again. “And I feel even better now. Thank you.” I watched him toddle off to the sandbox before turning back to Mom.