How my Parents Met

When I was in my teens I was a hopeless romantic and loved nothing better than a love story. I asked my mom to tell me how her and dad met and here’s the story she related to me…

By age 21 mom had already been divorced once and was “shackin’ up” with her boyfriend (name unknown). Her boyfriend had a friend, who was their roommate. They were renting a large rambling house and needed help making the monthly payments. Once day the boyfriend decided to move west, broke up with mom, and left her and his friend to deal with the rent on their own. Mom abandoned the house and moved in to the YWCA.

The roommate had nowhere to go. He snuck into mom’s women-only dorm room and begged her to let him sleep there for the night. She broke the rules and let him sleep there. He adored her. He was the shy guy who had never had a girlfriend and she was the older hot divorced recently-spurned woman who was unattainable. Or was she? They became a couple, and later my parents.

It was the early 70′s, when love, sex, and drugs were becoming more the norm. They had road bicycles, a pup tent, and no obligations, so they biked across Eastern Canada, smoking pot, skinny dipping, making love, and camping where ever their bikes took them. One time they were camping by a peaceful lake when a US military helicopter started circling overhead. Through a bullhorn they were ordered them to leave immediately or their bikes would be confiscated and they would be arrested. They scrambled to pack up their gear and get back on the road. They realized later they had inadvertently crossed over the Canadian border into the US onto private government property.

Life on the road was not always fun, but it was memorable. One night they were cramped into their little pup tent together in the freezing rain, and mom was very sick. There were cold, wet and miserable. Dad finally had to give in and hike out to find a pay phone to call his dad to come pick them and their bikes up.

Later dad got a job and they were able to rent a house. To supply their pot-smoking habits, they had a small grow-op going. One unforgettable day mom was on the phone with dad, who was out of town working, and she suddenly exclaimed, “I gotta go! The SWAT team has surrounded the house and are coming in all the windows!” No criminal charges were laid.

They had been together for 3 years when mom discovered she was pregnant (with me). She was a determined woman with a strong will and the one thing she loved more than anything else was babies. Dad didn’t want children. He was a talented budding musician with a restless roving spirit, and children meant having to put down roots. He had survived a difficult childhood, and didn’t believe in his ability to raise his children differently than he had been raised. He was satisfied with the footloose fancy free life he was living with the woman he loved, so why change that? But what mom wanted, mom got. And she wanted babies. Lots of them.

Writing my Memoirs

A Synopsis of My Memoirs

I was 5 years old when my parents joined an extreme legalistic church community. You’ve seen them before. Girls wear long skirts brushing their ankles, long sleeves below the ever-sexy elbow, modest necklines to prevent tempting men sexually, no make-up, no heathen jewelery, not even a wedding band, and they all have long uncut hair. They abstain from any form of Hollywood media and avoid mingling with “sinners”. Children are cut off from the outside world in favor of a life of holiness and purity within the church. We were also a “spirit-filled” church, speaking in tongues, dancing in the aisles and “falling out” in the spirit in the pews. It was our main purpose in life to evangelize the entire world.

Growing up, I had a streak of feminism, but deep down I most desired the role of wife and mother. There was just one small problem. Discrimination against my obesity among my youth peers meant I had never had a single boyfriend or date. Thin and slightly overweight friends married easily, but the fat girls became the fat spinsters of the church. I was forbidden to marry outside of the church and I knew I was one of the girls destined for spinsterhood, which might as well have been a death sentence.

At age 22 I was thrown into a tailspin by the premature death of my mother to cancer, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Close friends acted awkward around my grief and started avoiding me in the days following the funeral when I needed them most. I turned to my family for comfort, but my dad remarried just 3 months after my mother’s death and I felt like his lowest priority because he had a new wife and five teenagers at home clamouring for his attention.

In a community of over 200 “friends”, I was alone and hated life. I would go to work everyday and come home to an empty apartment and no messages on my voicemail. I recognized this was what my life would always look like unless I did something drastic. There was a more liberal-minded sect of the church our pastor didn’t allow us to fellowship with, and they had internet chat rooms. I logged on, fully aware I was using forbidden worldly technology, but was so desperate for love I didn’t fully consider the consequences.

I was popular and attractive in this alternate world, and it filled my need for validation and love. I made the mistake of confiding in a mutually single friend, and she in turn betrayed my indiscretion to our pastor. Without a trial, I was publicly excommunicated from the church, and left to face the world I had been sheltered from most of my life. Now I was truly alone. I had been brainwashed to believe our church was the only church with the truth, all other churches were damned to hell, so my excommunication also meant eternity burning in hell unless I publicly apologized and broke off all online contact.

I refused.

A few months later I flew to Savannah, GA to meet the charismatic American man I had met in the chatroom, and he easily won me over with his compliments and smooth ways. I was amazed that anyone could love me, a fat girl. We had a Christmas wedding 5 months later, and I moved from the Rockies of western Alberta to the deep south coast of Georgia.

My new fairytale life came crashing down less than 2 weeks into my marriage when my husband revealed his true character. For 5 years I hid the abuse in shame and accepted it as penance for my choice to defy the rules of the church. It wasn’t until I had a child that I realized I had to leave. My child deserved better.

I reached out to my family in Canada and asked for their help. They worked with me to make an escape plan. I left everything I owned, taking only 4 cardboard boxes of clothes and a few important pictures and documents, and made the long journey home to Canada with my 20 month old son.

When I arrived on the small gulf island of Gabriola, British Columbia to stay with my dad and stepmom, healing started to slowly open my heart again. The small close-knit gulf island community was exactly what I needed. The deep peace I found here had me reminiscing of the days before my parents joined the cult-like church community when we were a nomadic family living in a school bus and seeking a simple uncomplicated life.

I started exploring my family’s hippie roots, the simple natural organic life, and it became a quest for full body, mind and spiritual health. God led me to a gentle man who loves me in a way I had only dreamed was possible, we are married now, and he has adopted my son. We opened our own businesses in the past couple of years, and last year we started growing our own organic food. My desire to finally conquer my life of morbid obesity has started an evolution from a fully toxic life to who I desire to be one day – Organique Gal™.

I would be honored to have you along as I write my memoirs. Who knows… maybe someday my blog memoirs will be published in a real live book, and I’ll become wildly famous, and you can say you knew me back in the day when I was just an online nobody.

Nomadic Living – on a Bus

My parents were hard core hippies. The first “house” I lived in when I was born was a cabin in the woods with no running water, and no electricity. My dad is a finish carpenter, so all his wood work was done with hand tools.

Next we moved to a hippie commune in Santa Monica, CA. My dad did all the wood work in the health food store that the commune operated, and when I returned 20 years later I instantly recognized his unique style.

When I was around 5 years old, and my brother was 2, my parents purchased an old school bus. Dad converted it to a nomadic home with a little toilet extension on the back. I have amazing memories of that time of our life. We started in Ottawa, ON, and hoped to make it back to Vancouver, BC where we had lived when my brother was born.

We only made it as far as Calgary, AB before the bus died for good. We lived in a friend’s driveway until my parents found work and a place to live. We spent the majority of our childhood in the Strathmore/Calgary area because that’s where this old bus was put out to pasture. Good times.