How to Thrive While living with Negation

How to thrive while living with negation 

...

My mother made a terrible mistake in the fall of 1962.

She had suffered for years in her marriage. My dad wasn't physically violent just emotionally abusive. We tiptoed around him because of his explosive temper which anything might set off. While he yelled at us kids for minor infractions, against our mother he used the silent treatment, often not speaking to her for weeks on end.

In October 1962 he went on a hunting trip over Thanksgiving - an annual rite for him and a group of his pals from Ontario. Our lives were easier and more harmonious until he came home. That year he shot a deer and carved it up on the kitchen table with a hack saw. The bundles of venison ended up in the basement freezer wrapped in newspaper.

My parents were no longer sharing the master bedroom as a couple - this strange arrangement had been going on for months. At first my brother had moved into my mother's bed, while my mother occupied his little room down the hall. Now it was my turn to sleep in the bedroom with my dad in the bed near the window. In retrospect I have no idea who thought this was a good thing but things were different then.

At Halloween my brother and I gave a party for 

our friends. Lots of loud rock and roll: the Locomotion and Monster Mash. My parents endured it in the living room -

As the party wore on downstairs we kids got out the Ouija board and spoke to a spirit who accurately answered all our questions and told us its name was SATAN.

It was after our successful kids party  that my mother probably decided to make her move and phone the doctors. A sense of desperation likely overwhelmed her. Maybe our music was a factor - seeing her kids dancing a "brand new dance" -. Of course we didn't tell her about the unexpected visit from "SATAN" --

Very frequently in those days the Montreal Star and Gazette carried articles about Dr Cameron at the Allan Memorial and how successfully his new methods were curing neurosis in difficult family members.My mother was home alone all day with little to do but watch daytime tv and talk on the phone to her distant relatives. And read the newspapers.

And plan our lives with the help of the brain doctors who had made Montreal their headquarters.

Our family were subjects in a mind control experiment that had already claimed many victims. She must have felt a sense of pride as an insider to this program, not realizing its true nature. She must have also been in touch with the psychiatrists at McGill whose work was always being praised in the strongest possible terms among the initiated and uninitiated alike.

Behind the hype about the world class hospital looking after our mental health, the reality was that Cameron had no patience with flawed humans and their neurotic histories, and believed he could blast all their problems away with drugs and electroshock --  leaving many of them helpless zombies. The media covered all that up and pretended what was going on down at the AMI was advanced psychiatry when it was more like an atomic bomb being dropped on unwitting Montrealers.

Even now I find it hard to connect these bizarre revelations to the life I remember, growing up in a typical Canadian family. It's almost as if I were two different people sharing different 

households - one of which was just a middle class home while the other was a classified experiment with a cast of thousands.

Family dramas and ordinary neuroses were fuel for these military mind doctors, providing them 

with a steady stream of naive subjects for their experiments.

I had a thick file downtown dating back to 1955 and had been seeing psychiatrists through my childhood. Yet I didn't remember any of this in 2007 when I asked for my childhood Pneumonia records  and was shown my emptied file folder at McGill - marked PSYCHIATRY. The nervous secretaries who finally pulled it out from behind the counter seemed to be disobeying orders-- more evidence of just how secretive all this was, and how we were being controlled by a deceptive team of doctors, hailed back then as heroes of medicine.

To my conscious knowledge I have never even sat in a psychiatrist's office let alone been subjected to mind control techniques used in Nazi concentration camps - but apparently that's because most survivors erect barriers to stop them remembering their torture.

Imagjne this happenjng to a whole city.

It was secrecy on a massive scale. A crime against humanity. And it happened in our own backyard. And we forgot about it.

In exchange for our memories we were given rock and roll. Why was that?

Because rock and roll was a weapon in their cultural arsenal aimed at a global takeover of youth.

In lockstep with the British Invasion, our lives were falling into ruins. 

In the fall of 1962 as we awaited annihilation under a hail of nuclear bombs my mother felt she couldn't stand it any more. Something had to be done about our dad's behavior which threatened her health and our future. Probably the last straw and the reason she sought help from the 

psychiatrists, was that he was seeing another woman, named Helen.

The Air Force shrinks  stepped in with a plan to cure my dad and save our family. They waited until early December when the school term was winding up, before taking my dad from work and locking him in the Allan.

When he came home six weeks later he acted confused and disoriented. He didn't recognize my brother and me. 

"Welcome home, Dad. We love you."

He just nodded then walked to his bedroom and lay down.

Our mother said not to worry. "It will take time." 

That was on a Thursday. The following Monday he got up, got dressed, and drove to work. Or so we believed. He did that every morning for the next six months. In fact however he was on sick leave and unable to teach high school music. They kept that from my brother and me, pretending things had gone back to normal when in fact our dad had gone from breadwinner to mental patient.

We played board games on some evenings and my dad would become confused.He was no longer impatient and hyper-critical. My mother pointed out how his handwriting was much larger, loose and flowing. His psychiatrist said this was a sign of improved emotional balance and openness.

A book on handwriting analysis appeared on our coffee table and I started to study it in my spare time.

Be patient, said our mother. Don't forget to tell him you love him.

"They're not doing anything good down at that hospital," he confided to me later.

"Oh Dad," I said, "they're only trying to help you."

Eventually we went back to watching TV in the 

evenings. The Twilight Zone was our favorite show as it seemed to reflect our reality.

Our family was too deeply involved in the program to just let things slide toward disaster. They had invested too much money in us. World class psychiatrists had been working on me since age 4. I'd been flown around North America numerous times in military planes. I had been chosen for a special future, over in England with a boy picked off the military base of Dartford where they'd trained their WW2 pilots.

Meanwhile over in England, it was the coldest 

winter on record. Even the Thames froze solid and Sylvia Plath committed suicide by gassing 

herself in her flat near Primrose Hill.

The Rollin' Stones soon to be Rolling were playing in clubs and attracting a following around London. 

In Canada we'd never heard of them. The 

Beatles were still a year off. Schmaltzy tunes like Moon River and Johnny Angel topped our charts along with joke songs like Ahab the Arab and Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. Surf Music had not yet escaped California. 

And it was winter. One evening my dad took me shopping for a new coat. We drove to a 

department store where I tried on a bright orange padded jacket and a sleek pair of ski pants with foot straps. In the tall mirror, I glimpse a svelte young woman I barely recognized. I gasped when my dad told the shop 

girl to bring me a black fur hat to complete the look. His eyes glistened. He was spending the grocery money on me but he didnt care. Poor dad, I thought - he's just like the rest of us now. Human.

A fashion plate, my mother sighed, squinting at 

the bill. She knew the power of image. In my new outfit I could easily pass for 16. Maybe their investment in me was about to pay off 

after all. 

At school I attracted strange looks from other girls when I entered the playground in my new orange and black outfit - more suited to Swiss slopes than the gritty snowdrifts and slush of our schoolyard games.

At church the organist's 18 year old son tried to ask me out for a date but dad crushed that notion before it went to my head .

For my 12th birthday I asked for a diary and got a pink plastic one with its own little lock and key 

ensuring total privacy for my most intimate writings. I would record events in my life like my 

hero Anne Frank as the Nazis invaded her town and sent the Jews away in trains. That week the US submarine Thresher had just gone down in the Atlantic killing all crew members on board.  For a while I thought the Russians had sunk it and I was living in the opening days of a world war that only needed another teenage girl to record it for posterity in her diary. 

I soon gave up trying to turn my daily life into the stuff of memoir.

It was four years since my first menstrual period and I was still waiting to have another.

Waitin for a girl she's got curlers in her hair..

The package of pads in my closet had been gathering dust since summer of 1959, the last time we saw young Mike.



Mike wasn't in a band in 1959, or even thinking of going into music. Although he did like to do his hair like Eddie Cochrane and Bo Diddley. Like my brother and me, he was part of the secret program involving drugs and mind control. They flew him in from London, while my parents drove all the way from  Montreal in my dad's Ford Zephyr. We arrived in Toronto the day before my aunt, uncle and 10 year old cousin flew to London for a month's vacation.

I vividly remember arriving at their home. My cousin had a treehouse that we played in, and then we walked to the neighborhood swimming pool and swam in the turquoise water til dinnertime. And the next day they took off. A few days later a postcard arrived showing my cousin feeding the pigeons out of her hand at Trafalgar Square. And then there's a blank. I remember nothing of the month long "summer school" my twin and I attended. Not a single thing. We never talked about it, never reminisced, never even asked each other what we did there. Gone. 

Nineteen fifty-nine was also the summer the MKULTRA program began moving out of McGill and over to York University in Toronto-- because Dr Cameron feared the French were out to get him in Montreal, Quebec, and he needed more space for his secret experiments on children. 

What I do remember is waking up one morning in the basement room where I slept, and finding blood in my panties. Fearfully telling my mother who took me to the doctor, and having my first pelvic exam, being asked if I was constipated, and then listening to the verdict. "She might be having early menstruation. Eight is young, but it can happen." My mother pretended to believe him and just to prove it took me to the drug store and bought supplies: a little white belt and box of Kotex napkins. She broke it to me that for the rest of my reproductive life I would be bleeding every month. News to me. I'd never heard of this but went along with it.

I waited to bleed again but nothing happened, not the next month or the month after. By autumn I was back in elementary school missing classes and reading myself fairy tales in bed. 

In the spring of 1963 the Rolling Stones hooked up with their manager, Andrew Look Oldham - a brilliant marketer who designed their bad boy image. Andrew had been a window dresser for Mary Quant at her trendy shop in Chelsea, but after seeing the Stones perform one night he saw the future and "it was sex". He jumped ship.

That's probably when my mother heard our polite young Mike had moved to London to study Economics and Politics. 

He was now a Rolling Stone whatever that was, and had connections in the London fashion business. The King's Road and its swinging boutiques were just around the corner from the putrid flat at Edith Grove that he shared with Keith Richards and Brian Jones.

No one in Montreal except our psychiatrists had heard of the Rolling Stones of course. They didn't have a record out and even if they had, we wouldn't have listened to it over in Canada.

So my mother, who was turning 50 soon, decided she had nothing to lose by sending her 12 year old (but could pass for 17) prepubescent daughter over to be part of the launch of the Stones' first single. She probably thought it would be a glamorous break from elementary school, a quick trans Atlantic jaunt.

It seems to have started out at a track and field event I was attending with my school up north at a place called Shawbridge Boys' Farm, a youth detention facility run by McGill University so there you have the special MKULTRA link. Our world class shrinks were experimenting on juvenile delinquents in the Laurentians where no one would think to look, amid the trees and grassy outdoors where kids ran relays and practiced broad jump.

Anyway I woke up in London that morning of June 7 in 25c heat, needing a bath, in dirty track clothes on a mattress at Edith Grove with Keith Brian and Andrew. There was nowhere to bathe or do laundry so they took me to Mary Quant. Baby doll dresses were the latest thing but we opted for a pair of pink pajamas, presumably cheaper, and tied a long scarf around my unwashed hair.  Then Andrew Oldham (son of a downed RAF pilot) took me to meet Mike, now known as Mick, who hadn't seen me since I was 8 - at 12 I was almost as tall as he was. We walked all the way to LSE.  Later that night things fell apart or I assume they must have. It was probably the shock of seeing him with his  girlfriend Chrissy Shrimpton after he'd been kissing me earlier that day. I just wasn't cut out for my mission as a trafficked child slash mind controlled courier. Probably Mick was a bit wary of my age and called off my visit. Since all this came back to me fairly recently as a detailed flashback, I can't be sure of every little detail just that I flew home with my baby doll costume which my mother later presented to me as a gift: "Look what I made for you - baby doll pajamas! The latest thing." A small deception indicating she was following advice from my brain handlers who had erased my memory with drugs or hypnosis or a stun gun. The pajamas were much too fancy for her simple sewing machine but I accepted them gratefully and wore them for years. Thanks to my debriefing on reentry I had total amnesia for the trip to London -  

I know none of this makes sense to those who didn't experience it, however apparently I did. As they say, if you remember the sixties, you weren't there.

The reverse is also true. If you don't remember a thing, you probably were.

And anyway I had other things to think about, like Dr Cameron's voice in my head endlessly repeating

"You're no good

You will fail

You will never succeed at anything"

It is strange to realize you have been a pawn all your life. And that your parents sold you to science hoping you wouldn't remember.

My mother stayed in touch with the psychiatrists. And they remained interested in her Norman bloodline, very important for the Jaggers and the ticket to British aristocracy.

My father was now officially retired. In late June we set out on a family camping trip driving across Canada and back in two weeks. We never crossed the Rockies, instead turning around when we reached the foothills. Possibly the string of depressing prairie towns had discouraged my parents in their search for a better place to live than Montreal, for all its evil undercurrents.

By July we were back at the cottage on the Ottawa River, with our extended family of aunts uncles and cousins. I was learning to waterski and doing a lot of reading. There were hot dog roasts and singing around the campfire and games of hide and seek in the dark. My American cousins were up from Detroit, and they all loved to sing.

One day at the beach I messed up badly with my cousin John, who was 16, a loveable extravert and born entertainer. My mother loved him and said he would make a wonderful husband for some lucky girl. He'd always been chubby but since I'd last seen him he'd become obese. For some reason I took it personally, as if I'd been looking forward to hooking up with him - and he'd disappointed me some unknown part of me was furious and wanted revenge. I wrote in the sand "Johnny is a fat slob" and showed him what I had written. Maybe I imagined this stupid critique would spur him to go on a diet. In any case, he cried and called me a stupid bitch and skinny little runt, and never spoke to me again. I was in shock over what I had done with no idea how to apologize so instead I went to bed and refused to get up. Two years later he enlisted and went to Viet Nam and was never the same, coming back with severe PTSD - we lived hundreds of miles apart and I never saw him after that or if I did we avoided it each other until my dad's funeral ten years later when he drove up with his younger brother and was as always the life of the party - singing and joking and cheering everyone up.

I hated myself for what I had done but couldn't talk about it, just as I lacked words to apologize to Johnny. I entered a black space for a couple of days until finally my mother asked what was wrong. I said I didn't know. I was afraid to tell her the truth. Instead I looked into my heart which seemed totally black and inhuman, beyond rescue or forgiveness.

I finally I sobbed, "I feel like my heart just turned to stone."

She had no answer to that.

 https://youtu.be/KdLRMVZ14ho