I grew up in a home for little girls. My mother was a single parent. She was abandoned by my beatnik father when I was a year old. She was pregnant and penniless. My brother was born but he died of crib death a few months later. My mother had to lie about being a divorced single mother in order to get a job. That was the 1960s.
Initially, I was put in daily care with two women in a suburb of Toronto. They took in the children of women who had fallen on hard times. This was before national daycare. At 2 years old, they convinced my mother that I would be better off with weekly care. So every Sunday my mother packed my valise, and every Friday she came on the bus to collect me. I grew to hate Sundays. I was molested, raped, sodomized, photographed and tortured by a group of pedophiles affiliated with that home for the next five to seven years.
I wasn’t the only one. There were many children who came and went. Street children. Orphans. The children of drug addicted parents. The children no one wanted or whose parents couldn’t care for them. The memories I have of them are fragmented. A first name. A cherubic face. I’ve often wondered where they are and how they’ve managed? I wonder if they remember? I worry that they’ve suffered over the years without adequate healing, validation or help. Did their parents believe their allegations of child sexual abuse and torture? Or did they struggle alone with the horrors of a violated childhood, as I did?
Of all of those children there is one face I remember well. So today’s blog is for Cindy. Wherever you are, I hope you’re well.





