I have been in motion most of my life. Not always visible motion. Sometimes it looked like stillness: marriage, work, routines, a child asleep in the next room. But inside, something was always shifting. I was looking for exits, thinking of somewhere else, fearing that the ground underneath me might not hold.

I thought this restlessness meant I was unfinished. That my sense of self was something to solve, like a puzzle whose pieces would eventually and satisfyingly click into place. Solve it, it felt, and everything else would follow: desire would make sense, love would warm, fear would loosen. I believed peace might come if I could be myself, fully and correctly. That belief carried me. It cost me, too.

This is not a story about courage or authenticity, at least not as those words are marketed. It’s about living inside the space between who you are and what the world will allow you to be, and what that does to a person.

Some of what follows may feel like secrets exposed, some fulfilling, some selfish, some maybe brave. All of it is true, no MSG added, as I understood it then. I’ve not tried to explain myself. I don’t expect forgiveness. I just want to understand what I did.

There are people in these pages who loved me deeply and were hurt in return. Others saved me without knowing it. Some disappeared, leaving only the version of myself that existed with them. There are moments I’m proud of, and others I would change if I could. But life doesn’t move that way. It only goes forward.

I didn’t always know what I was fleeing. For a long time, I didn’t even know what I was rushing toward. What I knew, viscerally, was that staying felt both self-numbing and dangerous. Moving, even when it hurt, felt safer.

I wrote this after I stopped long enough to look back. Not to relive my story, but to see the pattern underneath it. This isn’t a straight-line story. It doesn’t resolve neatly. It moves the way I did: vignettes of childhood, then fear, love, error, bad choices, survival, and eventually, something quieter.

This is how I got here.

Preamble

By the mid-1960s, adoption in Québec remained largely governed by Catholic institutions. Unwed motherhood was treated as a moral problem to be resolved quietly, and babies born to those young mothers were integrated into a system meant to restore order rather than preserve origins. Records were sealed (ostensibly never to be opened again). Names were erased. Gratitude was expected.

Infertility had its own quiet stigma. Couples who couldn’t conceive were not encouraged to speak openly of loss. Adoption was framed as a rescue: of a child, it was said, but more often of a marriage or of a family’s sense of purpose.

My parents did not ask for a healthy baby. They simply asked for a baby girl.

This is the framework into which I arrived. Not an accident; a solution. A very specific solution.

I learned early how to observe and be observed.

I remember the kitchen where my father helped me confront my nightmare, the Lémor, a monster born from my imagination. I had invented that name, trying to give an identity to the terror that haunted my dreams. Lémor and “les morts” (the dead) sound identical; I had created the perfect name for my monster.

That night, Dad approached me holding a brown paper bag to which he had glued long, scruffy strands of yarn to create hair and a beard and drawn menacing eyes and a toothy rictus with a Magic Marker. When he presented it to me, I recognized it instantly as his interpretation of the Lémor. It didn’t match the creature I had imagined, but I didn’t want to tell him that. So, I exclaimed and smiled, showering him with praise and gratitude for making my Lémor come to life. Here I was, five years old, already concerned about the emotions of my thirty-five-year-old father.

The kitchen, where Dad tamed the Lémor for me, was my favourite room in the house. In the evening, it was sometimes filled with the comforting scents of cinnamon and cloves, the staple spices of French-Canadian cooking. My mother prepared slow-cooked dishes when she could and lightning-fast meals most of the time. So, while I remember the aroma of tourtière, our French-Canadian meat pie, it could just as well have been the smell of Shake ’n Bake, equally delicious to me. In that kitchen, love and control intertwined. Mom always watched. It was where I spent my sick days off school, watching television, lying on an outdoor chaise longue wrapped in a blanket, a makeshift puke bucket/mixing bowl at my side. The kitchen was also my favourite playroom. After dinner, once everything had been tidied up, I would select one beloved toy, often my chemistry set, to play with quietly at the table.

My warm world opened a crack when my babysitter, Michelle, my friend Lilianne’s older sister, introduced me to the sounds and images of the English-speaking world through music and television. It was instantly a world I wanted to be in. Even at five or six years old, I realized that my French-Canadian culture was but one of many, and with that came the yearning to explore.

She let me watch Bridget Loves Bernie with her, and I developed my first celebrity crush on Meredith Baxter-Birney. I would drive my Hot Wheels car across the patterned kitchen carpet, imagining myself inside it, conquering the world with my girlfriend Meredith, with her long blonde hair and a smile for me.

By second grade, that desire transformed into a domestic fantasy: I dreamed of marrying my teacher, Nicole. At night, in bed, I loved playacting in the safety of my room, something I would keep until my mid-teens. I would pretend that Nicole and I were married. I didn’t fully understand what marriage meant; I only believed it involved coming home to someone who was happy to see you. In my imagination, I would open the door and say, “Hi, Nicole,” and kiss her as she cooked dinner in the kitchen. I don’t remember what she made, only that it smelled wonderful and symbolized home. Essentially, my fantasy revolved around coming home, being expected, and being loved. It wasn’t romance, not yet. It was a place of intertwined adult love and care.

My body was also entering its own narrative. I broke my wrist twice within six months. The first time, I was running down the driveway when I fell forward, fist tucked under my belly. I recall my father rushing towards me, the words TOO SLOW TOO SLOW TOO SLOW clanging in my head. At the clinic, the doctor reset my fracture and fitted it with a cast. The plaster was warm as he wrapped it around my forearm, and when I asked why, he laughed: “Because you sin a lot.” The nurses chuckled, but I didn’t understand. I suspected “sin” was something serious, maybe even fun enough to cause nurses to laugh?

The following Monday, I returned to school, proud of my cast. For a few days, I basked in the attention, like a minor celebrity. Everyone wanted to sign it and ask what had happened. I loved being special. Less than six months later, it happened again. I was a beginner cyclist, a late learner, and when I tried to catch up with my friends, I fell almost immediately, breaking that same wrist. For several hours, crying, I pleaded with my mom, “Please tell me it’s not broken!” as I looked at my grotesquely swollen arm. It was. I spent the summer in our pool with my arm wrapped in a milk bag. The cool factor quickly vanished. My mother kept both casts wrapped in tinfoil for decades, storing them in her cedar chest as if they were relics.

When babysitter Michelle was unavailable, my parents found backups. One of them was Vicki. She lived just down the street, by the bend. She used to walk past our house. She was the very picture of early seventies cool: long hair, miniskirts, and gigantic hoop earrings. I thought she was beautiful. I was delighted when I was told she would babysit me. She did, and while she was quiet, I loved her attention.

But not long after, Mom and Dad sat me down and carefully explained that Vicki had died. They spared me all details, of course, but gave me just enough that I understood that she had committed suicide in her parents’ basement. This was my first real-life encounter with death and, trying to make sense of it, it became catnip for my young, creative, and slightly morbid mind. I built a story around it and began telling it at school. My version was replete with details gleaned from my own fears. Soon, some of the kids in my rapt audience were having nightmares. Their parents complained. I was summoned to the principal’s office and instructed to never tell scary stories again. I now look back and think: thumbs up, you little creator. The truth is, I didn’t yet have language for grief, no way to explain my budding sense of loss, so I made up stories and let them carry what I couldn’t. It kept Vicki in my mind.

A little older now, I formed friendships, my very first few. One summer, my father suggested that a great toy for me would be a bunch of huge appliance boxes stacked in the backyard to make a fort. I agreed, and the thought stayed with me. It seemed like it took a long time—weeks, months, maybe even years—but one day, my dad came home from work with the car packed with folded cardboard boxes. Some were huge, freezer-sized. We laid them out in the yard, stacked them, and taped them together. Dad cut out doors, windows and passages, and poof, I was the cool kid on the block. The boys wanted to hang out. The fort became our cardboard-scented refuge. We played war. We played explorers. We played astronauts. The fort was spaceship, fortress, and kingdom. Two or three days later, the rain came. The cardboard softened. The walls sagged. The towers collapsed. We had to dismantle the fort and throw it out. Its existence had been brief, but the pleasure (and neighbourhood cred) it gave me was not. My father had accomplished what I always believed he could: he had created magic out of nothing, and for a while, it held.

My friend Martine and her brother Luc lived next door. Their parents were younger than mine, not quite hippies but almost. To my parents, that meant they were politically suspect and far too young to be taken seriously. For me, they were fascinating. Mme M., Martine and Luc’s mom, had long dark hair and wore Dr. Scholl sandals. Her husband wore turtlenecks under his suits, sometimes a large wooden pendant in the shape of a fleur-de-lys, and a beard without a moustache. Très Beatnik. 

Mme M. was a musician and had started giving music lessons in her basement to neighbourhood children. I was one of them, and I loved it. That was where I picked up my appreciation for classical music, which was just about the only music played in our house anyway. My parents referred to anything that was not classical as “jazz.” For a few years, I went through life referring to all other-than-classical music as “jazz”, including the Beatles, and no one ever called me on it.

I must have been six or seven when one day, Mme. M. asked me if I’d like to accompany her, Martine and Luc downtown for the show of a very seventies interpretive dance troupe: Les Ballets Jazz. I remember almost nothing of the performance, except maybe fleeting glimpses of pure seventies imagery: young hairy people in leotards. But what I remember clearly is that I had to pee. So badly, in fact, that it eclipsed all that existed. One of my childhood talents was the ability to convince myself of anything. If I thought something hard enough, it became a fact. One night I had imagined a crab under my bed sheet, and I was sincerely surprised and disappointed when I had finally whipped back the sheet… only to find none. But that night, I convinced myself Mme. M. would want to come to the bathroom with me to help. The thought was intolerable, so I refused myself the relief. Of course, looking back, Mme. M. would not have done that. I was past the age of asking for help or being offered it. But my mind had decided otherwise.

The evening lasted forever. The drive home took centuries. I sat in the back seat beside Martine, unmoving and barely breathing, terrified to speak. When we arrived, getting out of the car, I saw I had left a pee stain on the seat. I was mortified, but said nothing. I ran home and dashed to the bathroom. When I came out, I said hello to my parents’ evening guests. My mother put me to bed, furious that I had not greeted everyone properly before running to the toilet… Yeah, sometimes my house was like Captain von Trapp’s before Maria’s arrival.

But some self-affirming events also dotted my existence. Across the street lived an older couple. Their house was a mid-century jewel, and everything about them screamed glamour. They drank Scotch, smoked a lot, and went to Las Vegas. One evening, we were invited to their home for dinner. A new song had just come out, “Oh Babe, What Would You Say,” released in its Michel Stax French version. Our neighbours loved it. They played it again and again on their stereo console, determined that I should learn the lyrics. After some practice, they had me sing it a few times and then decided that I should look the part. They put a fedora on my head, a tie around my neck, and a fake drink in my hand. And like magic, I was a crooner. For one perfect night, I got to be Frank Sinatra/Michel Stax and was well applauded for it. Having an eye on me at home was never fun. An eye on me (not Mom’s) during a performance was incredible.

That evening was special, a quick taste of pop music (sorry… “jazz”). Music already filled my childhood. My mother loved Gregorian music, and she adored “Panis Angelicus,” a hymn in Latin which became our family’s funeral song. My father loved opera and classical music. Every night he played “Je crois l’entendre encore” from Bizet’s opera The Pearl Fishers on repeat to help me fall asleep, Nicolai Gedda’s tenor voice floating into my room from the living room record console. It is still one of my favourite pieces of music today. A great childhood favourite was Saint-Saëns’s “Danse macabre.” It was melodic and a little spooky, and that sounded just right to morbid little me.

But even though we listened to little else but classical at home, I knew something else existed in the universe. The radio revealed that to me. I remember driving home from a long trip at night, lying on the back shelf under the rear windshield, the way kids used to do, watching the highway lights streak past in the dark. On the radio, Mas Que Nada by Brazil 66. Then the Carpenters. To me, Karen Carpenter sounded like what I imagined a loving mother would sound like. The car moved steadily through the night; the music wrapped around me.

My friend Lilianne and her older sister (and my babysitter) Michelle were the two most important figures in my life during that period. They lived kitty-corner from us. Their dad was a Mad Men type, much like my father, and their mom was beautiful and sweet. Their house was magical, mostly for one reason: they lived partly in English. They watched English TV, listened to English music, and their world seemed larger than mine. 

It was Michelle who introduced me to the Beatles. They had just broken up and were still towering over the younger generation. She gave me her single of “Hello, Goodbye” on the Roulette Records label, the first Beatles record ever played in our house. I still own it. My father made fun of the song. He’d joke that the little guitar sound before “oh no” sounded like a toilet being plunged. Years later, he discovered the Beatles on his own and grew fond of them. 

Lilianne was like a precious jewel among my friends. Maybe because she was a little older, and maybe because she was patient with me. We cooked weird food together. We staged fake masses where I played the role of the priest. We camped in her backyard.

Our friendship was like a door wide open to another world.

From the ages of six to nine, I had male idols. I never had “crushes” on them. I did not want to be with them or near them. I just wanted to be them. One was my doctor. He looked as though he had stepped straight out of a soap opera: perfect hair, perfect smile, the kind of handsome face that made patients and nurses light up. One day, I told my mother that I thought he was handsome. Mistake. At my next appointment, she mentioned it to him in front of me. “You know,” she said brightly, “she thinks you’re very handsome.” I remember my confusion, the partial thought in my mind, “Mom, no! That’s not what I…”. The doctor laughed and said, “Oh, you make me blush.” I stood silent and mortified. This secret was not meant for him. I did not want to be perceived that way. I just wanted to look like him. The entire misunderstanding seemed dangerous to me. I felt betrayed without knowing why, really.

But there was a special day to be seen any way I wanted: Halloween. I don’t recall many of the costumes I picked, but I remember wanting, specifically, to be a hobo. That meant my father’s old clothes and stubble painted on my face with a burnt cork. It meant age. It meant being a boy. We would take off, first six of us, then more and more kids joining in as we moved through the neighbourhood, knocking on the doors of strangers’ homes. Our parents trailed us at a distance, watchful but discreet. For me, the candy was beside the point. What mattered was the night, the group, how my costume felt truer than my regular clothes. 

Halloween also made it clear to me that changing the way I looked changed how the world treated me. You could put on something and become closer to who you were, be it a princess, a pirate or, for me, a hobo. That discovery stayed with me, not washing away like the cork stubble. Was there something I could wear to feel true to myself, not just on Halloween night, but every day?