Book/Blog

Autobiography 0-5: The Beginning

Born October 7, 1960 around 6:15 PM to Margret Faye Creighton and Milford Ralph Marois. Sperm donor unknown. I am not my fathers child though he willingly took responsibility for my mother and me. May 15th was my parents wedding anniversary.

I was named Cherylann Marois by my mother though the government and schools took it upon themselves to split it in two and calling me Cheryl Ann. My family always called me Cherylann and the elders still do.

How I came by my name? I am not sure what her reasoning was but she named me Cherylann after the daughter of Lana Turner. When I went to find out more about Cheryl Turner I found several interesting things:

1) Her last name was Crane not Turner
2) She stabbed her mothers boyfriend to death. The killing was ruled as justifiable homicide as it was deemed that Cheryl had been protecting her mother
3) She was sexually molested
4) She was a lesbian

Now if my mother was a fan of Lana's she would have called me Lana so I think it has to do with the stabbing of the mothers boyfriend. I wonder if she hoped that one day I would avenge her against the man who had molested her during her childhood.

We lived in a shack that my father built on the hill behind where my Aunt Lena and Grandpa Marois lived. The house was built on Rock, literally part of the Canadian Shield solid granite or something similar, It was heated by a wood stove, the bathroom was outside, there was no electricity or running water. The rooms were separated by sheets. I think it might have been 12 feet by 12 feet, maybe a bit larger

We had a garden with a pear tree in it. It was a very small garden. For my mother to have a garden of any size she would have had to bring the earth to its site. The only thing that grew well there was moss and juniper bushes. There were a few tall spindly trees too but I don't know what kind they were.

By the time I was five there were five people living in this little place. My parents, my two brothers and me. As you can imagine it was quite crowded.

I was an adventurous child. The earliest memories I have do not start until I am three but my parents told me stories of things that happened when I was little.

I got a blue boil (that's what my dad called it) on the inner part of my left leg near the knee. It was really bad and they had to take me to the hospital to have it lanced. I was about 18 months old.

I was with my mother at my Aunt Lena's house and the truant officer came around. He asked my mother why she wasn't in school and she pointed to me. She was always very young looking. I apparently was sitting on the floor beside her looking at a newspaper. I was not quite two yet.

I had just learned to crawl. In those days my parents used a 2 x 4 to hold up the clothes line. My mom and dad both said that I climbed up that board to the wire a few times.

Shortly after I began to toddle I was at my Aunt Bernice and Uncle Louis house. They had this old cupboard. It was like a dresser base with a smaller thinner cupboard on top, (think hutch). I had decided that I just had to have the margarine which was up near the top of the hutch part. I somehow manage to climb up to it and by the time they found me I had eaten quite a bit of the margarine.

They also tell of a pair of hounds who appointed themselves my babysitters in my younger years. They used to talk about how Queeny and Prince would herd me back to the yard when I tried to walk down the drive way.

My mom always called me high-strung. I decided to look up that term one day and this is what I found: "High strung" describes a person who is nervous and "touchy"; quick to take offense or over-react, highly excitable, edgy. I do not know if this is a true description of me or just a way for my mother to come to terms with a difficult daughter

These are things I remember: Playing with my cousin Janet on the rocks in front of our house. Visiting my Aunt Lena, even eating with her and her family on a regular basis. A dream that seemed all too real and a reality I wish I could pretend was a dream.

    A dream that seemed very real: I was not very old maybe four. I had just started Sunday school I think so my mind was full of images from the stories they had read us. I went for a walk into the juniper fields that grew beside our house. It was all juniper, moss and granite. I wasn't very tall because the junipers were like a forest to me. I came to an space that was only stone and moss. There was a man there holding a shepherds crook and wearing a long white dress thing. There were also a half dozen sheep there. The sheep were eating the moss and the junipers. He knew my name this man and he asked me to walk with him. As we walked he told me I had something to do in this world, something with the potential to be great. Then he proceeded to tell me what it was and how I would come to it. When I left he was sitting on the stone watching the sheep. I forgot his words and kept only the sense that there was something I had to do.

    A reality I wish was a dream: I am about three years old. I am wearing a dress given to me by one of my cousins. I am sitting in the back seat of a fixer upper my dad is working on and I am not alone. A cousin is with me. He tells me to pull up my dress and pull down my panties. Then he touches me there, in the place where the pee comes out. I do not protest. I think I do not even realize that it is bad until my mother comes and sees me like that. She is so angry! She seems very angry at both of us but more with him then with me. That's good, I don't like it when she yells at me the way she is yelling at him. She tells him to go home and not to come back until he has learned to behave better. I remember watching him from the driveway as he ran home across the rocks. I don't know what mom said or did to me about that but I do remember that that was when she began to withdraw from me to get cold as if she had stopped loving me.

In July of 1963 my brother John was born. I have a picture that was taken of me the day he was first introduced to me. I wear a very puzzled look like I'm trying to figure out what he is and why he is here in my house.

In December of 1964 my brother Frank was born. I have no picture of that but I think I was probably not that happy about either of them.

In September 1965 I began school. I was one month shy of my 5th birthday and made me the youngest person in the school. The school was a two room school house total student body probably not more than 30 kids. It meant that we got a lot of help. I was reading by the end of that school year, I mean really reading not just the pretend stuff I had been doing at home. I was actually ready to read chapter books. I was also doing basic math.

In May of 1966 I watched my first ballet. I went to school the next day and got lost in a day dream. It was recess and I was dancing in the shadows of the trees at the front of the school yard trying to duplicate the movements of the dancers I had seen the night before. I was so caught up in my daydream that I did not hear the bell ring. When I came out of my day dream the whole school was there laughing and clapping for me. I liked that feeling and it was the beginning of a live long love/hate relationship with dance.

I say love/hate because that memory got twisted and was twisted for a long long time. In June  1966 just 4 days before school was to end for the summer I got sick with the chicken pox. I got it really bad. High fevers and stuff.I still carry scars on my forehead from it.  I missed getting a perfect attendance award because of those dang chicken pox. I also lost my joy in dance for decades. The fever dreams twisted the laughter into mocking and the cheers became jeers. It became a nightmare instead of the beautiful memory it should have been.

It took a chance remark by a counselor I was seeing for me to go back and explore that image and dig down through the fever dreams to the real image. It also took nearly a year to bring the real image to the surface through various means including writing and drawing.

After I got better Mom sent me to visit some relatives of ours down near Trenton. My guess is because she did not want to deal with a very upset child which I would have become because of what happened next.

I had been at my cousins for nearly two weeks and I was looking forward to going home when I got a letter in the mail. It was from my mom telling me I had to stay where I was for a little while longer because our house had burned down. She had done it deliberately but that did not click until I was much older and she had to explain it to me. Simple really. Stoke the wood stove as hot as it would go then take the kids to the beach. By the time you get back your little wooden house is nothing but cinders and ash.

I understood her reasons easily enough, she had four children and two adults in what was basically a one room shack and she didn't want to raise us in the kind of privation. The upshot was she and the others stayed with relatives near Buckhorn while I spent my summer getting to know some of my cousins in the Trenton area and in Bancroft.

In September of 1966 we were living in a three bedroom farmhouse. It had no indoor plumbing but did have electricity. It also had a barn, a chicken coop and a big work-shed for Dad. It was surrounded on all sides by fields. The water was in a well down a small hill and the outhouse just a 100 yards from the house. I began a new school. It was even smaller than the one in Buckhorn being only one room with one teacher. It was heated by a round bellied wood stove. It was the first time I ever had to take a bus to school. I actually thought taking the bus was fun that year. The buss picked up me and members of the two nearest families. We became friends but I did not spend much time with them I had to be home to help with chores.

To be continued....