My first post on this blog, 5 Going on 35, shares the story of being hit by a car at the age of five and how the family story of that event had a greater impact on me than the accident itself.
In my Grade One class, the teacher asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. We wrote our answers on a piece of paper, folded it, and tossed them into a hat that was passed around the classroom. Our teacher collected and sorted the answers, then created a bar chart of the aggregated replies.
The most popular aspiration was fireman. The usual ones followed: doctor, policeman, teacher, and so on. The bars on her chart descended in height, and at the far right of the chart, with a little bar representing n=1, was my answer: orchestra conductor. Yeah, I got plenty teased about that for the rest of the school year.
But it makes sense to me now and dovetails into the story that I chose to start this blog. In July 2023, I had an epiphany about how the narrative surrounding me being the survivor of a car accident shaped my worldview and my sense of place in the world. Spoiler alert: I adopted the notion that I was ‘saved for a purpose’.
My parents loved Arthur Fiedler and The Boston Pops, a popular conductor and orchestra featured often on television in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s. In Canada, we got a couple of American stations on cable TV., and the Boston Pops had a regular show on Sunday afternoons.
What on Earth made me answer “orchestra conductor”? Well, it makes perfect sense now. There are two important attributes of performing such a role. First, I would be seen by everyone. When I was hit by that car, I was alone on the street, unsupervised. I knew this because my Mom often lamented that she ought to have been keeping an eye on me on that day. She felt a tremendous amount of guilt. Second, I would be in charge of what people were doing. A classic case of needing to be in control of everyone in my sphere, a very strong and natural response to early childhood trauma.
When I discovered the effect of alcohol, it was a “Where have you been all my life?” kind of moment, because I was relieved of the burden of needing to be in control. Right from the very first time I drank, I could not control how much I drank or when I stopped—and I didn’t want to.
The Peace of Wild Things 