Mother Daughter Matching Dresses

The third, a boy named Sean, is someone that my father’s later correspondence mentions, but whose identity, otherwise, is lost in time. My eldest sister believes there may have been a dog, too. After we piled in (who had heard of a seat belt?) my father steered us across the Golden Gate Bridge and swung the car onto California Highway 101, heading north. This crazy car trip seemed normal; the only constant of our childhood was chaos.

My parents had split when I was two, in 1964. My sisters and I, with our mother, then left our home in Burnaby, B.C. We lived in La Jolla, Calif. and then Elko, Vancouver and Mamquam, B.C. My mom met a new man and we lived in Cardiff, Calif.; on to Banff; then Montreal. My two elder sisters attended seven schools in 1967-68, and twice landlords evicted us because we owned no furniture.

In the summer of 1969, having completed Grade 1 in Montreal, I had joined my mother, stepfather and two elder sisters on a trip to Banff. My mother studied ballet and my stepfather studied pottery at the Banff School of Fine Arts. Then, desperate for break from child-rearing, they sent us to our father, whom my mother believed to be living in Mendocino with his 19-year-old girlfriend, Gloria. We carried a brief note from my mother to my father, which he saved: “I hope the revolution can miss you long enough so you can spend some time with the children this summer! Write c/o Gen. Delivery Banff. We will go back to Quebec in Sept. Love Hans.” (Hans is her Dutch nickname.