Please keep in mind this was written a long time ago and is not well done.
My name is Robin Shaw. I am a 27 year old mother of a great son. I have a wonderful boyfriend that I met when I was 18 and he is a great father but is this really me, is that all I am. I feel like there should be more to my story after everything I have been through.
So this is where telling my story comes in. I feel like I could help people out there that feel like their life's are at rock bottom. Those people who have lost all hope and think things will never change. I am aware there are thousands of stories just like mine. I am aware that the chances of someone who really needs to read this actually reading it but I am going to write it anyway in the hope that maybe that one person that really needs to read my story will.
Where do you start a story about yourself? Honestly, I really do not know so I am going to start from the beginning. By beginning I mean my first ever memory. That way you can see that no matter how bad things are you always have at least that one great memory to hold on to.
My first ever memory is of learning how to ice skate. I would have been about two years old and we lived in Airdrie, Alberta, Canada. There was this big pond in the fields behind our apartment building that had frozen solid. Many families were out there skating on the ice. I remember sitting in the snow while my mom put on my double-bladed skates. My older brother Anthony and my sister Dawn were already on the ice with my dad. My younger brother John was just a new baby and my mom kept him in a stroller. I remember my dad coming and taking my hand and showing me how to stand up and explaining how skating worked while my sister Dawn kept close to him listening intently.
That is it. I know right? Such a small memory but it means so much to me that I shared it with you.
We did not stay in Alberta. I was just a kid and never really knew why we moved away but we did. Back to British Columbia. I was born on Vancouver Island to a small group of towns called the Comox Valley. It is a great place to live with lots to offer a small town family. I do not remember much about where we stayed at first but eventually when I was 4 we moved to Backroad in Courtenay. We moved into some shabby townhouse or complex type, neighborhood.
All us kids in the area got to know each other pretty quickly. It was not long before we were all friends. My sister, Dawn was 6 years old and the most friendly, not shy girl there ever was. She dragged me everywhere she went. There were some girls who lived a few doors down from us. There was Jane who was a year older than Dawn and Leila who was the same age as my older brother Anthony, 12. We all became friends.
Now Dawn could be a bit of a trouble maker and like I said she dragged me everywhere. I remember sneaking into the storage rooms where people had things stored behind metal caged doors. We either found one that was open or Dawn got crafty and broke in. Either way, we ended up stealing a few things. I cannot remember much else about that day but a small wooden birdcage sticks in my head for some reason. Anyway, my sister took an empty box out of this room and decided I was going to be a crash test dummy. She took my brother's baby stroller and but the box on top of the sun visor. Then she convinced me to get in the box. In my defense, I was only four so yes I got in the box. She and Jane then proceeded to push the stroller down a small hill. It only took about a second for the box and me to fall off the stroller. My mother, of course, heard my screams and gave Dawn trouble for hurting her little sister.
I didn't mind though I loved my sister and wanted to be just like her. Every night before I fell asleep she would sing to me. We had bunk beds and she loved to sing anything, but the song I remember the most was 'Part of your world' from the Little Mermaid movie. She could hit those notes perfect. My parents took us fishing at the local Comox Lake often. We loved it there. My sister built this little fireplace out of rocks while we were fishing. It was way out on some bedrock that is only visible where the water level lowers in the summer. So most of the year the fireplace is underwater. We spent a lot of happy memories there just being a happy family. My sister even learned how to water ski with my Grandfather. We had a normal, happy life.
Ok now that I have those happy memories to hold onto in my story, you can see, that like most people's life's, my life was not all bad. In fact, at this point in my life, I was a very happy 4-year-old girl.
I never mentioned all the people who lived in that complex. Living in apartment next to us was a 16-year-old boy, who lived with his mother. He used to come outside and play with my sister and me. We never thought anything weird about him. Just another kid to us. Unfortunately, he was not just another kid. His name was Jason.
The night that Jason ruined my family's life's is one that no matter how hard I have tried I cannot get out of my head. It seemed like any other day we played outside and came in to eat fried spaghetti for dinner. My mom was out and we were home with my dad. My dad decided it was time for me to stay inside but allowed Dawn to go back out to play with her friends. This is where not many people really know what happened.
My mother came home and called to Anthony and Dawn to come inside but Dawn never came or answered. It was not long before a search party was sent out and police were called. They gave my youngest brother John to another neighbor then the police took Anthony and me to Jason, they asked him to watch over us while they searched for my sister. I remember sitting in his apartment, on his pull out couch, watching TV. After a short search, my sister was found. Dawn was found. She was dead. She was murdered. I am not going to get into any details of her death with anyone because it is just too hard to even write. After the body was discovered they arrested my father. My dad was not even yet aware his daughter was dead. The police arrested him for her murder and he did not even know she was dead! My mother was in shambles. My father had been turned into a broken man.
It did not take long to realize my dad was not guilty but the damage had already been done. My mother has told me a lot of things about how she felt during the days that they searched for her killer but that is her story to tell, not mine. It took me a long period to understand that Dawn was dead and what that meant. I remember not understanding why my parents cried when I asked where she was. I remember the broken look on my brother Anthony's face every time he tried to explain to me that she was gone forever and I remember the moment where I realized she was really gone.
It was at her funeral. Hundreds of people I have never met or ever seen before just appeared out of nowhere, telling me how bad they felt for me and calling me that poor little girl who lost her sister. I kept trying to understand what was happening and I just kept getting more confused. At one point all my family sat in a row of chairs in front of a crowd of people standing around crying. At one end of the row, someone was holding a fancy jar. They handed the jar down the row and my whole family was in tears. When the jar got to me, my mom held it over me and passed it to my dad. I remember looking at that jar like it had some power to make people cry. Then it happened, my mom said to me, "that's Dawn in there," that was the clinching moment for me that I realized Dawn was really gone.
The next few months they investigated and found Jason guilty of her death. Her killer, a repeat sexual offender who had been convicted previously of two sexual assaults on young children. He was convicted just a few towns over in 1991. He moved to Courtenay and was attending court-ordered sex offender therapy through the John Howard Society. The same 16-year-old that played with us outside, the same one the police let watch us that night. He had crimes of sexually offending children in the past but he lived in my complex with all us kids. He played with us kids. I still do not understand why police gave me and my brother to him to babysit right after he had killed my sister. It should never have happened and thanks to new ways of doing things, hopefully, it will never happen again.
It took close to two years before the trial came. I remember staying with my grandma while my parents were away at trial. She would tell me that when the news was on I had to leave the room, but sometimes I peaked. I watched them show clips of Jason admitting to what he did, clips of him standing with a man and explaining how he killed my sister. The trial lasted a few months I think. It felt like a few months for me anyway.
On my 6th birthday. The trial was still going on and my parents needed to be there, so they brought me with them for a few days. I remember my wonderful parents trying as hard as they could for my birthday not to be about Dawns trial. We went to the museum and some pretty gardens, but I still knew why I was there. How could I not with reporters chasing us down the road. I am pretty sure I even jumped into a bush to get away from them once.
After Jason was sent to prison it took years for my family to get even a quarter of our life's back. Every person that seen us knew who we were. We were that family whose daughter and sister was murdered by the neighbor. Every school I went to, every new person I met. Your sister was that one who was killed right? I do not even want to imagine what it was like for my parents and Anthony.
Before my sister died my mom was trying to finish her high school through the college. She never went back. The college planted a tree in Dawns memory. It is still there to this day. They built a park in her memory and then another one. People acted like they knew her even when they didn't. I few years went by and people stopped talking about it so much. I got less of the 'your that girl' remarks.
Then Jason killed himself and even in his death he had somehow turned my life around again. I went to school and kids ran up to me with newspapers they had brought from home that had headlines all over them about how he had hung himself with a bathroom towel.
Then it started again. The 'you are that girl, from that family' comments. My parents were also having trouble settling down in one place, we moved to a new home, and I started a new school, so many times I lost count. My parents lost friends and gained more children. In 1995 they had Jeffery. In 1998 we moved to Cumberland and they had Barry. Cumberland was great. It was such a tiny little town. For once the stories didn't follow me. For once I could walk down the halls without being pointed out as 'that girl'. I felt like I had a new start. A place to be known for being Robin.
Just to be clear this is not the end of my story, more like the beginning.
My life in Cumberland started off like any new life in a new town surrounded by new people. Things seemed weird, it seemed people did things differently there than other places I had lived. I was 10 years old when I moved there and the first thing I took in was the smallness of the town. For obvious reasons, I had been pretty sheltered since my sister died. Not allowed to leave the front yard kind of sheltered. So my parents finally became a little more laid back about allowing me to explore this tiny village. I took my brothers bike and went for a ride to the local park.
This is where I had my first encounter with a stranger. He was a boy, about fourteen and he was standing near a slide when I first noticed him. I got off my bike and was looking down a big hill into the baseball field below when he just walked up to me. I looked at him and said hello. He looked back at me and said "bitch please" and then proceeded to smack me across the face. I was stunned. I grabbed my bike with tears in my eyes and went home. I was so confused and upset about what happened I got a little lost.
Eventually, I had some crazy luck. My brother John, who was about 8, was outside my house standing on my small shed roof. I was so overcome with happiness about finding my house that I was nice to my brother and did not even rat him out for being up there. I told John about what happened at the park but I never mentioned it to my parents because I knew they would worry so much I would never go anywhere again.
When I was 12 and it was the year 2000, my brother Stephen was born. He was my parents, last child. When he was born I was in grade 6. I was already smoking cigarettes. I had my first one at Jane's house. Her friends gave it to me when she left the room. It was not long before I was smoking every day. I stole smokes from my parents or picked butts off the ground.
As the years went by in Cumberland I slowly gained weight and developed bad acne. I also wore glasses and had braces already. The whole dork set. I was very unpopular and found myself hanging out with the wrong kind of kids before I was even in junior high. Kids that would convince me to sneak out in the middle of the night and steal pot and smokes off their parents. I did end up getting one best friend around this age. Her name was May she was 3 years younger than me. Her mother was divorced with a drug and alcohol problem, she also had an older brother named Fred who had many problems himself. Her father lived a few towns over and was suffering from cancer so May was a very upset, angry, girl.
There was one night at Mays house when her brother was not around. We went to his room to play his Sega. While we were in his room we found mushrooms in a baggy under his pillow. I remember us being very confused about why someone would keep a bag of food under their pillow. We just put them back. As we played the game we smoked some of his cigarettes until we got caught by her mom. She was already drunk or high so we could hardly understand her as she started crying, telling us we were going to ruin our lives. We promised we would never do it again.
May and I spent every day together. I am not going to lie to anyone. I did not treat her the greatest. I had a lot of anger problems and always seemed to lash out at her. I do not know why but May put up with me. It wasn't long before we met some other girls who had troubled life's like us. First there was Leslie, she was 1 year younger than me and had just lost her dad recently to suicide, her mom had remarried and just moved her to town.
Then there was Marie, she was the same age as me, she had divorced parents but lived with her dad, older sister, and younger brother. Her dad was disabled because he had suffered from a stroke before I met her.
So there we were. My three best friends and me. Most kids our age would have been thinking about makeup and girl guides we were thinking about drug use and alcohol. The first time I got drunk, it was Marie's older sisters idea, her name was Jen. May had stolen some money from her mother's wallet and Jen told us she could get us some alcohol. So we gave her the money and she came back with a 2'6 of vodka and an empty plastic bottle. She insisted that for buying it, she was entitled to half of it. Turned out she had already drunken half the bottle, our half was watered down but I was 15 and did not even notice. We met up with some boys who took advantage of us while we were passed out. One of them helped carry me home to Marie's house. After he helped me home, he and May had sex in some bushes nearby. He was 14 and she was 11. The next day May explained to me and Marie what happened. We were all very childish and girly about it. The boy found out that May told us and tracked her down. He beat her up on the street with a skateboard, in front of all his friends, calling her a whore. May was never the same.
My unpopularity grew into seemingly being hated by everyone my age. I rarely left the house during the day due to my fear of the other kids in town. They had started to chase me down throwing rocks, tried to beat me up and just totally humiliated me at every chance they could get, they even harassed my brothers and my mother. I was treated so bad in school I could hardly handle it. Same old story, I was a dork who did not fit in and felt like everyone hated me. They gave me nicknames of course. I was Zitfarm, Fugly and Troll.
The only difference I would say is going to school in a place like Cumberland was not the same as going to any other school. The schools were small and the town only had a population of about 3000 people. You could walk from one end of town to the other in 20 minutes. The group of kids that hated me were not just normal mean kids some of them were violent, drug abusing, mean kids, that there was no way to avoid. These kids were almost gang like in how they walked around town in groups of 30 of more kids picking on people.
I became so scared of being beaten up I started homeschooling.
I stayed the night at Marie's house a lot, May usually stayed too. At first, we would just sneak out her window to go steal weed and cider from Mays mom. Then we started breaking into cars. In the beginning to steal smokes. Then we found money in cars and it became like a game to us. How much can we steal in a night. All of a sudden I had new clothes, CD players and a bunch of money to spend on more alcohol.
I got really drunk one night and broke into a van. I was caught by the owner and he must have been a really nice man because he let me go with a warning after a made some excuse about being lost and thinking it was my mother's van. I do not really remember thinking about my actions affecting others at this point in my life. I did not even feel guilty for what I was doing. I just thought I was lucky to get away with it. I thought it was just all in good fun and didn't see any point in stopping. That guilt came later and all these things I had done caught up with me.
My Life was very to sided. When I wasn't with my friends I was at home in my bedroom. My bedroom was like my whole world when I was at home. It's not so much that I had bad family problems but more like I just could not handle the crowd. I had 5 brothers in my house and the all-powerful parents. Who I carefully hid my problems from. I just hid in my room all day, I spent a lot of free moments writing poetry or singing made up songs.
I remember the day I decided to make my walls a giant college of random things I liked. I had pictures from magazines of artists I was interested in. Good Charlotte, Green Day, Shania Twain and The Backstreet Boys. When I think back on those pictures now, I realize I was a strange girl. I think I was very confused about who I was and what I wanted people to think of me. I had every corner covered with these pictures, colored pages from flowered coloring books, pictures of pot leafs and smiley faced mushrooms. I loved my room, it was like my safe place.
At this point in my life, the actions of my bullies started to get worse.
It got really out of hand when a movie about people doing pranks, stupid tricks, stunts and performing bad jokes came out in theaters. I am not going to name it here but it made more than half these teens in town decide that caring around a big heavy camera while bullying other people would be fun. Anyway some of them did it only in good fun. Then others took it to the extreme by wanting to videotape the beating of me and my friends. When those 20 kids came running after May and me, my only thought was to get away. Unfortunately, she did not. They all pushed her to the ground and kicked her while calling her names and spitting in her face. They taped the whole thing and she was the joke of the town forever after that.
I few weeks later we were all just hanging out smoking pot when Marie's sister Jen told us you could get high on prescription pills. She herself had already overdosed and suffered from an eating disorder. Which I was unaware of. We sent May to her moms to steal some pills. I still to this day have no clue what they were she stole. We ate about 4 or 5 each. I got really high for the first time. I ran away from my friends with Mays house keys which also had a copy of her mother's truck keys on them.
I attempted to steal her mother's truck. I had never driven a vehicle before so was actually kind of lucky when I crashed it into her fence trying to back out of the driveway. I jumped from the truck and left the engine on with the keys in the ignition and ran away. I was so high on drugs I felt like my mind had become like a train on a track. I could only think of stealing another car. I continued around town alone breaking into cars looking for one I could try to steal.
I was on the other side of town when I found this ugly red van. It had the keys inside and my criminal mind thought it was a perfect opportunity. I started it up and moved forward. I got about a foot and smashed into a big hedge. All of a sudden the van door flew open and a man with a baseball bat screamed at me to get out of the van. Once again the fact that I was young or a girl, must have made some difference because the man let me go. He told me to run before he phoned the police. I did, I ran so fast back to Marie's house I thought my lungs would burst.
When I got back May was passed out, we could not wake her up. We freaked out and tried to shake her awake but nothing worked. We were so young we did not even think about what an overdose was. Luckily May was ok, she woke up the next morning angry with me about her mother's truck. Her brother was blamed for it and he was really mad at her. Sometimes when he was really angry he would smack May and call her names. So I felt terrible.
A few days later we hitched to the next town over with the intentions of going to see my old friend Jane. I thought of her as family but at this point in my life, she was keeping me at a distance because of her own life problems. I had not talked to her in a while and wanted to see how she was. Anyway, she was not at home or at least ignored my knock.
So my criminal mind took over again and I decided breaking into the neighbor's house was a good idea. In broad daylight, I knocked on the front door. No one answered, so I went around back and just walked in the other door. We stole lots of things. Jane had a shopping cart near her house that we stole and used as our getaway stroller. We also stole baggies full of prescription medication, which we were eating by handfuls.
As we were running away with our shopping cart we decided that pushing it around would surely get us caught and that really all we wanted was the pills. So we ditched the cart and went to find some friends. Most of the night is a big blur to me. I think we found some friends who were nice enough to, at least, try and take the pills away from us but the damage had already been done. All I can remember after that is blurred moments. I remember running. I was alone. Then I stopped and sat down on the sidewalk. I do not know how long I sat there but all I could think about was how much I hated the world. How I wanted to just watch it all burn. I think back on it now and it was almost the lowest I have ever been. I broke into a car nearby and looked for water to take more pills. I did not understand that the pills could kill me but I did feel like I wanted to die. I found a knife in the car and tried to cut my arms with it. I barely scratched myself before blacking out.
Then I woke up to a police officer putting me in a car. I fell over in the backseat. It was later mentioned to me that pills fell out of my pocket and that the officer saved my life by bringing me to a hospital instead of a drunk tank. I woke up on a gurney as they wheeled me through the doors. I blacked out again until I heard my mother's voice outside the curtian around the bed I was in.
I was still in a horrible state of mind and decided that my parents had caused all the problems in my life. I said things to them I can never take back. I yelled at them that I wanted to die and it was all their fault. I was also rude to the nurses and doctors that were only there to help me. It is something I feel terrible about even to this day. I lied to the nurse when asked if I drank all the charcoal they had given me but really I just hid it under my bed. They gave me a needle and I would not stay still. So it broke. I think I even insulted one lady by saying she smelled bad.
My parents had called Marie and Mays family, so both friends were getting treatment. It turns out I had eaten Tylenol 3 and some estrogen raising medication. Strange mix I know, but when you are in this state of mind you do not even look at what a bottle says. I must have eaten at least 300 pills. I blacked out again after yelling at my parents and do not remember waking up until morning. When I did my entire body hurt. Not only did I almost die from taking the pills but the medicine they used to help me I was allergic to. I was lucky to be alive and I did not even care. My face was so swollen and itchy I could hardly stand it.
My mother was lying in a cot by my side. She had never left me. I think all the time about what I had put her through that night. It is something I could never just say sorry for. My mom told me it was Easter. In my drug haze, I had not even realized it was Easter. I had ruined Easter for everyone.
When I got home from the hospital my family tried to be helpful. They tried convincing me I had things to be happy about. My younger brother Jeffery ran up to me and asked me if I was ok. He asked me why I took so many pills and I just felt like my heart broke. I had no clue what to tell him. He was only a kid. I just told him I didn't mean to and went to my room.
I was still really messed up from all I had been through with the hospital and I tried to run away again almost immediately. My brother Anthony forced me to stay inside for my own safety. Even though I hit him and screamed, he still tried to help me. Later that night I broke down again. I realized the mess I had put myself in and I felt like no one would ever look at me the same or forgive me for the things I did. I snuck out of the house in the middle of the night with the intention of killing myself. I brought a knife and I wrote a note. I walked around town for a while before deciding on an empty alley.
I am not even sure what it I was thinking. I guess I wasn't really thinking anything. More just feeling. Feeling like everything in my life was pointless. Feeling like I had no hope that things would change. Feeling like no one cared about me and no one would even notice I was gone.
I remember trying to pull that knife out of my backpack with its broken zipper getting caught annoyingly as I tried to unzip it. Then the anger that overwhelmed me as I pried it open, then the fear and sadness as I pulled out that knife. I was just about to cut myself when I heard a dog barking in the house on one side of the alley. A porch light turned on, in the fear of being caught I dropped the knife and ran away. I was about a block away when I just stopped running. I sat on the side of the road and I just cried.
I was there for a long time. I would like to tell you I had some kind of revelation about my life that made me a better person or that someone came along and gave me some great life lesson in 5 minutes but the real world does not work that way and it was a much harder journey than just that. I did, however, realise as I sat there thinking about how much my life sucked that I had no right to complain. There were people out there dying to stay alive. My sister died. Maybe she should have lived and I should have been the one that died if I was just going to kill myself anyway. I was in no place to complain. I convinced myself that I was not going to allow myself to be controlled by other people's life's. I went home that night feeling ashamed with myself and determined to change into something I liked better.
Of course, I was only 15 so my version of a better me was a prettier, more popular me, a more fun and not sad me. So I started to dress slutty, party harder, Stay out later and continue with my criminal activities. I became 'that girl that overdosed'. I hated it I was 'that girl' again.
May got moved into foster care right after this and I felt like it was my fault. So when she could get away from her foster mom for a while we always tried to get drunk or high. One day May, Marie and I decided to hitchhike down to the lake to see if we could find some boys, instead we ended up breaking into the cabins that stretched along the lakeside. We stole mostly alcohol but also some marijuana. We stuffed it all into a stolen basket and called Mays foster mom for a ride.
We but a towel over the basket and when she arrived we sat in the back seat of her van. She didn't notice or say anything to us about the basket, I guess she just assumed we were carrying swimming stuff. She dropped us off at home and we went and got drunk. We found out a few weeks later that one of the cabins belonged to the principal of the junior school. The one we stole the marijuana from.
I continued to break into cars for months after that and I dropped out of school for good. My mom tried everything to get me to do my work but I would just call her names and run away or jump out my window.
Things did not get better until they got worse and even then the real better was still far away. I had so much learning and growing at this point before I could really admit that my own self confidence was the problem in my life and not what those people called me or what they thought about me. The problem was not that my sister died and it was not my parents fault. My problem was a lack of self-love. I had no confidence and no hope for my future. I was the only one that could fix my problems and it took a lot more troubles to really get me trying.
I tried to run away from home once. I ripped down all the photos on my walls. Every last magazine picture and coloring page. I tried to jump out my window but was too scared to jump. I got caught just hanging there from the window by my brother Anthony. He laughed as he helped me down. Then made me go clean up my mess.
Throughout my story, I mentioned I also had a friend named Leslie she was not really part of my criminal life or the drug part. She was more like a friend that I just talked too or would go out to pick up guys with. I was a virgin and painfully shy. Leslie was a pretty, outspoken girl who just had men throwing themselves at her. Her mother had also remarried after her dad's suicide to a man from the US. So they spent a lot of months traveling back and forth so was not always around but when she was we would always become really close, almost as if she had never left. She had a tough life, her close relatives were known drug addicts in town and so she had a bad family reputation that followed her around. Not to mention the after effects of losing her father still weighed heavily on her.
Even with all her problems I was always jealous of her. I felt like she could get anything she wanted in life for being so pretty she always got the guys and never seemed to even try or care. We spent most of our time together separately from my other friends. She did not like May and Marie very much. When I think back on it now she really was a good influence on me. She didn't smoke pot much and was not the party type.
We would do normal kid things, like go swimming or hang out with boys. Pretend like we knew how to skateboard to get attention or hang out with her cousins and just drive around. It was nice being a normal kid sometimes. At one point or another May had told me a secret about how she had slept with Leslie's boyfriend. It put me in a really hard place but I made the decision one day to tell her. After that, her hate towards my other friends became pretty strong and it became harder for us to spend time together.
One day Leslie let me in on a secret of her own. She said that her cousins husband had been touching her when she would come over to babysit. I was very shocked. I could not just sit by and let her do nothing about it, so I told my mom. Then my mom called Leslies parents. Leslie was a little mad at me but I knew I did the right thing. After that, Leslie was not seen much for a while.
When I was just about 16, May, Marie and I hitchhiked to the next town over to go to the local Big-box-store and steal chocolate. Something we did all the time. May would run inside and grab some chocolate that they always kept next to the front door, then just walk out. She never got caught. After stealing our chocolate that day we were walking down the train tracks and it began to rain heavily.
We started to wish we had money to get home so we decided to try to pawn our stolen CD player. The pawn shop was just down the road from where we were, so we ran in the rain in the hope that it was open. It was. We went inside and because I was the oldest I figured I would try to pawn it. I went up to the counter and told the woman what I wanted to do. She said she would look at it and typed some stuff into the computer in front of her while examining it. A few minutes later she asked all of us to move to the other side of the counter. We figured she just wanted us to sit down and then she said: "You are now on camera, the door is locked and the police are on their way."
My mind was so everywhere that the only thought or feeling I can remember is fear. The police came and I lied, I told them I found the CD player in the back alley behind Mays house. They took us in for questioning anyway. We arrived at the police station and the first thing I saw when I walked in the door was one of the boys that bullied me. He looked at me and smiled. The police took us into separate rooms to wait for our parents. The room they put me in must have been for children because it was full of toys and teddy bears. Before my parents got there, they took me into a room and asked me to make a statement on a piece of paper. I refused. My parents arrived some time later and were of course not happy.
I felt ashamed of myself but continued to try to lie my way out of it all. I still refused to make a statement and apparently so did May.
When I think about these moments now all that comes to mind is, what was I thinking? Really, how could I be so dumb. What I put my family through by my actions is just not acceptable by any means. Here were my parents, they had 6 kids to worry about and they had already been through so much with losing my sister. Here I was not caring about anyone but myself and not even seeing the stress I was causing anyone.
A few hours went by in that police station before finally the police came over said that Marie had told them everything. She had confessed to them the CD player came from someone's car and that we broke into the cabins at the lake, the house with the pills next to Jane's. Everything. In her defense, they had already convinced her that we came clean first. They sent us all home with are parents that day and with a promise of charges in the future.
When I got back to Cumberland my parents tried to contain me but again I fled. The first person I had seen called me a thief and I realized everyone already knew. I thought I was unpopular before it was nothing compared to this. They wrote an article in the newspaper about what we did but left out our names. The author called us Hard-core Cumberland girls and the nickname stuck. Soon that's what we were known as. Most people didn't want us around their kids so the chances of us breaking out of the rut we had got in was slim. Once again I was 'that girl'.
I did not try to kill myself again but instead turned to drugs. I began taking ecstasy. Only a bit at first with a friend I had met outside of Cumberland. My mom Had set me up in an alternate school for troubled teens. Marie also went there so we were always out taking breaks or drinking coffee. Never got very much work done there. May had been sent to a new foster home in Courtenay and had already been doing harder drugs for a while. Mostly Ecstasy. She cared too much about me to let me try it. So I went out and got it for myself. I was instantly addicted. One day when I was high and I wanted some weed to go with it, I called Leslie and asked if she could get some from her family to sell me. She asked me if I was with May and I told her I was. I wish to this day I had lied to her.
When Leslie showed up she had a boy in the backseat and her female cousin was driving. They said they needed to go pick it up first and asked May to get in the truck to come and pick it up. They were gone for at least 2 hours before I just left and went home. May called me later, crying and explained to me what happened. Leslie had made her strip naked in front of the boy, she hit her in the face then took her to the place in town where the group of teenagers always hung out. She made May get out of the truck naked in front of everyone. When she was done humiliating her she took her home and left her outside her house in her underwear. May never did anything about it.
I few weeks later I was charged with two counts of theft under 5000 and two counts of break and enter with one added count of possession of stolen property. My friends got charged also but it was much less extreme than mine. I was terrified I was going to go to jail. I was also finally very ashamed of my actions. I hate that it took getting caught for me to finally stop being a thief. When I think back on the things I stole I feel horrible about myself all over again. Once I stole a teddy bear from a girls birthday bag. Like who does that.
I was put on a probation order and was legally not allowed to see May or Marie anymore. I was also given a curfew of 9 pm so I spent the next few months locked up in my room trying not to get in any trouble. I convinced myself that I needed to change. I was very lucky when all the charges were dropped. I never stole another thing again. Things were finally seeming to be getting back on track.
Then May disappeared. It was an entire week before anyone found her. It turned out that she had met up with some strange guys and they decided to take her on a ferry to the mainland. She had spent the week doing cocaine and sleeping on a beach. She was 13.
During her absence, her father had died from cancer he had been suffering from. May was so broken that she had not been there for him. All she wanted to do was drugs. I let her drag me into her world and started doing ecstasy on a daily base. Before long I looked as horrible as I felt. May started to take off with random men for days so I spent most of my time with Marie. She did the drugs sometimes but suffered from a lot of her own problems. I do not think she ever got addicted to the drugs like we did. I think it was always more of a social thing for her.
We started trying to meet guys since we were both still virgins but felt like we had done everything else. Marie ended up dating a nice guy we knew and I hooked up with his best friend. I say hooked up because it was totally meaningless sex, never a relationship, or romance of any kind and I regretted it so much after. The guy treated me like crap. After we hooked up he called me names in front of his friends, swore at me and rudely asked me to leave when I entered a room. It made me feel horrible about myself.
A few weeks later I was hitchhiking home one night and a man picked me up. He offered me some beer and took me down to the lake. He then proceeded to ask me if I wanted to make out. I was only 16 and he was a grown man but I was feeling so rejected and depressed about myself I was just happy someone was being nice to me. We fooled around a bit and things started to get a little out of hand. I asked him if he had a condom and his face all of a sudden changed to anger. He yelled at me and asked why I didn't mention that before. He was so angry I didn't know what to do. I was worried that if I asked him to just take me home he might just rape me. I didn't want to be raped. I convinced him to calm down and in my fear I said he could take me back to his place if he had a condom there.
When we were done he dropped me off at home. I sat in my room and cried. I decided again that I hated myself. How could I let him make me do that? How could I have let him have control?
I started to drink a lot more at this point, I moved on to a few more men that took advantage of me while drunk. None worth mentioning. My drug problem got worse and I started feeling alone. May had become a total crack head and I rarely seen her anymore. Marie was always with her boyfriend and his asshole best friend. So I was left spending my time with Leslie again. We started dressing to pick up boys and we would use them for their drinks and drugs than ditch them to party alone. It finally took me hooking up with a guy more than twice my age to finally realize what I was becoming.
I tried to back off again. It was harder this time. I was getting letters in the mail from May. She was in a court ordered rehab. Marie and I had pretty much stopped talking. So while spending time with Leslie, I met my first real boyfriend. His name was George. He was a year younger than me and was also in foster care. We had a lot of good times together but it was never enough for me. When May called to tell me she was out of rehab I broke up with him and we were back on the drug track in no time.
I started to do cocaine. May and her new friends sold themselves to get more drugs. She never tried to make me do it. No matter how bad she got she was always a good friend. One day she vanished again. She took off to Vancouver and started working the streets. I would hear from her once in a while or other friends would tell me how bad she was getting. She came back one time and we hung out for a night. She told me about how these men in Vancouver had pretty much kidnapped her. They offered her heroin then waited till she passed out. They kept injecting her with heroin every night to keep her passed out while they sold her body to junkies. After awhile she started getting sick in her sleep so they dropped her off in front of a hospital to be someone else's problem.
I felt so bad for her after everything she had been through I just wished I could help. Finally, it hit me. I could help her by helping myself. So the next day when she met up with me I told her that I would not do drugs with her anymore. That I was going to try to quit. Her reaction was just what I expected of her. She slapped me across the face and ran away.
Marie started calling me again when I was about 18, we hung out a few times but never got back the closeness we shared before. I never fully kicked my drug problem. Something always just seemed to drag me back there. This time, it was mushrooms. The first time I tried them it was only a small amount but I went to school. I spent the whole day laughing at everything until my teachers told me to leave. I started spending time with a gay man named Henry. We were great friends and he was one of the few reasons I even went to school.
My brother John threw a party one night at the lake. We invited Marie and her younger brother Lance. They both brought a few of their own friends along and eventually we had a nice little party going on. Earlier that week I had met a guy named Robert. I had been camping at the lake and he was cousins with one of my friends there. We hit it off right away. So I was really happy to see him at my brothers party that night. We all got drunk and high. Robert and I left together. My past relationships with men while I was drunk led me to believe I would never see him again after that night but to my surprise by noon the next day he was at my front door. He actually wanted to spend more time with me.
Within a few weeks, we were dating. I started calling him Bob. Bob had spent a lot of his childhood in foster care and had a few problems like we all did but he was my rock. For 6 months things went great. I got a job working at the gas station in Cumberland and stopped going to school. It seemed like a good decision at the time. I felt like I needed to hurry up and get out-of-town but to do that I needed the money from a full-time job.
Then May came back I ended up doing drugs with her again. Bob and I did drugs a few times with her but it was never anything worse than ecstasy. At one point I found out Bob was smoking crack. May told me that she heard it from a friend of hers. He lied to me and said it was not true. I believed May. She had never lied to me before. Eventually, Bob came clean but our relationship took years to recover.
I kept getting back into drugs. Bob would try to tell me that he was there to help me quit. That together we could do it. It was not until someone I did not even know told me the truth that I could really get better. I was 20 now. The drugs had worn me out. The drama that comes with them had broken me.
Bob and I moved into his mother's large house. She also ended up renting a room to Henry. We threw a lot more big parties and did a lot more drugs before I finally got some energy back to help myself. I knew that I could only help myself. That by pretending like I needed Bob to stay clean was only an excuse to do it when he was not around.
Until one day I was standing at a bus stop waiting to go to work when I seen I man feeding some birds. He was old, and looked tired and seemed to have trouble standing but every time he threw that seed on the ground, those birds flocked around him and his face would light up with happiness. I lady watched me watch him. She sat next to me and said words that I will never forget.
"When you find something that makes you happy you do not mind doing it, even if it is hard or you are tired of trying."
These words changed everything for me. I do not know if it was just the right day, at the right time but it helped a lot. My drug problem was not over magically from this. Like I said before the real world takes work. It took about two more years for me to fully kick the drugs. I moved out of Bobs mothers house and back in with my parents. Bob and I spent then next few years just trying to keep full-time jobs. Every once in a while, I would break down and do cocaine.
Till finally I just stopped. I stopped drinking I stopped doing drugs. I just stopped. I was tired of the drugs and the drama. I was tired of being sad. I thought back on the day that woman said those words and just stopped. I was going to be ' that girl' again but this time, I was going to be that happy girl or that smart girl. I was no longer going to let my past define me and was going to move forward with my life.
When I was 25 I got pregnant with my son. Bob and I moved out of my parents and into our first real place. We have never gotten married but it has been ten years, 1 cat, 1 dog, 3 homes and 1 son later and we are still together.
We have not touched or been around drugs for over 5 years now. I never drink or go party anymore and I think never have suicidal thoughts. I still think about May all the time. She never got better. Marie has 4 kids now and is still happy with her man. Leslie developed a drug problem in her young adult life and last I heard she was in rehab.
I still think about my Dawn everyday. I bake her cake every year for her birthday and am trying to teach my son to know her name from a picture. Those memories of her will always be something I treasure.
My beginning.
By Robin L.A. Shaw
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