One mother's recollections of her early years in school were of a very trying period for her mental health. Her experiences were anything but playful and positive. As she says, "I wasn't allowed doing anything." She retold stories of abuse at home and the physical pain and mental anguish she was forced to endure as she slowly withdrew:

So for me in school, I was not there…Like…Ah…there was…all types of abuse. You name it, it was there…Grade two, I can remember sitting at the kitchen table…trying to do my math homework. I had asked her [stepmother] how to do it. She took my thumb, took it back and broke it. Um…like it's all just little things that kept on building up and building up and by the time I was in school I was so frustrated like in grade 5, I only passed one test out of the whole year.

When asked if she got any extra help at home, she replied that she was punished and spanked when she didn't succeed and that to her stepmother, whom she only learned at 16 years of age was not her real mother but a relative, "I was…the pile of poop!"

She then described the situation with her own mother:

Mom had her first child when she was fifteen and had to give it up for adoption cause she was sent to Montreal…That's what they had to do back then. Then Mom got married, had two kids, which was one brother and one sister. Divorced. Ended up with three more kids. All had different last names. Except two more of them had the same last name. And then all of a sudden, I'm in the picture. And I'm under the married name.