I was a sad, strange, lonely, impossibly bright little kid.

Yup, we’re back to the soul searching stuff. The worm has turned and I feel depressed and frustrated and smothered by life again, and so it is time for more therapy pas de deux.

Tonight, I was thinking about the Votours. They were the family across the street from us when I was growing up at good old 135 Belmont Street. A big Acadian family, their home always seemed to be full of life, with various members of the clan moving in and out as well as the full time residents having drinks on their back porch and talking, or having some child’s birthday party, and so on.

This was so very different from my own bright but chilly home, where the six of us were pretty much the only people ever there except for Christmas Eve and New Year’s, that the Votours fascinated me from afar.

See, my parents didn’t have friends. They just didn’t. That seems so weird to me now. Both of my parents knew a lot of people through their work, but they didn’t have any actual friends.

Like I said… bright, but chilly.

As for family, my father’s was all in Ontario, where is is originally from. But my mother’s was right there in town with us. And there was a heck of a lot of them, too. Another big Acadian family.

But we didn’t see them much either. My mother would go see them, but we rarely had them over. It’s like her family were in one compartment, and she could go there to the house she grew up in and be in that world, and we all were in another compartment, another world, and the two were not to touch.

Admittedly, the times I did end up spending some time with my cousins, it didn’t go real well. Relatives or not, the same gap between me and other kids that kept me isolated at school operated there as well.

So my interactions with other kids in the family were as strained and awkward as with any others.

Still, perhaps if I had been given the opportunity to hang out with them more often, I might have actually gotten that vital socialization that could have gotten me out of my shell and into normal social life instead of being a child trapped by his own shyness, brightness, and awkwardness to being terribly, terribly alone.

Sometimes it feels like I grew up in a deep freeze.

And there there was the Votours. On the positive side, they provided me with two of the friends I did have in my childhood : Janet, who was my friend in my preschool years, and Bobby, who was only ever there in the summers, but for the two or three summers he was there, we were quite close.

But then there was Donna. Oh… Donna.

Donna Votour was a nice lady in her mid twenties who made the “mistake” of being nice to me a few times, and thus became the object of my desperate need for emotional warmth and acceptance.

Don’t feed a stray dog unless you want a friend for life, I guess.

I think it would be fair to say that I was obsessed with her for a while. Any chance I got, I would be across the street trying to get her attention or insinuate my way into the Votour household somehow so I could be with her. I would hang around the periphery of their property, listening to all the life going on in there and desperately wishing I could be part of that world.

And for a while, she put up with me. She would invite me in and include me in the edge of what was going on, which is all my shyness would allow me to enter. I spend some days in their household, not even really paying attention to what was going on, just soaking up the feeling of warmth, togetherness, and friendliness.

But I was a weird and offputting child, and I am guessing that the other Votours got tired of me before she did, because eventually, they just stopped answering the doorbell when I rang it.

Picture that : there I am, an incredibly lonely child, ringing their doorbell over and over and over again because I am far too clueless to take a hint that if they are clearly in there but they are not answering their doorbell, it’s because they do not want me around.

And there I would be, ringing that doorbell, getting increasingly freaked out that they weren’t answering but clinging ferociously to the hope that any moment now, someone would open the door and welcome me in.

Now picture them, sitting inside, chatting and socializing, hearing their doorbell over and over and over again, and knowing damn well that it’s me out there (otherwise, they would have answered it) but ignoring it because they know that, eventually, I would go away.

And of course, I did. I would wander back home, and try again later. And eventually, of course, I stopped trying completely and gave up on Donna and the Votours.

I’ve never told anyone about all that before, but tonight feels like a night of birthing one’s pains, and that one has been gestating for a very long time.

That pattern was to repeat itself thorough my childhood. I would completely over-attach to my teachers and end up, I am sure, freaking them out a little, especially because I was such a strange and in some ways difficult child. And I would try my best to just be a normal kid and not overstep my bounds, but my need was too great and I would always end up projecting that.

More or less, I was asking for far more than any teacher can afford to give any one student. Not when she has 25 or even 30 other kids to look after.

I am not mad at the Votours. They were not my family. They never agreed to adopt me. Donna made the mistake of “feeding” me but that didn’t obligate her to keep looking after such a strange little doggie as I was.

But I look back at those days of sadness and loneliness and strangeness, and wonder how I ever survived it.

I guess I had no choice.