Growing Up Hippie
(Page 2 of 5)
November-December 2003
by Adriana Barton from Elm Street
Mom returned to Ottawa to live with my future stepfather, Russell. He was one of the men behind the Wasteland, a coffeehouse that drew counterculture heroes like Bruce Cockburn and John and Yoko. Drugs were surely in the background of this scene, but my strangely puritanical parents avoided them. They didn’t live in a commune, indulge in group sex, or drop LSD. The only hydroponic thing in our household was the commercial alfalfa sprout farm in our basement—15 bathtubs full of seeds that I watered in return for an allowance.
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My assumptions about life, from relationships to morality, were shaped by these people, who quoted Zen Buddhism and traded tips on building yurts—those circular Mongolian tents that were a hippie obsession. Though less notorious than their Haight-Ashbury counterparts, my mother's crowd also represented an iconoclastic and influential radical ethos. They were spiritual seekers, committed to personal and social transformation and abstemious to the point of asceticism. Their life choices were part of a continuing social experiment, from earnest meditation practices to a willingness to go on welfare rather than compromise their values. As their own purse-lipped parents would say, “That's all fine and good for them, but what about the children?” Nobody knew how offspring of the Age of Aquarius would turn out. Well, I do.
From childhood embarrassment to adolescent conformism, it was hard not to rebel against my parents’ freewheeling ways. A week before starting first grade, I begged my parents to buy me a lunch-box: a spanking new plastic one with a picture of Sesame Street or Barbie, the kind every other child in school would bring. For days I lobbied, emphasizing that it came with a Thermos, but my mom and stepfather couldn't understand why I wanted such a tacky, commercial thing. On the morning of the big day, they presented me with a plain cardboard box with a thick wire for a handle. Inside was a jar of milk, an apple, and a whole-wheat sandwich. Pleased with their ingenuity, my parents beamed. I was crestfallen. At noon hour I sat in a corner, trying to avoid the stares and snickers.
Desperate to be normal, I rarely invited kids over. They would see the outboard motor stored in plain view in our dining room. They would see my hyperactive 6-year-old brother leaping around the house, naked as a monkey, slowing down only to retract his foreskin to gross us out. My friends would inevitably turn up their noses at the snack food they were offered. I'm not making this up: To a tentful of 7-year-olds my mother once offered a late-night treat of pickled eggs.
Like many adult children of hippies, by the time I hit university I had turned to therapy to try to make sense of my family and to adapt to mainstream society. My current therapist is an expert on perfectionism. He believes people develop this trait as children in the attempt to create order out of a chaotic environment. For me, this took the form of a boot-camp approach to life: As a 12-year-old, I kept color-coded logs of when I exercised, what I ate, and how much I practiced my cello, down to the minute.
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