For several years in my twenties, I worked with what were then called “emotionally disturbed” children. I worked in group homes with young children and teens, did one-to-one contracts, and eventually worked in a receiving home for street kids.
I dealt with kids whose behaviours were off the charts, like the girl who told me she was going to slice my guts open and leave me bleeding beside my five-month fetus on the street. I heard stories that made my neck hair stand on end, like the girl whose father pimped out her older half-sister to support himself and the two younger children.
But mostly I worked with kids who were struggling to deal with the realities of life with parents who, often because of their own childhood experiences, weren’t anywhere close to knowing what good parenting looked like.
In The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed (The Ginger Press, 2024), author Gwen Lamont describes the latter kind of abuse, the gnawing daily neglect that characterized her childhood.
There was the poverty because Dad always thought the next big scam would solve their financial problems; the money that disappeared in a fog of gambling and alcohol and second-hand smoke; the frequent moves that kept the children from establishing friendships with other children or relationships with adults who might have helped.
There was the non-stop bickering between a mother and father who’d long since stopped liking each other but couldn’t imagine anything different; the children’s teeth, rotting from a total lack of dental hygiene; and a decision her father made to get her teeth fixed when she was in grade 9, which ultimately led to her not finishing grade 9 or any more of high school.
As traumatizing as all of this must have been, Lamont says, she never really thought of it as child abuse and still feels taken aback by references to her “trauma.” This was just her family, her life; she didn’t know anything else.
Here’s an excerpt of what Lamont’s family life was like:
I had seen teacups, spatulas, and a can or two fly through the air but this day it was a kitchen chair I watched hit the wall with such a force it left a hole. As if the chair throwing hadn’t made her point, Mom followed it with one of her tirades.
“I’m not moving again, John Godfrey Morrison. I don’t give a shit what you do. I’m not going. You’ll have to go without me and the girls.” He wouldn’t go without us, would he? “I’m sick to death of your schemes that never amount to a hill of beans. I’m not going and that’s final.”
Dad sat silent, grinding his jaw with such violence I could hear it clear across the room. Red blotches crept up his face. The whistling started soft and slow, then grew faster and louder.
“I don’t care if you never speak to me again and you can whistle forever, you goddamn son-of-a-bitch. I AM NOT MOVING! Just when I find a job I love, and just when the girls are settled, you want to move to the goddamn middle of nowhere? And your mother, Jack, what about her money?”
Dad whistled.
“And just remember it was you who had to have this house, Jack Morrison. You! Not me! You talked me into this house and now you have the nerve to want to move us again.” She crossed her arms across her heart. “You jerk. What the hell are you running from this time?”
Dad whistled louder. My stomach knotted.
It’s hard to pick just one passage to quote because the tension in the book rises relentlessly. There’s never a break. And that, it would seem, is what Lamont’s childhood was like. A relentless struggle, no winners, no losers, no end in sight.
It did finally end. For years, she buried her past beyond memory while she went on to earn a BA, BSW, and MSW, work as a social worker in child protection and intimate partner violence. It was really only in writing this book and eventually earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of King’s College that Lamont began to face the impacts her childhood had on her.
The contents of The View from Coffin Ridge make it a difficult read, but the story is told with such skill that it was hard to put down. I find I’m writing those words about many of the books I’m reviewing, but that doesn’t make it less true. These stories embody what it means to be human and are of singularly high quality. And I’m reminded how grateful I am to have been part of this program.
Other books from the class of 2019:
How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral
On Borrowed Time: Shaking Complacency in North America’s Seismic Zones, by Gregor Craigie
Some Kind of Hero, by Kirk Johnson. Review coming soon.
The Performance Equation, by Kevin Kelloway. Review coming soon.
Visiting Africa: A Memoir, by Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin. Review coming soon.
Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboy, Jennifer Thornhill Verma