A lot of real life tragedy for GH actors - General Hospital

alissain:

May I ask who took care of you since you were a minor?

My brother. He was only 21 at the time. Because there was almost 6 years difference between us, we weren’t close as kids.

My mom and dad separated when I was 9 years old. They never divorced. There was 25 years difference between my mom and dad.

Mom moved out when my brother and I were at school. Basically, she abandoned us. We still saw her but she wouldn’t tell us where she was living. I remember one day after she had been to visit and was leaving, my brother who was 15, ran for many blocks, hiding behind cars and trees, following her to see where she went. He found the building she was living in about 12 blocks away, and confronted her. She was living with a man she worked with.

My mom died when she was 52. My dad was 76 at the time and living in one room in a rooming house. His income was just his government pension. He was not in a position to look after me and I was given the choice of either living with my brother and his fiancée and her 2 kids from a previous marriage, or going into a foster home. I chose a foster home. Not that I had any choice because I ended up living with my brother anyway.

It was a Cinderella’s story.

I was their built-in free babysitter. He worked for the city transit and she was in nursing school and working. Neither had time to look after their kids.

They had a baby and I was in charge of raising 2 kids and a newborn. I was 17 years old.

I raised my youngest nephew for the first couple years of his life. I schlepped the kids to and from school, either walking or on the bus, and to the grocery store on the bus and back home with groceries. I cooked and cleaned. I took the kids to the emergency room when my nephew ran into his brother with the front end of his tricycle and punctured his head.

On top of that, I was paying $150 per month rent. I didn’t have my own room. My bed and a small dresser were put into a corner of a partially finished basement. There was a curtain that was hung up separating my room from the family room. The outside wall of my so-called room was just bare concrete. In the winter it was freezing cold. There was also a partial wall that had a large square hole for a large aquarium, but there wasn’t one, and on the other side of that was a completely unfinished basement; storage, junk and a washer and dryer.

I was going to school and working part time earning $2.70 per hour. I had to buy my own toiletries, clothes, bus fare, prescriptions, dentist, glasses etc. I need glasses from the time I was 16 but I didn’t end up getting any until I was in my early 20s because I couldn’t afford them.

When I got my Driver’s license, I was allowed to use their long van. The condition though was that whenever I used it I had to return it with a full tank of gas. The catch was that whenever I went to use it it was almost always on empty.

There was something called family allowance at the time. You got a certain amount of money for each dependent child, based on your income, from the government. They gave me the money that they were getting for me, which was I think $18 per month.

A few times they came up short for a utility bill and they asked me to loan them some money. I never got any of it back.

When I turned 18 I got a letter from the federal government that I didn’t understand. I called and I found out that now that I turned 18 I was entitled to an orphan’s benefit in the amount of $150 per month until I turned 21. Apparently when I was a minor, after my Dad died, that money was being given to my brother for my keep. Yet they were still charging me an additional $150 a month rent.

When I Graduated high school, I was told that I had to pay them $300 per month or I had to move out.

It caused a lot of problems with my brother and I later in life. It took a long time, but we did manage to repair our relationship and we were actually friends. He died last February and I miss him so much.

I never thought that I would be the last one in my family. It’s a very lonely place to be.

I have a niece and 2 nephews. I haven’t seen my niece in decades. She lives just outside of Calgary Alberta. My 2 nephews live in the city, but I’m not close to them. I would see them occasionally at my brother’s over Christmas, but because of my declining mobility I had not been to my brother’s in years because I can no longer climb stairs. So I hadn’t seen them in probably 8 or 9 years until my brother’s funeral.

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