I threw up.

A lot.

If you asked my mom, she’d say it was only a few times, but she’s just trying to gloss it over, make it all sound better than it really was. And I understand why.

It wasn’t any more fun for her than it was for me and she was just a kid!

But the reality is that no matter how she remembers, I remember it from inside and it wasn’t better than it really was. It was maybe even worse.

My memories of that kind of throwing up has been concentrated, boiled down, with the boring parts cut out, like a straight-to-video action movie, the tail end of the last dry heave smash cut straight into the first belly flutters of the next rolling wave and then choppy jump cuts of me running to the kitchen sink just in time for that sweating, jaw-chattering explosion and the clutching panic of all my muscles spasming, head to toe, twisting my dumb little body into a letter C from the centre out.

In my memory, there is nothing in between. No story. No character development. No deeper meaning, no understanding and no reflection. Just panic and puke. They all fit together in my memory like one big same time, a rerun episode with maybe a few new lines of dialogue dubbed in here or there but always with the same setup.

The same central equation: Me + Babysitter = Vomit.

It wasn’t something that just popped up surprise, either. I would feel the problem brewing early in the day.

Phone calls would be coming in, lots of quiet talking punctuated with sneaky looks over at me sitting in a cardboard box watching Dodo, the Kid from Outer Space, in between shifts of driving my cardboard box around the living room, delivering cereal box auto parts or trying to harpoon my little sister with a broken hockey stick.

Mom thought I wouldn’t notice this shift, but that’s the thing, I noticed everything.

I seemed to take particular notice of stuff that other people said wasn’t there. Invisible strings and forces at work in the world, twisting and pulling and making connections, all these tiny waves and ripples in the air came together for me and no amount of sneak looking, and cautious whispering was going to hide anything.

On those babysitter-is-coming days, there would be a slivery buzz in the air, as though some God finger had plucked the superstring from which the universe was hanging, and that note it made, a deep, soundless tingling thrum, worked its way into my body, vibrating me up to the same scratchy frequency with which it was resonating.

You know how you’re sitting with your feet on the floor and just slightly lift one heel, and your knee starts going on its own? The ball of your foot is on the ground and your heel starts bouncing, your whole leg is twitching off that, jackhammering up and down? Well, I had that leg feeling in my whole body. (and I’m doing it as I write this, natch)

I would feel my blood beginning to pool, collecting , thickening, curdling in my stomach, and whatever I had eaten fought back, worked itself into knots, coiling and uncoiling while my guts and organs started pulling out of their normal spots, stretching like there was extra gravity inside sucking them down, unfixing them from their normal places.

I would be rubbing a smooth worry spot into the tape around the handle of the broken hockey stick as my jittering leg scrape the cardboard over and over and all the while I was tuning into the rising tension, picking it all up out of the air, out of the sound of Mom’s voice, slowly sinking down into some unlisted sub-level channel without words.

Maybe I was just responding to the change in her maternal pheromones the same way dogs know that weather’s coming or that there’s going to be an earthquake, or maybe all of the ideas, thoughts and feelings in the collective unconscious of generations of humanity came together in one thunderclap moment for one scared little boy in Clinton, Ontario in order to force him into a sudden leap forward to some new locus of awareness, but as there I sat in front of the tiny black and white TV in my box, aiming my unblinking concentration at The Beverly Hillbillies with that perfect intensity of a child born into three channels of bad TV, I suddenly stopped being a normal kid.

All in a moment.

And just like that, I was Me.

While I fought to avoid the sick tension developing in the house, while I focused everything, I had on that brainless TV show, something clicked somewhere inside, and I felt my self pull out of my three-year-old body. Gears turned, switches flipped, and there, from where it had been hidden all around me, those patterns, webs, appeared not in my vision, but in my mind’s eye. They came from everywhere, winding through my house, into and out of my mom and dad and my little sister, into and out of my new self centre, into and out of that place that was the separate little creature that I had suddenly realized I was. There I was, looking out, but seeing in, seeing where I was-

-seeing what I was.

Me. The independent operator of a meaty little form, with my own pathetic thoughts and feelings, trapped in this Now alongside a few other independent operators with their own thoughts and feelings, bound together by those knots and webs all twisting, merging and splitting off, out in every direction, further out, into forever and beyond.

I truly saw my Self, knew my Self for the first time. And just like that, I got it.

All of it.

All at once.

An overwhelming tidal wave of associations and connections passed through me, sparking a cascade of ideas in my head for which I didn’t have names, tearing a hole into this new, unknown part of my brain and revealing thoughts, feelings, images I’d never had had before. Couldn’t have had, because it was all so fresh and raw and scary.

In that supernova of Self, baby Randall Robert Lobb split open and something else emerged, something new.

And in that momentous millisecond, what did this newly self-aware creature do with the great power of this sudden explosion of fully formed consciousness?

Well, hang on a minute.

Before you go pointing fingers and making judgments, I need you to think about baby geese.

When they hatch, they follow the first thing they see, right? They imprint. And that first thing they see, whatever it is, no matter how implausible, becomes their mother.

No matter how stupid or how unlike a goose that first thing they see is, it’s their mother and they instinctively know they need to follow that thing. They stick with it. An ultralight plane, a painted glove, it doesn’t matter. I tell you this because it is not my fault that I happened to self-actualize as a human in front of The Beverly Hillbillies.

Which suddenly made so much sense to me. It was like I was watching it for the first time and, I guess, in a way I was.

One thing that hit me was that these hillbillies aren’t anywhere near as stupid as they seem to be. It’s true that they don’t know about certain things, like swimming pools or the devious plots of city slicker bank managers but in reality, they’re far more natively intelligent than all the other people in the show. And they come to do the right thing. As a result of this baseline of basic integrity and common sense, they will always win, and the chaotic, unpredictable universe is a better place because they are there.

And then I thought about Miss Jane. It was clear that she loves Jethro because he is like a little kid, and she has no kids of her own. In a way, she wants to be his mom, but Jethro doesn’t like Miss Jane in that same way because he already has a mom, even though she isn’t in every episode. Amazingly, she’s too busy back at the Petticoat Junction show with Uncle Joe and- wait a minute. Why can’t Jethro and his mother be together on the same show?! This is terrible. Why separate them? Unless…

Right. Those places in these shows aren’t even places. They’re not real! Next time you’re watching an episode, look for a ceiling in any of the rooms. There isn’t one! The whole thing is like one big Hallowe’en. All their clothes are costumes because those people aren’t actually Beverly Hillbillies. They’re fakes. It’s all pretending. You can check at the end of the show and you will see that Jethro is played by some guy named Max Baer. There is no Jethro. He’s just a character living out a dream that we’re all having at the same time when we watch. And that girl pretending to be Elly May is called Donna Douglas and she’s so pretty she makes me I wish I was that chimpanzee she carries around. I would hang on to her really tight but that’s something I’ll have to figure out later because Mom and Dad are going away and I will left alone forever.

Yeah. That’s what I thought would happen, but before I had a chance to act on this explosive upgrade of brain power and more deeply consider what it would mean to be left here to die alone, I was taken by main force in a surprise assault, stripped buck naked (what even is a buck? Like a man deer? Aren’t all deers naked?), tossed into a lukewarm tub of leftover water with an oily skein of soap, shampoo and flaked off Mom and Dad bits floating around and I was told to wash up. Wash up? In this water? Every pass of the cloth would actually add layers of dirt to me in the form of somebody else’s actual skin. If you had a micrometer, you would probably find me a good ¼ inch thicker all around. I would come out of that tub literally wearing a hand-me-down epidermis. This was not a good bath, but it was the one I would have.

After a couple of passes with an unsavoury washcloth, and after a few half-hearted attempts to play Jacques Cousteau Undersea Monster Adventure in three inches of tepid gray bathwater, I was yanked out and toweled off with a drum sander, wrestled into some cutesy pajamas and tossed back in my box just in time for Green Acres, the theme song of which I hope is playing in your head, as it is in mine. I think my mom and dad put me in front of Green Acres because of that delightful music, which they knew was compelling enough to lull me into a happy trance of some sort such that I would enjoy a few Mr. Haney gags and forget that I was about to be left alone forever.

It was a pretty canny operation and, if I hadn’t achieved complete self-knowledge scant moments earlier, I might have fallen for it. Mind numbing sitcoms to lull me into a state of zombified complacency, followed by a whirlwind of high intensity hygiene and festooning me in the the homey comfort of my flannel evening wear. Dump a few busted handfuls of potato chips into a cereal bowl and maybe give me access to a tub of onion dip to grease them down and there you had a fairly effective program of parental distraction that any lesser child would have fallen for with no sense of what they were getting into but not me. Not this time. I was different now.

I had discovered my Self. I was awake.

My little sister, however, appeared to have no Self and would be a good example of one of those lesser children who was easily taken in by whatever distractions were laid out for us. In general, she was no fun at all. Being one or whatever, she didn’t do anything, unless you consider crying, sleeping, eating, crying, filling a diaper, crying, whining, and making wet noises doing something. I didn’t think she was impressive at all, but my mom sure did. Somehow, even taking into consideration her limited range of activities, my no-fun infant sister was able to completely distract my mother from the truly important things in her life, which were me and my needs, which were many.

On those rare occasions when our parents were deserting their only first-born child, my no-fun infant sister didn’t even care. She accepted whatever transparent machinations our parents put together with a trusting, toothless smile punctuated by milky spew bubbles. She didn’t even need any chips to salten the deal. Jam half a bottle of curdled milk into her howling maw and you could get away with anything. She just drank milk and went to sleep and that seemed to be enough to mollify her.

But for me, such attempts at parental chicanery were ineffectual. I was now able to see the whole machine at work. I could feel the lockstep sequence of events all falling into place, no matter how hard they tried to hide it. Their plan played out for me like it was written on cue cards that I could see too because I was in the same scene!

Mom came out of the bathroom first, having transformed into a complete stranger. She suddenly has these ;ong eyelashes, longer than anyone could hope to grow through conventional means, glued there on top of a coating of makeup that combined to eerily change her face, raising her cheekbones, thickening her lips and widening her eyes. This other-mom-mask was capped off with a sprayed-up helmet of going-out hair and she had a new smell like she was some unknown lady who comes to visit your house and you have no idea who she is but your mom does and gives her coffee and maybe she is selling Avon? Also, what is Avon? Why isn’t it at a store? What is that?

I would look upon this new woman in shock and I would want to look away because it made no sense because I knew that woman was my very own mother, but I could not look away because what the heck, this was my very own mother and somehow, she was still there under all these changes, right? RIGHT?

I stared at her, trying to figure out how that clean-smelling, fresh-faced woman who provided me with nourishment, healed my wounds and protected me from bad dreams had been supplanted by this Saturday night imposter, smiling with subtly changed eyes, bluer than ever and glinting with secrets, smelling all fancy with new chemicals and dressed up in a long dress with different colours all over it and she was going to go away and leave me behind in this house to be left alone forever with no parents at all.

It was deeply troubling.

How could my very own mother be so completely changed? And it wasn’t just an external change. When she was like this, she didn’t act like a Mom. She was lighter, happier, untroubled, like she was getting a day pass from me, like I was something from which she couldn’t wait to escape. Like it was a relief for her to not be my mom.

My dad’s change was less physically disturbing, but every bit as surprising. In real life, my Dad had some kind of invisible hurricane wind beating against him, all day, every day, and his every waking moment had formed itself around pointing straight into it and going forward face first. Dad’s way of moving, of eating, of talking, of breathing was based around this struggle. He gritted his teeth, squinted his eyes and leaned into his every day like it would knock him flat if he let up even for a second.

His life was a job, and he wasn’t one to call in sick or punch out early.

But on one of those going out nights, instead of the metallic hum of diesel fuel and hand cleaner, he came out of the bathroom smelling of something blue-green, sharp and sweet, like adult drinks, but don’t drink it because it was called aftershave, and it was poison. I knew that because I could taste it in the air and it took my breath away. I had seen him put this stuff on his face sure enough after he shaved, and I had truly become aware of its impossible toxicity when I used it for whiskey during what started off as a pretty good game of Cowboy at the Saloon but did not end that way. I did not have to drink any of that shot glass of play whiskey to know that aftershave is deadly poison.

But unlike every other day, Dad didn’t grit his teeth on going-out nights, not even with deadly aftershave close to his mouth and nose. He actually smiled, with happy little creases in his face. His head was up too. Somehow the wind was shut off and you could see that he was ready to laugh in surprise at that same sense of relief Mom had.

As they got closer to abandoning me to my lonely suffering, the noiseless buzz of excitement coming off Mom and Dad got louder, squiggling like cartoon Spider-sense.

Their voices got louder and quieter at off times, like their soundtracks were screwed up. Their faces were flushed and shiny, and they touched each other far too much. Dad would rub his shaved face on Mom, and she would giggle — it is impossible to imagine that your mom knows how to giggle! — and pull away with this smile and looking up at him I could just feel those smells all mixing up together and see the looks on their faces and HEY! What about me!? I’m standing right here, knowing too many things!

What if I get a fever? Or the flu? Or some kind of prickly heat? What if I fall down the stairs and hit my head again? What if I fall asleep and don’t wake up? What about that?

Do you honestly expect you can leave a deathly sick little boy here alone with some unqualified teenage neighbour girl? Yeah. Because you get a babysitter. A babysitter!

Can anyone in good conscience go out like that, face rubbing and giggling and planning on having fun knowing that your only firstborn son is not going to make it through the night and if he does somehow survive until the morning, he will be alone forever and nobody will love him and he will fall forever and ever, dizzy, dying and alone?

Well, they could go out and they did do out. They were going out to drink drinks and dance and talk and laugh and have fun no matter what happened to me. They were going somewhere out there in that crazy world outside my safe little house, where drunk people drove fast and didn’t watch for kids on the road, where bad people robbed good people, with soldiers and the Vietnam War and the scary hippies hanging out in front of the bank, where everything bad happened. That’s where they were going Out.

Out to other people’s houses, out to the Legion, out to the Pineridge Chalet, out to a dance, it didn’t matter. They were going “out,” and I would be staying “in.”

Alone. Forever.

While they were Out I would be naked to all the misery the world could pile on me, with only some pock-faced girl elbow deep in a greasy bag of chips to protect me.

The closer Mom and Dad got to putting coats on, the more acute my senses became.

I could feel the floor shifting, the walls moving back and forth minutely with the tectonic shifting of the earth, with the wind pushing into the trees outside.

The house buzz grew until it was so loud in its quiet that it hurt, and I tried to shake it out of my ears, but it was no use. The buzz was becoming a roar, pushed against the sides of my head, pressing into my ears, squeezing the muscles of face, pinching the corners of my eyes, swelling them up against the looming danger. I tried to get Mom to understand that something was wrong, that I needed another story, or another snack or anything else that might get her to stay and keep me safe, but nothing worked.

My parents would give me a hug and kiss, push me over to the babysitter, who clamped a hand down on my arm hard enough to let me know that she didn’t like this any more than I did, and turn away like I wasn’t standing there sobbing my heart out, begging them not to leave, throat tightening, chest pounding, heart ready to explode.

There was nothing I could do.

The minute the car pulled out of our driveway, I would look into the eyes of my babysitter, eyes that were only marginally less filled with fear than my own, and wail as a flood of rising misery, terror and panic bubbled up in my throat and then I would run to the kitchen sink and vomit. I would stand on a stool and vomit into the sink, retching and coughing and choking and throwing up until I broke all the blood vessels in my neck, my chest, my stomach and back, until I was hunched over and spasming.

Wave after wave of roiling spew, coughing and choking and crying, puke and tears and gasping punctuated with deep, howling sobs.

I would throw up until there was nothing left, no food to cushion my belly against the burning clench of terror that twisted through me, scared, little, freshly conscious Me, understanding that I was ultimately alone inside this tiny, clumsy bag of meat and bones, trapped forever inside these thoughts, this mind roiling with too many big feelings.

And then, once I was emptied, done throwing up and bruised enough that I could have convinced even the least concerned town police that my polite, Calvinist babysitter had pulled me out of some boiler room where she’d been rubber hosing me. But I couldn’t think clearly enough to do that. I didn’t even know where the police station was.

I would stagger off to bed and sob myself into a tormented sleep, certain that this would be the night they wouldn’t come back, that my mom and dad were gone and I was left behind to face a terrible world alone, three years old and, as of this day and forever after, far too aware of it to deal with what was happening either inside me or out.

I curled up under my blankets, put my pillow over my head and cried until dreams came.

Bad ones.