The Turning Point. - Campfire Yarns

The Turning Point. 05/30/2010

The Turning Point, the Year I Turned 13.

You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down - Mary Pickford

Camp fire yarns, was created for me to tell stories I have heard through my life. I will gradually compile them here. This is a glimpse into my own story. Not one of my happiest years, nor the worst, but this was the year of my first great turning point of positive change, in my life.

I don’t regret any part of my ‘different’ from the average life. Each thing that happened to me was a stepping stone I built on. Each event made me a little stronger and gave me a lot of understanding. of people with problems, I can relate to, because ‘there but for the grace of God,( or someone being there with their hand outstretched for me to grab and haul myself up), go I'.

I remember my teens, my first teen year at home when I was 13 years old was the usual familiar for many, head on clash with my mum, only exaggerated due to our hostilities beginning when I was 4 years old and growing up in a family who longed for love but mostly hated each other. Yes that does happen. 'It's a long complex, story, maybe the subject for a novel, not for today's waffle'.

I left home before I turned 14, made some good choices for my life, early on and never looked back from there. That was the start of a much happier life for me than my childhood had been. In some ways, I could say I only experienced being a teenager, the year I turned 13.

I certainly was not your average teenager, worried about my weight and looking for diet pills that work. I actually was suffering from severe malnutrition, I had been since I was age 4 when it was diagnosed by the school doctor and the government, school health program, 'chose me', as one of the 32 most neglected, children in the state of Victoria and put me on a free food program, providing me my school lunch, and morning and afternoon tea, for the year that I turned seven. I remember being so proud that I was 'chosen' and 'special' and I won the award for the child who grew the most in one year. The program only lasted for one year, because I left school to go to work at age eight.

At age thirteen I was still as I had been since four, skin and bone, rib cage sticking out and 'escaping' into tree tops or my world of art to find beauty as reality was a nightmare. I was 'learning to be an artist and create my own beautiful world.’

At age thirteen, after leaving the job my mother found me, (a machinist in a facory), I found myself my ideal job, training to be a veterinary nurse and from that job I got a live in job working with animals, doing things I loved and felt I was good at, veterinary nursing, dog training and breeding and canine portraiture plus journalism for a dog club magazine.

During my teen years I was able to study art, obtain my leaving certificate by correspondence, study health sciences while I worked, living in with a caring family for the first time in my life. It was in this happy environment, when I was only 14 that I met my husband Reg.

Fourteen was the start of the happy life of my future. In many ways, (aside from that year I turned, thirteen), I skipped my teenage years and jumped straight into adulthood, at least in a behavioural sense.

I can remember what a traumatised person I was at age 13. Desperately unhappy, afraid, knowing even then, that the only way to protect my sanity was to break from the only security I knew, that of an unhappy home, life.

I did not know if there was anything better ‘out there’, (there was), but as I was beginning to entertain thoughts of suicide, as a means to escape the awfulness of my existence, I knew I had to try to find a better solution than that and I obviously did J

One day, after a family member had attempted to kill me and I had fought them of till we separated, equally wounded, I sat on the front porch, sobbing until my mother came home. When she arrived, I informed her, that I ‘would never set foot in that house again’. I did not. I had only waited there long enough to sob my heartbroken goodbye to my mother. I broke her heart too, (if there was anything left to break,) by telling her 'I was desperately homesick.

Homesick for the home I had never known.'

There are many organizations set up to help counsel teenagers who are considering suicide. Yellow Ribbon is one of them. Every individual has the potential to save a life, save another’s sanity, if they are willing to reach out and offer a hand to be grasped and an opportunity to allow another to better themselves, a world where they can feel good about themselves and their accomplishments and most of all a life free from abuse.

The Turning Point, the Year I turned 13, I made the leap, from Survivor, to Successful, Achiever.

Don’t leave it to organizations to help. It is one on one individual acts that make the difference.

Every time you reach out your hand to another, IT COUNTS. Just because some will not grasp the outstretched hand, please do not ever stop reaching out. You could be saving a life with your kindness. Each opportunity to advance that you give to a young adult, has a positive snowballing effect that builds in momentum with other acts of kindness and offers of a ladders to climb, transform and enhance lives in ways you might not be aware at the time.