by Manjit Handa
Name: Barbara Baxter
Age: In the early 70’s
What we learn from her? Her suffering as a mother and wife and her triumph as both and as an individual.
Born and raised in Canada, Barbara was the third of the four children and the only one with a physical problem i.e. asthma. She nearly died of it at six months but survived. The story of a fighter was in the making. At the age of 13 she was determined not to spend another day in bed with asthma and she didn’t. At the age of 50 she cured it completely with jogging.
Married to a loving man Kem (she was 24 and he 22), they had four children, two boys and two girls. Three children were “easy to raise” as she “loved mothering”. Heather, the second child “was difficult”. Heather was more of a “free spirit” and when she was around nine years old, Barbara heard a voice that said, “You are not allowing her to be a child”. That is when she and Kem began going to “personal growth” workshops and before late Barbara knew she herself had to “change”, “stop controlling her child” or “finding fault with her”. She had been trying to “control and discipline her with anger” which needed to change and “she did” change her strategy and let her daughter be.
Heather bloomed into a lovely teenager, sailed well through high school and went to the University of Waterloo. But within a year she returned with a negative feeling towards the Canadian Universities. Now she decided to take care of a man in Belville, Burlington, suffering from quadroplegia. She did not complete her education but although she had no training of patient care, she did a magnificent job with this man. No one in the family forced or imposed anything on her and she was to find her own path. She was around 21 at that time. Later she decided to go to Vermont, U.S.A. and joined a free style “chose-your-own-curriculum” school. But before long she returned home and refused to go back again. By this time she was not in a healthy state of mind and was already into alcohol and drugs. It was around this time she could have been traced clearly as being bi-polar, something which was diagnosed quite late in her life, as Barbara reminisces.
She was home in Belville from May to September and Barbara and Kem usually spent summers in their cottage. On their return from the cottage they were aghast to see that Heather had turned the whole setting of the home topsy turvy. She had taken all the pictures from the living, dinning and bed rooms and hung them in the kitchen; hammered nails wherever she wanted and moved all the furniture around. Unaware of her mental condition they told her to leave the house. An alcoholic now, Heather married a native named Carl who was not only an alcoholic but uneducated and unemployed as well. Barbara was told three days after the marriage. It was an unhappy marriage; Carl went to jail twice and even Heather left him twice as he used to beat her up. On one occasion he even stabbed her in the belly when she was pregnant and fortunately missed the baby. But she kept going back to him. She had three babies with him and since none of them worked, they were always on Social Welfare. It was about four years of their marriage when Carl killed himself. He was drunk walking up the highway with two bottles of beer in his hands and got hit by a car.
Heather was still an alcoholic and was unable to take care of her kids. Terrified for the kids, Barbara and Kem called the Children’s Aid for help. Barbara’s eldest son Steven (a doctor by now) and his wife Fay were ready to adopt the kids but that did not work out. They were then sent to foster families. Heather kept unwell but had three more kids from different men. All the kids were taken away by foster families. The worst part was that she refused any kind of medication. Later in life Barbara took her to a psychiatrist and that is when she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. And that is when Heather moved to Brockville and agreed upon medication. This was around eight years ago and ever since she has been moving toward a healthy state of mind. She has been in detox centers and has doctors and counselors taking care of her. Although it is not a smooth journey and there are constant ups and downs, yet it is to Heather’s credit that she “starts it over and over again”. Heather does feel guilty about not having been able to look after her kids and hopes to see them in future when they grow up.
Within a year of Carl’s death, Barbara’s husband, Kem committed suicide. That was something Barbara found very difficult to come to terms with. She remembers he was undergoing depression, the cause of which was not known, either to him or to Barbara, but Barbara never expected it to go this far. In fact, Kem’s suicide was well planned. He drowned himself at their cottage wearing his work boots and chaining his ankles prior to which he had taken some sedatives. That was the time they were both doing personal growth workshops and she was feeling “strong, happy and spiritually centered”, a time when suicide was a remote thought on her mind. Kem did mention about committing suicide twice and as a response to which she had taken him to a psychiatrist. But the suicide was a blow to her psyche. In fact she herself behaved suicidal after that. But she survived it all.
Barbara’s coping strategies: Years and years of medication, huge support from friends (specifically mentions her doctor Karen Trollope and her husband Pradeep Kumar) and relatives and her own “determination to live”. Also she did not want to put her other kids through the pain of a “second parent committing suicide”.
Her message to the readers: “I had to personally go through the fire of pain (both physical and psychological) to get to the other side, so face your challenge yourself. . . .” As a wife, perhaps I could have pushed my husband further for help, or held him more, but I was ignorant. As a mother, the gift of Heather’s lifestyle is that “I kept opening . . . and all judgments against other people dropped”. My life has been a journey “towards spiritual progression, towards perfection, towards wholeness and towards unconditional love”.
Her favorite one liner: “Be still and know that I am God.”
A yoga practitioner, Barbara readily volunteers at various places in the community. A resident of Hamilton Ontario, she recently moved to Halliburton, Ontario. There are few people in any given community who inspire a person enough to go on and fewer who never fail to delight you.
Barbara is one of them!
