If you’ve managed to plant your love somewhere along the way, sure, it might have felt good during those first walks, those first professions of love and affection, the love letters and birthday letters and rapid-fire texts. But when it all starts to fall apart, you realize that all you did was take your very last lifeline and recklessly plug it into another human being: a flawed, paper human who is, once you get past the model exterior, really no more impressive than yourself.

Not even the crescendo-laden love of a thousand ages, the soaring gulls of seduction and pedestalizing, can survive the midlife loss of yourself. Suddenly, all that you knew and loved reveals itself to be flimsy as a vintage windmill. A proper fool, you back away into an available corner with an aging laptop and a filthy compass, desperate for some kind of way forward.

Reminders abound that you are not a teenager anymore. You’re not 20-something, when you could cut your hair short and still look cute. When they used to swoon and hype you up all through every corner of the Big Bop and Reverb, those dirty downtown Toronto watering holes that we just accepted as places to go.

“What is this?” a friend said in the ’90s, of the gathering, tingling crowd of kids around me and my music in those places.

For it wasn’t fandom. It was something else. Something a little untrustworthy.

But okay. I can tell you what it was.

It was an extension of the monkey show that got rolled out in our family’s living room when I was a child. “Come and perform for company!” I’d be told, and, not aware there was a choice in the matter, I’d come down and knock out some song on the upright piano. Everyone would clap, rum and Cokes in hand, and I’d get the hell out of there, up to my room, back to gaze upon Michael J. Fox’s face in a teen magazine, or Stephen Pearcy’s leather pants which shone majestically from a poster on my wall.

Yes, they shone.

The monkey show should have ground to a halt. But instead, it turned into a magic carpet. I took a passion for songwriting a little too far, and it landed me on the inside walls of Worldwide Plaza in New York City. My manager, a jovial chap whose musicologist skills outweighed his business prowess, was unable to talk to presidents but very good at charming the college reps. This, unfortunately, couldn’t help him see me through an acquisition where a company that made a drink called Jamaican Me Happy acquired my record label’s parent company, PolyGram, in a $10.3 billion deal, firing everyone and dropping all the artists.

So that’s when the breakdown happened. It was exacerbated by going to L.A. and falling in love with a bald painter of large oil paintings from London, Ontario. Even in the wilds of California, I could not at least find an American to marry.

Then two planes hit the World Trade Center, and, clinging to one another, bald painter of large oil paintings and I retreated back to Canada.

As I crossed the border from Michigan into Ontario, radio reports of pending war and the political implications of 9/11 turned to soft voices talking about houseplants and the latest healthy recipes.

Thank you, CBC Radio.

My new normal was a sort of la-la land. I might as well have been living north of Dryden in a shack.

I carried on making music, writing songs, touring, but deep inside, my belief in all of my teenage dreams, the inflated post-Lilith Fair heyday of my thirties, was just a layer of paint, and another layer of paint, and some sealant, and some papier-mâché, and some goddamn insulation caked on a tiny seed, a pure moment, where beats of the ’80s, orchestral strings, galactic production met my broken young-girl heart.

Those beats and that heart: we were supposed to warrior through this world together.

But oh, how sensitive I was.

Too sensitive.

A lie here, a rationalization here. Five different managers there, and then came parenthood.

The most magical distraction of all.

I waited until the very, very last minute to put a human in my uterus. Let’s do this, geriatric pregnancy. Let’s have kids before it’s too late and play house and be happy.

That imploded eventually, too.

My hungry heart, which had darted all over the world looking for a home, got played. You see, the joke was on me when the father of my kids finally fed his hungry heart, and gone he was, quicker than a bright lightning bolt.

So then, Glastonbury 2000 came out, the album commemorating the concert. David sang to me from the dead in Alexander McQueen. Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie, came out. Whatever you think about it, fine, but anything that put Freddie back in the spotlight was enough to get me thinking about the miracle that is breath, voice, salvation.

The seed, that little seed, the pure joy. I realized it was still there underneath everything. It was still fighting so hard to push through all of the layers I piled on top of it.

I stopped drinking.

My friend Kim Mitchell said, just wait till week three. You’ll hear everything perfectly. You’ll hear a pin drop.

I didn’t hear no pin.

But I could feel, in my loneliness, my commitment to myself, the smashing and drowning of bottles of Irish whiskey, the seed, now a sprout, still pushing through.

I think I might have seen the tip of green, for a moment, and imagined a garden.

And then, I plugged in.

Everything, every last ounce of hope, joy, selfishness, music, fear, death, poetry, bass notes, stabbing violins, sweeping piano glissandos, body sweat, stretched-out breath, faith, Holy God—I plugged it into: him.

…

And you can’t just unplug, I realized. Not when you’ve done it like I did it.

And that is why now, I struggle to stand.

Why I’ve lost my will. My identity. My playful big choruses. My taffeta skirt.

…

The pals want me to come out and see Toto in the rain tomorrow. But I saw Toto last year, with him, my electric love. We saw them not in the rain. I already heard Lukather’s sobriety jokes. I already saw Dennis Atlas swing his hair around and outsing everyone.

I take a pass.

So now the only things that are taking my shortness of breath and weaving it into a way to see that precious little promise of a garden… are:

Making songs for the girls I’m coaching in the spare room at the car dealership in Stonetown. I’m taking their lyrics and recording them into my computer. It truly gives me joy.

I buy a gift for my vocal student, Lily, who is going to school in Bristol, and it’s a bracelet by Hen & Bear with stars. I remind her she is so many stars. I remind her to breathe and that she always makes it through.

I wait for Kara to come back from holiday because that means I should have done something on my record.

I see Darlene become a record producer overnight with her laptop and interface and MIDI dreams.

I hear Kelly’s whole life in all of her songs.

I hear Julie sing freely, finally.

And I re-read what I write here.

I see the sprout again and maybe tomorrow, drawing from the river that is female friendship, creativity, a sunrise over the gravel road that hugs the Ontario farmland around me, I’ll water it.

And finally make sure I clear the way for it to break through.

On paper, this admission will conjure up a smorgasbord of reactions, and mostly, whatever reaction you’re having, (let’s say you’re a human living with a balanced mindset) is probably correct.

Allow yourself to imagine the 14-year-old me. Here I am. I’ve already accomplished things I’m proud of: I’ve won the Grand Theatre’s Young Playwrights Competition, and I sashay into high school an accomplished pianist and performer, with more than a few sweet awards already behind me. I’d been at the top of my class throughout elementary school and even graduated as valedictorian, despite coating St. John Fisher School in shaving foam on my last day of Grade 8 and enduring the wrath of Mrs. Traill, who threatened to strip me of my distinction.

My parents are busy running their newspaper business, and John, my 19-year-old boyfriend, a friend of my brother’s, is, in my view, completely respectful. We are first, friends. He lets me navigate the relationship at my own pace. We sit around for hours watching episodes of Friday the 13th and listening to Queen. We’re only intimate to a certain point. He visits our house a lot and is part of the family.

Fast-forward to 2024.

I had never thought anything of this relationship with John. He and I had even exchanged a few messages over the years, referencing some of our old jokes and catching up with random small talk. But it was on a trip to Aruba in 2024, surrounded by nightlife and beaches and New Year’s Eve, when I started to become aware of just who someone is at age 19, that it hit me like a sledgehammer to the side of my head.

I’ve come to understand it differently now. In 1990, in the middle of nowhere Ontario, no one was really looking at what this relationship meant for me.

We were intimate “to a certain point,” but I’ve learned that those distinctions don’t necessarily tell you much. Attachment doesn’t organize itself neatly around a line you did or didn’t cross. Actions and emotions intertwine. Bonding happens. Confusion happens.

He was kind to me. It felt normal to me. Both of those things can be true, and still not change what I see now when I zoom out: I was fourteen. He was nineteen. I should not have been left to navigate that on my own.

Today, I live through the lens, as much as I can, of forgiveness. Forgiveness for ignorance or neglect. Adults, especially those living with generational or cultural trauma, make their own attempt to survive the grind of daily life. I’ll never know what was really going on back then, and I’m certainly not going to hang it all out in a Substack: things I don’t understand.

But I learned through writing my book that instead of assuming what others’ experiences were, you can only look at your own and take appropriate accountability. Unfortunately, this can only be done in the adult years, with the gift of a developed brain, lived experience and the love of people around you who can reinforce what respect and care really is. Those things that happened to us in childhood, as we all know, end up running the show.

Thank you, childhood.

The fallout from being left to navigate a relationship like that at 14 has been significant. First, there is what I couldn’t possibly understand then. Then there is the reckoning that came in 2024, the sledgehammer realization of seeing it clearly for the first time. Even that went largely unattended, by the people around me and, in some ways, by me.

So now there is the aftermath: a pile of jagged glass I have to gather up. Gloves on or gloves off. I can choose who surrounds me as I do the hard work of softening into clarity. I can choose people who are gentle, supportive and willing to care. But the gathering is mine. At the risk of elbowing my way through deep emotions in a inelegant attempt to armchair psychoanalyze, I notice some of the wounding.

I live with the message that my worth is tied to my sexuality.

I live with a loss of some aspects of childhood that may have existed in my early teens.

I am untrusting of adults, at times.

I subconsciously believe that I am not worth deep care and love.

I have sometimes rationalized neglect in my own life.

I have, at times, unconsciously, made a home for emotional manipulation.

And sure, this seed of unease and pain, combined with my love for writing and music, probably whipped me into a pretty great songwriter. You’re welcome.

Therein lies another issue. The ticket I rode out of rural Ontario on (my musical gift) became a measure of my worth, in part because some of the other ways of valuing myself simply didn’t exist. The promise of a life in music became a blanket I would cling to well into my forties. The thought of someone taking that blanket away, even as it was becoming ratty and perhaps no longer necessary, was terrifying.

The sad part is that it’s kept me from truly enjoying the melodies and lyrics I create. I think with my new album, I might finally be starting to unravel some of that.

The “falling in love with my music” is coming from being surrounded by safe people in the studio, like Kara, who has been engineering, or Kevin, who played cello. It’s come through a handful of caring fans who hold me carefully, and through the blunt admission that it’s been fucking hard to make this new album. And that it’s okay to admit that.

I think, if anything, reflecting on this injustice, this abuse I didn’t understand as abuse at the time, has allowed the broken parts of my shell to finally start cracking and falling away, revealing a very young girl who, honestly, values something more than big stages, Juno Award nominations, or songs in HBO shows.

What I’ve come to appreciate most is someone asking, “How are you?” and really, truly meaning the question.

And if I’m completely honest, what I’m learning to celebrate are the moments (and they are new) when, at the end of a long day, I ask myself the same thing, and find that I’m perfectly okay with whatever answer comes back.

If you happen to be a parent in these times, you have to be quick on your feet. You can begin to descend into sorrow over what the world has become, but only moments later, you must transform into a vigilant protector of your children. It is a part of the parenting job you never realized you were signing up for. You become a police officer at 8 am, leaping into duty when you’ve barely had half your coffee.

“There’s news of a video of someone livestreaming self-harm. I’m going to ask you not to watch it.” is the text that went out this morning, probably while they’re still dozing.

Whether my children watch it is not under my control. They are hundreds of miles away at a cottage. They shouldn’t even have to receive a text like this, one that will undoubtedly spark the very curiosity I’m trying to discourage.

Flashbacks to telling my kids not to do things as toddlers, and then, of course, they do them.

Sleepy as I am this morning, I allow myself to fall backward into a rabbit hole of trust.

I have to trust that the work I did in the early years of their lives — the years when I sacrificed so many of the things I am now gathering back up with sleepy eyes and a faithful heart: my music, my career, my autonomy — somehow helped create little humans who can make decisions for themselves.

I hope that I have guided humans who are not so driven by curiosity and FOMO that they will watch something capable of changing them forever.

Last night, I played my London debut with my metal band, Ovary Axe. We performed for a handful of people in a watering hole called Supply & Demand, which serves pizza that is both delicious and deeply regretful upon eating.

One of the songs we played is called “Enjoying the Modern World.” In it, I lump together all the things I am sarcastically enjoying about modern life: pedophiles in power, the public listening to wealthy white men instead of survivors, gender inequality, injecting your face, celebrity pressures and pornography. Yup, it’s a real heartwarmer.

But what I am really trying to get at with “Enjoying the Modern World” is that one day, I hope to be genuinely enjoying it.

Being proud that I did the best raising with my kids under the circumstances. Admiring the beauty of the world, like when I stumbled upon a little picnic table hidden in a park yesterday. Running into an old high school friend last night who told me he was clean from drugs. Choosing not to watch something horrific, myself either.

Is it all about the lens we choose to look through?

Do we have to click the button down, the way we used to on a View-Master? When we are done with the scene in front of us, can we simply click to the next one?

In a world that seems determined to keep shocking us, I’m beginning to think it may be all we can do.

No one tells you. Well, I guess they’re starting to tell us now, but the freight train that is perimenopause came at me at breakneck speed, without even a tiny warning. One day, I put on my asymmetrical red dress for my video “Valencia,” and as I watched the footage back, I saw it. I was a corpse lying on the tracks. It had come for me. Weight gain, a sort of rumpled look to my skin, my hair was thin, something felt off in my moods day to day and as I twirled on the beach, no amount of four-over-five chords could save me.

For someone who prides herself on her appearance, who has measured her worth in applause and admiration, much of it physical, the train wreck that is midlife is more than just a physiological change. It is a redefining of all that is important. It is a questioning of meaning. It is a reckoning with the self.

Then, there are the lightning bolts hormonal changes send through your relationship. I know, in hindsight, that partners should probably know that a fucking hurricane is about to bring change to every aspect of life. I envy the couples who have weathered it, and become closer.

Throw in a little bit of unresolved trauma, and you have yourself quite a sinkhole on your hands.

So picture this. It’s 2022. Here I am, dealing with it all, brick by brick. The heaviness of each brick falling unapologetically on my former self. I feel the light in my being disappear. I feel the way I’d dance across the nonsense of life all but vanish. I’ve made a yacht rock record, so it’s the universe’s little joke. I’ve made happy music weaving in the lyrics of my poet husband, but I am rapidly changing inside. I later won’t be able to remember any of his lyrics. It’s not because I didn’t write them. It’s the neurological pummeling of perimenopause.

I meet an astronaut’s wife who is a menopause expert. Not only is she an angel and a visionary for good in this world, but she also happens to start me on my road to recovery with hormone replacement therapy. I had blindly been slathering testosterone cream on myself, with no fucking clue about anything. I think I had ordered it from a virtual healthcare provider in its early stages. “Healthcare” in quotes.

She, Catherine, sets me on the right path. Gregg, an OB-GYN in Stratford, who I am able to see in person (Catherine being in the US at this time), sets me on an even more helpful path by diagnosing the right estrogen replacement for me. I am suspicious of him, because I’ve had a lot to be suspicious about in my life, but it turns out Gregg knows what’s right for me and my body.

This takes one big brick off the pile. But then there is everything else perimenopause has left in the wake of its unannounced visit. Migraines that make me want to die. I have never had these before. My family practitioner finally prescribes something so I can actually leave the house (and the country) without fear of becoming debilitated. The headaches continue, but not with the same severity.

My rage, which is completely feared and misunderstood by almost everyone around me who isn’t female, I know is the culmination of unresolved trauma and perimenopause. I turn to the work of Marshall Rosenberg as well as a very simple webinar that teaches me about the jackal and the giraffe. The jackal has unmet needs and therefore responds with cruelty, name-calling and criticism. But the giraffe asks, with compassion, “What do you need?” Somehow, this using-animals-to-describe-human-behaviour resonates with me. I take the immense guilt I have carried for screaming at my son the day he refuses to go to school and decide I can change.

And I have. But I am still gathering my limbs off the track.

I have done this with a lump in my throat, knowing I need love around me. Simple acts of care, like slowing down. Letting go of the hustle of keeping up with the archetype of the musical artist. Knowing that I’m enough in some of the small things I do.

I look at the shape of my face. The last three years, the chronic stress, the hypervigilance I have carried for too long and the deep desire to love through this seemingly impossible labyrinth have created this downturn at the corners of my mouth. Instead of playing a big festival in Germany or proving to everyone that I can have a show-stopping artistic comeback at 50, I make this my next goal: to turn those corners of my mouth up. Up, up, up. So that one day, as Peggy Lee says, when that final breath comes, I look like I spent the last twenty years cheating the darkness and having the time of my life.

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It’s a new day in my condo, a low-rise, 2000s-era executive apartment that I moved into in May to escape a volatile marriage. As time has gone on, it’s become increasingly apparent that I’ve mostly been escaping myself. It’s dawned on me that perhaps, over many years, I’ve been in training. Training to give my power away to men.

It starts early. The thundering, loving voice of a father. You put all your little baby eggs into that basket because he gives the best hugs, the best airplane rides, the biggest laughs, the warmest smiles. But he is, like anyone else, human and susceptible to the weight of the world: finances, family, love’s inevitable cracks and challenges.

The teen years bring plenty of power giveaways. It starts the minute you realize you belong to that group, the group that possesses power in something as benign as taking off your clothes. For about the first ten years of life, I thought that was just something you did before a bath or shower. Turns out, as I discovered by stumbling on some magazines in my friend’s basement, taking off your clothes as a female can make you a shit-ton of money. But what that means begins to carry its own implications as you make your way into the world. How we’re viewed. What people want from us. What others believe they’re entitled to.

As I reflect on the burning desire I had at an early age to become Madonna, to enter the music industry, I realize I was walking straight into the Wonderland of Power Giveaways. Whether it was a music manager, a fat, rumpled record executive with a beach house in Malibu, or a stalker from New York State, they all wanted something, and it wasn’t never something I wanted to give. They wanted to make a name for themselves, for their idea to get applause, for me to sell a million albums, or simply... attention.

And then there are the husbands, the boyfriends, the lovers. The comfort they need. They try to derive comfort from an uncomfortable person.

In my craftier moments, I wonder how to spin the imbalances of our world. Some days I can’t fault Kim Kardashian for lying half-naked beside a Cybertruck. No, I’m not one of those girls, but some days I wonder if she received a memo so many of us somehow missed. That the ultimate expression of power is to understand this world and its weaknesses, then sashay into it with as much plastic surgery and smooth skin as possible.

Then I read the work of people like Rebecca Woolf, who finally puts into words the suspicions I’ve carried for years about the ways we’ve all been conditioned to give away our power.

Then I listen to people like Lynn Fraser, a somatic spiritual healer from Canada’s East Coast. Her voice calms me. She encourages me to begin from the inside out.

At 51, I’m painfully aware that I haven’t figured it out. Life’s chaos has created a perceived scarcity of time, and time is probably the very thing I need. Time to practice keeping my power, or channeling it only toward people and experiences that genuinely lift me up.

Sometimes I go back to being three years old. I remember myself outside in nature, blissfully unaware that such complexities lay ahead, singing about pet chickens and soaking up the sun.

I suspect I had all the power I needed then.