By Maureen Bogoroch-Ditkofsky  »  Some people are born with advantages, and some are given gifts, opportunities or concessions throughout their lives. Others are given very little and you would never know this because they seem happy and smile often.

A smile can break down barriers, but not every smiling face reflects a charmed life. A smile, however powerful, can belie years of hardship, alienation and personal struggle. Who would know that behind a huge smile are questions about how it feels to have had a birthday party, gifts, or a normal loving family? 

Paulina never had a birthday party, never received any presents and did not know her real birth date until she was a teenager. 

She has a wonderful smile. It stretches widely across her face and lights her emerald green eyes. She has long curly hair, fair skin, is petite and one cannot help but notice how big both her smile and her eyes are. Her eyes twinkle. Her laugh is also big, though not as big as her heart. 

Everyone has a story, but not many see their lives as being worthy of storytelling. Paulina would never see herself as being extraordinary and inspirational. I felt Paulina’s story was worth telling, but initially I was unclear why I was so drawn to it. 

Paulina is clean cut; she could be your real estate agent, financial advisor, or doctor. She is a successful sales rep by day. She has never been handed anything. She has earned her success by working hard, being diligent and determined; by not letting go. In her spare time, for recreation, Paulina is a trapeze artist. Yes, a trapeze artist! The kind one normally associates with the circus. Paulina was never taken to the circus as a young girl. I asked her why she does trapeze art. Her answer was simple and direct. “It is so much fun. I love it.”

She embraces life to the fullest by soaring, by flying past her fears and experiencing weightlessness and the rush that flight without wings creates for her. She challenges the benevolence of God and the universe by taking flight. She earns her living playing it safe; she lives her life taking calculated risks. She has chosen trapeze artistry as a component of her fitness regime. I find it hard to motivate myself to go on a treadmill!

Paulina’s childhood was plagued by hardships, and despite all the unhappiness and insecurities that marked her early life, one would think that as an adult she would look for ways to be secure. Travelling through space and careening above safety nets do not make Paulina feel insecure. Quite the opposite; she feels empowered to take on any challenges and feels grounded. This contradiction is fascinating. The absence of fear of falling is a result of trusting herself enough to know that to fall does not necessarily mean to suspend all caution, control or power. Hurts happen to us regardless of precautions. Falling is not necessarily a descriptor of failure.

What drew me to this story was the notion of possibility which has always intrigued me, but loomed large in an ordinary woman’s extraordinary transformation without the benefit of upbringing, education, financial assistance or connections. She alone is in charge of feeding her own self esteem. She does not run on empty. Her fuel is not dependent on what her parents gave her or did not.

She is an ordinary woman who is happy, secure and positive. There are people who have encountered fewer difficulties and obstacles in their lives and have been given much more than Paulina has, but are nevertheless negative, insecure, unsatisfied.

Most adults when looking back at their childhoods – especially when they revisit painful experiences, times of great uncertainty and sadness – will sum up that time by concluding that their childhoods were mostly happy. Paulina’s childhood was chaotic, confusing and fearful. 

Do children reflect on their unhappiness when they are in its throes? Or, is it an adult ability, the ability to look back, reflect on, and make sense of? Studies do support the fact that children feel unhappy, feel anxious or suffer from stress, but children rarely say so. Over dinner, Paulina spoke about growing up in Montreal. She impressed me with her ability to speak about her childhood with dispassion, with the journalist’s skill or doctor’s flair for detachment. She can talk about her childhood with the coolness and separateness as if she was just a player and now she is the audience. How interesting the dichotomy of being able to be both a participant and a voyeur contemporaneously.

Almost every teenager at one point thinks their parents are crazy, mentally unstable, or just uncool. Younger children do not have language skills which are sufficiently developed to label their parents that way. And even if they could, parents are usually sitting too high on the pedestals that children need them to be sitting on in order to make sense of the world and to feel safe. That does not mean that a young child does not have a sense that something is wrong or is unusual. The proverbial “elephant in the room” is very quiet under these complicated circumstances.

There are indeed unlucky kids who do have parents suffering from mental illness. When they are explained about mental illness, these children need to be reassured they cannot catch this ailment. They need to be protected from stigma and treated with compassion.

Paulina had no one to voice her gut feeling to that her parents were “crazy”. She survived her childhood without the benefits of having trusted adults to listen to her and comfort her.

Blessed with intuition (or should I call it intuitive intelligence?) and a hopeful spirit, which she learned to trust above anyone else’s guidance, Paulina has always known that her father was mentally ill and that her mother was damaged and therefore were not intentionally hurting her. They were responsible for her, this she understood very well, but they were not, nor could they be held accountable. Not unlike other offspring of holocaust survivor parents, she understood at a very tender age and at a visceral, primal level, her parents’ suffering, although it was unspoken by them to her. Blame never entered into the equation. 

She was not heavy with loss because she had never known what a safe home looked like. Can one lose something that’s never theirs? Yearning for love, for a family, for an idealized notion of what happiness is, is distinguishable from experiencing loss. Desire and grief are not interchangeable notions. Both concepts may involve empty pits or voids, but they are not the same. Paulina was not heavy with the burden of loss; instead she carried the greater weight of uncertainty and anxiety.

Most children who had mothers at home, came home after school to see their mother’s smile, enjoy a snack before doing homework or going outside to play. Paulina’s memories of school homecomings were of wondering whether the police would be at her house or not. The screaming and name calling – which Paulina thought nothing of; in fact was background noise to her young ears – was a terrible annoyance to the neighbours who called the police on a regular basis. She would walk down the street tentatively to see whether the coast was clear or not. Not, meant the police were there. It was not the reason why the police were called that terrified her, it was the fact that the police were persons in authority, and therefore persons to be feared, and they were the cause of her concern. 

Fear was not the result of the noise in the house, the shouting and cursing. Fear was that a third party might interfere. Such was the chaos and confusion for Paulina at that time. What scared her was not what the neighbours would think of her family, but rather what would happen to her if she met a policeman. 

It is important to a child’s development that there is an understanding of the source or cause of fear so it can be addressed and dealt with. When a parent assists a child in resolving fearful situations, this gives the child strength and helps a child be confident and whole. 

Paulina had heard many stories about persons in authority and thus associated a police officer whose job was to restore calm and peace to a marital crisis, with the Nazis who murdered, maimed, tortured. If one cannot run to the police for help, who does one run to? Who can be trusted? Paulina also feared the sound of airplanes. To the child’s ears this sound struck a chord that war was imminent. The fear of this noise was a vicarious memory and yet at the same time was a real fear for this child.

Paulina suffered her own unique causes of anxiety. Her father, in a state of mental depravity or just plain meanness on its own, or perhaps a combination of mental derangement and cruelty, locked his wife and children out of their home and changed the locks. Paulina, her mother and sister became boarders in another woman’s home. But one day, needing and wanting to reclaim what should have been and had been theirs, their mother broke into her former home and was arrested. Who protects the child when the mother is gone and the father is unavailable? What does safety look like, smell like, feel like? What is happiness? Is this even a concept that a young child can fantasize about when everyday living is a challenge of the highest order?

I asked Paulina why her mother would have been arrested for breaking into her own home. She had never considered that, because as a child that question (which is paramount to me as an adult) would not have been relevant. A child does not have the inquiring mind of a lawyer and cares nothing about legal arguments. “Where are my parents?” is the issue and not “how could my mother be arrested for seizing what is hers?” 

How any person can survive traumatic experiences growing up and emerge as an adult who is unscarred, and free, is a question I kept asking myself and Paulina. 

When Paulina reached puberty, she could not satisfy her thirst. Her mother, having survived the firing squads and the gas chambers, considered robust health to be one’s most valuable asset and attribute (including of course, one’s wits and desire to live) which must be held up to third parties at all times as perfect, to survive. If one were to act, look or speak as if one were ill, that meant one was vulnerable and could be expendable. The healthy survive. The weak do not. Case closed. A sick daughter was just not a possibility that would even be considered. Paulina’s mother was blinded by horrible images and she chose to see her daughter as healthy, fit and robust. 

As deranged as her father was, as oblivious as he was to his obligation to support his family, care for them or keep them safe (including their need for material comforts, for shelter, clothing and food) he noticed that his daughter was skinny and constantly thirsty. During one of their dinners together, he told Paulina that she was drinking too many soft drinks and that this was not normal. He commented that she was too skinny and suggested to her that she visit a doctor.

Kindness and compassion are what daughters normally expect from their fathers. Paulina had little experience with kindness or generosity being shown to her by hers and therefore had no expectations of such from him. She did however, consider his awareness of what was healthy and what looked right when he looked at her; together with his expressed concern for her health were actual signs of his love for her. Ironically, what little else he gave her during her early years, her father was ultimately responsible for saving her life. 

She took comfort in this demonstration of paternal affection. When expectations are low, any actions can be interpreted as something, which is more than nothing. Children need to believe that their parents love them and would lay down their own lives for them. Paulina to this day is grateful to her father for that demonstration of love. It was, after all, and to be fair to him, a great gift. Her gratitude was evident. She took care of her father during the last years of his life. She rescued him and returned his gift by giving him care, peace and dignity. 

By the time her diabetes was finally diagnosed, Paulina’s condition was so severe and she was so sick, that she needed to be immediately hospitalized. Her mother did not visit her in the hospital, so traumatized was she by her daughter’s imperfect, flawed health. It was not a lack of caring or love for her daughter, but rather a warped, and bizarre perspective, which, Paulina, despite her tender years, understood completely. She was not hurt by her mother’s absence or lack of support during this time. Paulina did not want her mother to suffer by seeing her as defective and ill. Unlike many other teenagers who would naturally have chosen to surrender to the care of a protective mother, she was more concerned with not upsetting her mother’s fragile balance. She needed to be parented, to be babied, and instead Paulina herself acted as a parent and protected her mother. She knew with absolute certainty that her mother loved her but that she was limited in her capabilities.

She was also concentrating on what she needed to do to stay alive. That meant learning how to administer the needles which would deliver the drug necessary to keep her sugar levels in balance. The very same lessons which she learned in order to live would almost cost her life later on. 

Coming home as a juvenile diabetic forced Paulina not merely to monitor her disease but also to become the alimony collector for her mother. That duty included having to convince her father at their weekly dinner get-together to give her enough money to keep her supply of insulin going. As difficult as it must have been to regulate this life threatening illness, Paulina had to convince her already paranoiac father that she was not seeing him just for his money. A child is owed the duty of support by a parent; a child does not use her own parent! Additional pressures were constantly placed on Paulina’s thin shoulders requiring the teen to develop one strategy after another in order to get enough money from her father to keep her alive. Insulin was not then, nor is it now, free.

At 16, Paulina met the boy she would eventually marry at nineteen. His greatest gift to her was that she acquired by default his parents as family. They showed her that it was possible for parents to love each other and their children above all else. They accepted her as one of their own and made her feel worthy, secure and loved. Animals of different species have fostered babies not their own. This is also possible for human beings, even when they are adults. Paulina blossomed in the warmth of her in-law family. Family is not always that which you are born into; it is where you receive love, guidance and are made to feel safe. 

It is ironic, even to Paulina, that as much as she loved her new family and as much as she was overwhelmed by their generosity, she wanted to die. At the same time that she was experiencing great happiness, she felt enormous despair. She and her husband hung out with friends who were heavily into drugs. They were young and misguided. Some died of unintentional drug overdoses. This brought home a harsh reality; drugs take victims. This terrified Paulina. 

Her husband was away a lot. Paulina felt lonely and empty, but she also had time alone with herself to reflect and to become clear about what she wanted and needed. She was determined to lift herself from the mind numbing and soul destroying life she was leading as if on automatic pilot. Growing bones need the right foods and environment to support growth. Emotional development requires a decision to immerse and engage in the process; to be self aware and to watch, to learn and to take positive action. This, notwithstanding pain, hurts, disappointments or setbacks.

Paulina decided that she wanted to alter the course on which she was headed. She left the marriage, (but did not abandon the extended family) and designed a fresh itinerary. Her parents in-law had shown her the visual image on which to model hopefulness and happiness. She quickly came to understand the notion of possibility and that she could live a good life. When Paulina knew better, she did better. She feels immeasurable gratitude toward her former in-laws for being her teachers.

No one is born a champion. A child is born with possibilities and potential. Fairness or lack of fairness does not change anything. It is a lament, not a solution.

A willingness to live fully, a freedom from blame and the habit of moving one foot in front of the other together with the practice of self sufficiency, surpass survival as a notion and are to my mind basic, but also some of the most important drivers of success. 

Paulina is successful. She has given herself what she needs: friends, hobbies and interests. She travels, owns her own home, her own car. She has savings. She loves and is loved back. She accepts that not every child gets the parents she deserves. It is a lottery. One gets to decide what one does with the spoils. That is the way life is.

Getting high through appreciation and enjoyment of life’s offerings are all lessons that Paulina learned by herself and on purpose. To her, life may not be as she had planned. She understands that nature overrules determination. She does not hold on to dogmas or ideals. She avoids complication.

Her feet are always planted firmly on the ground even when she is airborne. She is focused on not losing her balance and so she keeps her head up and is alert. She stretches herself. She lives each day and plays, dangerously in a way. She has a thrill for living, not a fear of falling.

• Maureen Bogoroch-Ditkofsky is a Toronto-based consultant, writer and speaker. She collaborates with individuals and organizations to develop and improve leadership capabilities and increase organizational effectiveness and wellness. She can be reached at 416.445.2802 or by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it more information, visit www.2golead.com.