She knows her husband is having an affair, but Roberta McKibbon is unable to say anything to anyone. They live in rural Gibsons, a small town on the Sunshine Coast of B.C. It’s 1963; with four children, she feels like an unpaid housekeeper. Gossip is a chorus around her.
She considers suicide.
Then, Roberta becomes part of a experiment in psychedelics that changes her point of view, her mind and her heart, for the rest of her life.
Everything is in Motion is the story of a preacher’s daughter, born in 1935 in Saskatchewan, who gets a new lease on life in 1963, just as The Sixties begin to unfurl.
https://caitlinhicks.com/wordpress/whats-your-story/
Post Script: I just came across the original notes from Roberta’s story, and I’d like to share some details here. In fact, I’m tempted to re-edit the story and leave in some of the rich details and re-record it. I think that I edited it quite heavily because I felt I was telling the story about her marriage ending, the betrayal of that, her sense of going crazy and her experience with LSD. So I edited out the details I now find fascinating: what life was like in the 1930s. How did women get by? And what were they thinking? Here is an interesting story about Roberta’s mother:
“When I was five,” Roberta said, “my Dad went to Winnipeg to find us a home and we spent the winter with my grandparents in Folden’s Corner. My sister was six months old, and during that time, my mother invented the Jolly Jumper. She made it out of pillow ticking and a broomstick handle and the local blacksmith made the springs. My mother was very anxious that all mothers should have one of these; she made several for other people and loaned them out. Through the years, she refined the design, but it got lifted from her by an unscrupulous lawyer who was working with my brothers. Now, mind you, my mother was a pianist, my brother a singer and artist; we weren’t into Business. They didn’t have a formal agreement, and the lawyer stole the design. He was supposed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, but we didn’t make a dime.”
She talks about getting married:
“When I got married, it was murder of course because I had to leave my very close-knit family. We were all very fond of each other. And there I was, all alone in the apartment during the day while my husband was at work. Let’s just say I did a lot of walking. I nearly miscarried my baby walking up two flights of steps.”
Then she talks about births of her two boys, how unprepared she was, how the use of ether robbed her from experiencing their two births — and the reverence for doctors.
And here are more details about cottage-building on the Sunshine Coast in the early 40s:
“In 1943, the war was on and plywood was in its infancy. My brothers had been beach combing in a boat called The Lindy Lou. There were building a tugboat in what is now Langdale, and Dick came out to see them on weekends. He had a dream to design a house. He had to float the lumber down from Williamson’s Landing, which is halfway between Hopkins and Port Mellon. The windows came up on The Union Boat.”
