Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told

by Carol Shields

  That silence scares me. I think it may mean the end of some of my long-term, much valued friendships, at least on some levels. We have difficulties sharing our successes; it’s hard to share the exhilaration of winning Professor of the Year with someone who is disciplining her child and washing the dishes while she listens. And when I’m lost in the minutiae of legal footnoting, my appreciation of the sheer elation over finding the perfect preschool is not nearly as enthusiastic as it should be. I may never connect with the physicality of their love for their children because I may never have a child. They may never connect with my woman-in-the-distance because she may not be important to them. But maybe what’s important is that one day I will.

  I have one eye trained on her at all times, and I am closing the distance. In the meantime, I continue my work, begin doctoral study and keep envisaging. And in between, there are flashes—fantastic, midnight, red-wine conversations that make me think no time has passed. My friends and I talk, for a while, the way we used to. We occasionally even watch our old soap opera, just to make fun of it over the phone. We all still hate the villain, we definitely do not want to work at the cosmetics conglomerate and we laugh together. I look down at my feet. There is the toe-ring. I have a toehold after all.

  A Place on

  the Pavement

  Debbie Culbertson

  My father holds my new second-hand bike steady on the cracked sidewalk in front of our grey stucco house. He has just come home from work at the sewing machine store. His bow tie is gone, and his white pressed shirt is open at the neck. I can smell du Maurier cigarettes and Old Spice as I climb onto the bike’s smooth black seat and reach for the handlebars. My father smiles as my feet find the pedals. Then I’m gliding along while he runs beside me, one hand resting on the back fender. I’m laughing and my hair is flying in the air while his stays Brylcreemed to his scalp. Suddenly he lets go of the bike, and I glide, wobble and bump over broken sidewalks, whirring past wide front porches, grape-vined gardens and rusty Chevys. When I stop, my feet dragging on the broken concrete, I turn and look back. He is gone.

  That fall, my father leaves my mother and disappears from our lives. My stay-at-home mother finds work in a canning factory, goes back to school and cries at night. There are no new school clothes, and the fridge is often empty. I make a promise to myself that if I ever have children, I will never leave them and will always be there to catch their backward glances.

  In my teens I pursue a kind of working-class normalcy. I am going to be a secretary, marry a nice boy and have a houseful of children. I take typing and shorthand, date boys who drive fast cars on back roads, cut classes to walk along the railroad tracks. Panic sets in as my eighteenth birthday draws closer. I want to be in control of my life but have created a situation where I will be as economically dependent on men as my mother has been.

  I become a model student. I study hard, cram four wasted years in high school into a few months. Although I am accepted into university, I cannot entirely escape, cannot reach for the ring without wearing one. At eighteen, uncertain about survival on my own, I marry my best friend. We become one of the thousands of young Canadian couples who survive on married-student loans in the late 1970s.

  When Jonathan is born, I’m in the second semester of my master’s degree. It’s a time when women play tapes of Beethoven next to their pregnant bellies and prepare flash cards for their infant children. I read Free to Be You and Me, tape National Geographic maps on the wall beside Jon’s crib and lay him on sheets printed with primary colours.

  It is the height of the second wave of feminism. I nurse Jonathan while writing papers on women’s history, rock him to sleep while reading Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. Sometimes he attends classes with me, zippered into a front carrier next to my heart. Later, we walk hand in hand to the co-op daycare where the faded names of 1960s children are still crayoned on some walls. As my son plays in the sandbox, I wonder whatever happened to the children named Moonbeam and Summer Skye.

  On a warm spring night, I leave Jon with his dad and walk with a thin corridor of women along Toronto’s back streets to protest violence against women. We wear black T-shirts emblazoned with “Women Unite, Take Back the Night.” I feel a kinship with the women who march beside me, as if we had cut our thumbs and mixed our blood, pledging a lifetime of protests together.

  In the summer, Jonathan sleeps in his stroller as I push it along in a massive Toronto peace rally. I walk next to an elderly woman who has been marching for peace since the 1950s, when there were only handfuls of protesters. “We were called names then,” she says. “Some of us got beaten up.” As we talk, a plastic bag filled with water explodes in front of Jon’s stroller. It has been aimed at us from an apartment high above our route.

  Some friends and I crowd into a packed lecture hall at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Mary Daly is the featured speaker. The lesbian feminist author of the new book Gyn/Ecology delivers a searing condemnation of those institutions she terms patriarchal—the church, the nuclear family and heterosexuality. Her solution is a radical kind of separatism—a women’s-only community, a kind of sanctuary and fortress against the dominant society. At the end of the lecture, she invites questions. I raise my hand. “What about women with sons?” I ask. A ripple of laughter runs through the crowd. “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that one,” she says with a broad smile.

  At university I encounter other lesbians. At first, I intellectualize my interest in them, treat my curiosity like a graduate school assignment. I stumble into a conference on lesbian sexuality fresh from my part-time job, wearing a blouse and skirt, high heels and panty hose. Among the sparkling scarves, blue jeans and flannel shirts, I am the odd one out.

  I meet a woman who has left her husband to be with another woman. In the process, she has given up custody of her young son. This shocks me more than the fact of her orientation. I am again seeing the empty place on the pavement where my father once stood. How could she give up her child?

  Then, I begin to understand part of the reason she may have made that sacrifice. I feel an overwhelming, unexplained need to separate myself from my husband and, sometimes, even my child; I want to see myself more clearly outside of the brass-framed photograph of the three of us that sits on top of my bookcase. That picture reveals a wife and mother. I need to know if there are other relationships that might define who I am. My husband and I separate, and Jon is sent back and forth between us like a laughing and trusting yo-yo.

  I date women for the first time. Susan, a tiny brown-eyed young woman I met at the sexuality conference, takes me to my first lesbian bar on Toronto’s Church Street. Until this moment, I have seen women dance together only at weddings, when elderly widows enjoyed a waltz or two together. But here, on a smoky, blue-lit dance floor, women of many ages are dancing as if their lives depend on it. Some are fresh from the overflowing typing pools on Bay Street, wearing short skirts and silk blouses, their thick hair teased into lions’ manes. Others stand with feet apart, cigarettes smoking between strong fingers, hair cropped short, wearing crisp cotton shirts and Levi’s. I don’t want to stare, but I can’t help myself. I watch the women dance and touch, my heart pounding and mouth going dry from longing, my beer getting warm while I hold on to it with both hands.

  A creamy white envelope comes in the mail. “Congratulations. You have been accepted into the doctoral program….” I am offered fellowships to study at a university in Evanston, just outside of Chicago. I leave Jonathan with his father and travel to the United States. At first it feels like a vacation, a release from responsibilities and a new freedom. The euphoria wears off quickly as I settle into the daily routine of seminars, papers and endless studying. Soon I am longing for my son. I remember the lesbian who gave up her child, and Mary Daly’s dismissal of any woman whose bond with her child is greater than her own desire. I stop dating the new women I have met, afraid of what it might mean for my son and me.

  The cost is h
igher than I expect. No more salty chicken dinners with Emilie in her Chicago apartment, while a block away the last train leaves for Evanston and Tracy Chapman spins out her love songs on the turntable. No more intimate intellectual conversations about “queer” politics with Kitty while she pushes at her glasses and uses the other hand to juggle the tilting tower of books she carries into our feminist theory class. Instead, I spend long nights in libraries, take solitary jogs along quiet back streets and make long-distance phone calls to a child who asks me when I’ll be coming home.

  At a local laundromat, a young actor starts a conversation with me as I dump my wet clothes into the dryer. He invites me to his opening night, and we begin a relationship that will last for the next five years. I become pregnant and we move in together. I put my feelings for women firmly into the back of our bedroom closet and take the eight-hour train ride back to Canada to reclaim my son. Now that I have a male partner, it will be difficult for anyone to claim that I should be barred from parenting by virtue of whom I choose to love. My new partner and I marry; I am once more tightly framed within an “acceptable” family pattern.

  By the time our daughter is born, my relationship with my husband is cold and strained. We move to Ontario, and our marriage slowly begins to fall apart. We often fight; he swears at me, throws chairs down the stairs, breaks the glass of a childhood picture. A short time later, Jon tells me that my husband has hit him; a hard slap that has frightened him and broken his trust. A friend asks, “Are you afraid of your husband?” When I realize that the answer is yes, I know it is time for me to leave.

  I begin to date women again. It is like returning home after being a refugee in a land where I was not welcome and would never feel at ease. With women I can again speak my own language, feel that stir of recognition and celebrate that, yes, I survived and isn’t it good to be among my people again.

  I meet Heather, a hazel-eyed strong-shouldered woman from Alberta. While we bathe together in the hot springs in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, her sweet voice reaches into me and calls out my spirit to meet her own. This time I do not turn away, do not deny the passion that draws me to her.

  In the summer of 1996, I move from Ontario to Alberta with fourteen-year-old Jonathan and nine-year-old Rachel. We begin a new life with Heather in a rural town a stone’s throw from the North Saskatchewan River. Together we buy a cedar house on five acres of aspen trees and pasture. A slough (Easterners call it a marsh) cuts through our land.

  Our move here brings a sense of peace and wholeness to my life. I take time to walk the gravel roads and sit with my feet hanging over our dock. Away from the steel and concrete of Ontario, I reflect on the twists and turns that have brought me to this place. I begin to accept myself as a lesbian and a mother.

  As I begin life with Heather, I know that some people will say I am placing Jonathan and Rachel at risk. They will argue that in our intolerant society, my children may be the objects of abuse because of their mother’s choices. Yet denying my own identity and submerging myself in marriage did not preserve them from harm.

  During our first summer in Alberta, Rachel makes friends with a girl who lives a quarter of a mile down the road. Like a New Age Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, they are inseparable. With torn butterfly nets slung over their shoulders, they go in search of minnows, discover salamanders under rocks and listen to the rattle of cattails and orchestra of frogs.

  One day, Rachel slams open the back door and tearfully announces that her new friend is no longer allowed to visit our home. She cannot come for sleepovers or share meals with us. After we calm Rachel down, Heather and I take a walk over to the girl’s house. When her mother answers the door, we are not invited over the threshold. The woman tells us that a mutual acquaintance informed her that we are lesbians. She is angry that Heather and I had not “warned” her about our orientation. Nothing we can say will shake the woman’s conviction that her daughter should not be exposed to “sinners” like us.

  We return home from that encounter, expecting Rachel to blame us for the loss of her first friendship in her new home. But it is Rachel who keeps the faith. “I don’t want to be friends with anyone who doesn’t like my family,” she says.

  Before fall arrives, we visit the large country school that Jonathan and Rachel will attend. We tell the principal that we are an “alternative” family and are concerned that our children may be subjected to the prejudice of others—teachers or peers. She reassures us with a smile, saying that she will not allow any such behaviour. We are filled with hope that Jon and Rachel will skim through school without a care, like the “whirligig” beetles that glide across the surface of our blue-green slough.

  Despite the best intentions of the principal and our own efforts as parents, we cannot prevent Jonathan from making his own mistakes. Within a week of starting school, he gets into a fight with another boy. We are confronted with the fact that Jon has used his fists to let other boys know he’s just as tough as they are. In our female-headed, pacifist household, how can we help him express his masculinity? We take Jon jogging behind Heather as she pedals her bike for miles along dirt roads. We buy him drums, and he starts taking music lessons. Better for Jon to “beat the skins” than fight with his fists.

  Jon and Rachel carry signs bearing the words “Hatred Is Not a Family Value” as we stand on the Alberta legislature grounds among the crowd of drag queens, pink-haired twenty-year-olds and office workers. We are all here to support Delwyn Vriend, a young man who lost his job at a local college because he is gay. The province’s human rights commission refused to investigate Vriend’s dismissal, claiming that prejudice against gays and lesbians was not covered in provincial legislation. He challenged that refusal, eventually taking his case to the Supreme Court. The justices agreed with Vriend, ruling that homophobia must be read into Alberta’s human rights laws.

  Unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruling is not enough for those who believe that it’s a sin to be gay. In letters that drip with condemnation and promises of violence against “sexual perverts,” they lobby Premier Ralph Klein to invoke the notwithstanding clause, a legal loophole in the Constitution that gives provinces the right to opt out of national legislation.

  In front of the closed wooden doors of Alberta’s stately Parliament buildings, speakers demand that the government refrain from overturning the Supreme Court decision. Our children laugh and cheer, but Heather and I, ever watchful, scan the crowd for any sign that words of hate might be transformed into action.

  The high school holds an open house when Jon is in Grade 11. He proudly takes Heather and me on a tour of his classrooms. One of the teachers asks him to introduce us. Without hesitation, Jon responds, “These are my two mothers.” The woman stares for a moment and then says slowly, “You can’t have two mothers, Jon.” He meets her gaze and says evenly, “Yes, I can.” The teacher is still shaking her head as we leave.

  Today, thirty-two years after my father disappeared from my life, twenty-year-old Jonathan has the same wide smile, dark hair and sea-blue eyes as the man who once ran beside my bike. He sits at the kitchen table, wolfs down a plate full of pasta and tells us about the rock band he drums for, his job as a short-order cook and his life as a university student. His long-haired, teenage sister sits beside him, laughing and teasing her brother.

  When Jon told us that he was moving out to live in the city and share a home with friends, a voice inside me shouted, No—you can’t leave! Then I knew. I no longer needed to protect and support him. I can let him go without letting him down. I can wave goodbye to my son. And this time, Heather and I will be there when he turns back to wave.

  We Are More

  Than Our Problems

  Wanda Wuttunee

  Memory: I’m in Fort Resolution, a tiny community of several hundred in the Northwest Territories. I awake to a hot, blue-sky summer day in July. The only place for toast is the pool hall up the dirt road, about a five-minute walk. I know how to blend in as a woman alone in t
hese communities—no makeup, nondescript clothes, low-key behaviour—so I’m a bit startled when all of a sudden there’s a young man on a bicycle beside me. I didn’t hear him coming. “Hi. You’re Cree, aren’t you?” he asks. No one has ever guessed my heritage so quickly. I think for a moment and point to my face—“Fat cheeks?” He nods. He balances well in the rutty road as he rides beside me. Just before I turn into the pool hall, he says, “If I don’t find someone to drink with soon, I am going to blow my head off.” All I can think to say is “It sure is a beautiful day. Enjoy it.” After breakfast, I go to the school to work with three locals who have a vision for themselves and their community. As part of a research project on economic development in First Nations communities, I am there to help these people get small businesses started so their youth have options other than the ones there for the young man on the bicycle.

  Another memory: Jacqueline, a young woman in Haines Junction, Yukon, has chauffeured me around for a weekend while I visit her community to help local people who yearn for small businesses. She is an artist and also works as an economic development officer. We’re staying at her family’s cabin. On this soft June evening just before the sun goes down, we can hear the rhythmic thumping of the grouse immersed in their mating rituals. An energetic granny is looking after the meals for the workshop. When Jacqueline tells her about the grouse and the thumping, the granny says with a twinkle in her eye, “You know what he is saying?” She starts flapping her arms and strutting, “I feel like chicken tonight!” Jacqueline’s laughter rings out in the warm evening air. Later, when she tells me of the devastating impact of the suicides in her family—one after the other, after the other—her personal courage and integrity astound me. After tears, we laugh again. Government statistics cannot measure the resilience of that human spirit.