Are you cringing right now? Because that one gets me every time. So gross. But underneath this disgusting story there is also a glimpse into my father’s personality. Whatever situation he was facing, he’d make the best of it. With a smile on his face, if at all possible. He’s got the best sense of humor, my father. We tease each other constantly. If I have a bad start in an important race, he’ll say something like, “You weren’t exactly in a hurry there, huh?” Not to needle me, but to defuse the situation. To let me know that he knows I messed up, and that I know that he knows . . . and that it’s no big deal. The idea, I guess, is to learn to shrug off a disappointment or a setback. It doesn’t matter if it is a big deal, like falling short in a meaningful race, or if it’s just a small thing, like finding some leg hairs in a pot of macaroni and cheese. It can’t touch you or hurt you or change you. Unless you allow it to touch you or hurt you or change you.
It’s all a matter of perspective, and to listen to my father, there was never a problem we couldn’t get past. My parents are a lot alike in this way. They both had a hard time of it as kids, and when it came time for them to be parents they knew exactly what kind of environment they wanted to create for their child, not because they wanted to model their own parents and childhood but because they wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes that had been visited on them. For the longest time, in fact, Dad wasn’t even sure they wanted to have children. Like I said, his father could be abusive. Again, mostly verbal abuse, but if you press my father on it he’ll admit that his father sometimes hit him and his younger brother Doug. Mom’s father never hit her, but he was an abusive, unreliable drunk. He’d hit Mom’s grandfather a bunch of times. And, once, when Mom was about six, he hit her grandmother so hard she fell backward and broke her back against a cast-iron radiator. She was in the hospital for six months! Mom remembers that she was so upset by the sight of her grandmother, lying unconscious on the floor, she didn’t know what to do, so she ran to the kitchen to fetch a glass of milk from the fridge. In her little-girl head, this was a way to help.
Clearly, neither one of my parents had the kind of positive, nurturing childhood that leaves young couples thinking they might want to have children of their own. They’d each grown up feeling different, less than. They looked at their friends’ families and wondered why they couldn’t feel the same kind of love, the same sense of security. What this meant was that without really realizing it, without really talking about it, my parents had come to their own conclusions about how and when and whether they’d step into the role. All of this happened before they ever even met, on the night of that mismatched double date. In their own minds, they already knew. They would not have children until they could be the kinds of parents that their parents weren’t. They would not have children until they could provide a comfortable lifestyle. They would not have children until they could be present and wholeheartedly available. If you would have asked him as a young man, my father would have told you he was all but certain he didn’t want to have a child. And if you would have asked my mother . . . well, she’d been told early on that she couldn’t even have children, so in her mind it wasn’t an issue. She learned this devastating piece of news on that trip to the gynecologist when she was just a child herself, when she took her sister to see their family friend for a little help with the birds and the bees.
You see, the facts of life that found my mother on that trip to the doctor were not at all what she was expecting. Read on and I’ll explain.
My Daddy’s-Little-Girl Moment
WINTER PARK RESORT—WINTER PARK, COLORADO
This is a story that’s been told and retold so many times in my family, it’s like a game of telephone. You know the game, right? You whisper a phrase to the person next to you, and then she shares it with the person next to her, and it moves around the circle until it reaches the last person, and at this point it’s unrecognizable. The name Michael Phelps might come out sounding like Mark Spitz after it’s been whispered and misheard a few times. You get the idea.
My father’s got his version of this story, told and retold from his own perspective.
My mother’s got her version of this story, told and retold in a once-removed way, because she wasn’t there at the time.
And I’ve got my version: I was five or six years old. Or seven or eight, depending on the storyteller. We were skiing at Winter Park, which was one of our absolute favorite things to do. Mom was waiting for us back at our lake house. She wasn’t much of a skier, but my father and I used to spend these great, great days on the mountain. It was our special time together. He’d always been a strong athlete, and a big-time skier, and he said he looked forward to the day when I could maybe keep up with him. He taught me to ski, and as my ski instructor he took the do-as-I-do approach. That was just fine with me. I was supposed to follow along, and for the most part, I did. There was a problem with this approach, however. You see, skiing has a lot to do with physics. Even I knew that at four or five (or six or seven). If one person’s skis are longer than another person’s skis, those longer skis will go faster and farther. If one person’s heavier, the heavier person will go faster and farther. It doesn’t matter who’s a better skier. All things being equal, it will come down to physics.
Now, a lot of dads, they’ll hang back when they’re teaching their kids to ski. And to my father’s credit, he did just that, but only in the beginning. He wanted to be uphill from me, in case I needed his help. He wanted to keep an eye on me, so he could give me pointers. Once he could see that I was able to make my way on my own, he went on ahead and waited for me at the next fork in the trail, or at the bottom. We had this whole routine whenever we skied together. His idea was I would either keep up with him or not, but it would be on me. Plus, he wanted to ski, same way he’d always skied before he had me, and since that way was all-out, he would sometimes just go for it. He didn’t do this on every run, mind you, but when the conditions were right and he was feeling it, off he’d go, and if the trail didn’t splinter off in some other direction he’d just keep on going.
Early on, I couldn’t exactly stay with him, but I could usually keep him in my sights. He’d never let himself get too, too far ahead of me, though. He’d always make sure we could see each other. But on this day there was fresh snow and the sun was shining and the slopes were relatively empty, so he was really cruising. To hear him tell the story, he was just charging down the mountain, as hard and fast as he could go, and it never once occurred to him that I was keeping pace. In his head, he knew I was fine, and he assumed I was trailing far behind and would take a while to catch up. The trail didn’t break off in different directions, so he just kept on going, knowing I couldn’t make any wrong turns. He was a hard-charger, like I said, and here he was, hard-charging his way down the mountain, really feeling it, expecting to have to wait for me at the bottom. But I actually kept up with him the whole way. I was right behind, doing some hard-charging of my own, staying right at his heels.
It was the most exhilarating thing, to be chasing my father down the mountain in this way. To me, it was a race, and I turned on the jets the way I’d learn to do when I was swimming and trying to catch the girl in the lane next to me if she jumped out to an early lead. To him, he was just gunning the engine, having fun. He wasn’t racing—at least, he wasn’t racing me. I knew it would be a big surprise, once he saw me at the very end, so I was careful not to get too close. I skied off to the side, just out of his view, and when he did his little kick-stop at the end and turned to face back up the mountain to look for me, he couldn’t spot me at first.
There I was, right off to the side, giggling.
When we got back to the house, he told Mom the story. He was just bursting with pride. He couldn’t believe I’d managed to stay with him the whole way down the mountain. He knew the laws of physics as well as I did. He knew how unlikely it was for a little kid to keep pace with a grown man who knew how to ski.
He said, “Would you just look at her.” Like he was somehow seeing me for the first time.
When I tell the story, though, I’m not so surprised. I knew I was matching him turn for turn. I knew he wouldn’t beat me down the mountain. The whole way, he was within reach. But what I didn’t know was how genuinely delighted he’d be to find me at the bottom. What I didn’t know was how he’d look at me, from that day forward, not so much like a little kid as like a relentless little dynamo. And what I didn’t know was how I’d now see myself, whenever I’d catch my reflection in the mirror. Like someone who could set her sights on a goal and make it happen. No matter what.
TWO
MORE THAN ONE WAY TO MAKE A FAMILY
So here’s what came out of my mother’s visit to that family-friend doctor all those years ago. Remember, she’d taken her sister and hoped the gynecologist would help with a little biology lesson. While they were there, my mother happened to mention to the gynecologist that she’d never had her period. She didn’t really think anything of it, but she was thirteen years old and all her friends had gotten their periods and she was becoming concerned. The doctor was not concerned until he did an exam, and what he found might have sent Mom reeling if she’d had a nurturing parent or grandparent at her side to help her absorb and understand the news.
There was a problem with her uterus, which hadn’t developed properly. That’s why my mother hadn’t gotten her period—and according to this doctor, that’s why she never would. It was a little unusual for a doctor to be examining a thirteen-year-old without a parent or guardian present, and to be sharing this kind of heavy news with her directly. But like I said, he knew the family, knew there was no one at home to help my mother through this. So he treated Mom like an adult and gave it to her straight. His daughter Jean was Mom’s best friend—years later, they were bridesmaids at each other’s weddings—so he spoke to her as he might have spoken to his own child.
Mom didn’t quite know what to make of this news, but the way she processed it was that this was just another way she was different, less than. She understood the doctor when he said she could never have children, but at thirteen she couldn’t really grasp what that might mean. It all seemed so far away, she always said, like it was happening to someone else, or off in some distant future, so she just kind of collected her sister and the two of them made their way home. For the longest time, she didn’t even think about this doctor’s diagnosis. The not-having-children part, at least. As for the not-having-her-period part, she was just relieved to have an explanation. For years, she would lie to her girlfriends about it, because she was embarrassed, didn’t want to stand out or stand apart in any way, but she managed to push the not-having-children piece to that place deep, deep down in her consciousness where she didn’t have to dwell on it.
This is another one of those stories from my mother’s childhood that tears at my heart. Really, to have to deal with something as big as this all on her own. It’s unthinkable. But my mother is one of the strongest people I know. Even as a kid, she was resolved. You have to realize, she’d been the “adult” in her family for quite a while by this point. Her mother had been separated from her at a time in her little life when she probably needed her most, and then she lost her grandmother on top of that. Still, she found a way to process this devastating news, and shoulder the weight of it, and set it aside for later. It was always there, she says now when I push her to talk about it, but in a back-of-her-mind sort of way, never front and center. That is, until she found a way to reconnect with my father after that initial double date and knew in a couple of heartbeats that he was the man she’d wind up marrying.
Sorry, I don’t mean to get ahead of their story. I suppose I should go back and tell what happened during Dad’s tryout with the Toronto Argonauts. Turned out he tore up his knee, effectively ending his football career. This was a disappointment, even if making the team was probably a long shot. So he decided to go back to school to earn his MBA. That’s the thing about my father—if one goal is just out of reach, he picks himself up and sets off in pursuit of another. It’s amazing to me, really, that my father was wired in this way, coming from such a deep blue-collar background, but he was determined to build a better life for himself, even as a young man. Or maybe he was tired of all that Kraft macaroni and cheese!
Saint Mary’s didn’t have an MBA program, so he’d enrolled at Dalhousie University, which was where my mother was going to school, and they ran into each other soon enough. In the back of his mind, he knew Mom was at Dalhousie, but he wasn’t thinking along these lines. And yet it’s one of my favorite parts of the story, the way they reconnected about a year after they’d first met. Dad was applying for a part-time job with campus security. Mom was a nursing student and the vice president of the student union, which happened to oversee the student security force. When Dad came out of his interview, he had the job. Plus, an invitation to Mom’s Nursing Ball. “It wasn’t exactly clear to me if the date was a condition of my employment,” Dad always jokes.
Three weeks later they were engaged.
Now, unlike me, my father is not someone you’d call a hopeless romantic (although he is kind of hopeless), so I’ve always loved this part of their story, because apparently they were sitting around one day and Dad looked over at Mom and said, “You would make a really good wife.”
Mom wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by this, so she just said, “Um . . . thanks, I guess.”
A couple of minutes later, Dad looked over again and said, “So what’s your answer?”
At this point, Mom was completely baffled. She’d had no idea my father’s comment was meant as a question, and never in a million years would it have occurred to her that it was the question. What was she supposed to say? After a while, Dad got his act together and just came out with it and said, “Will you marry me?”
So Mom said, “Oh, is that what you were asking me?”
Dad didn’t even have a ring. When he tells the story of how he proposed he always justifies this by saying, “I couldn’t even afford dinner.” (See what I mean? Hopeless, right?)
My very favorite part of their whirlwind courtship story came next. Right after Dad proposed, and right after Mom said yes, he scooped her up into a great old bear hug. One thing about my father, he’s a world-class hugger, and here all 250 pounds of him lifted all 105 pounds of my mother off her feet and enveloped her in a giant embrace. There was one problem, though. He hugged her so hard, he ended up cracking two of her ribs! Can you imagine?
Mom married him anyway, but she knew she couldn’t start a life with this big bruiser of a football player without telling him what that gynecologist had told her all those years earlier. It all came back to her, now that she’d found someone she wanted to share her life with. However, she didn’t think she could tell my father in person because she was worried she’d start crying. All that time, she’d carried her disappointment silently, but now that there was someone to share it with it felt to Mom like it would break her. And the last thing she wanted was for Dad to stay with her because he felt sorry for her. So she put everything down in a three-page letter and left it for him on his desk at the campus police station. They’d never really discussed children, so Mom had no idea how he’d react, but in the letter she’d said she would totally understand if this was not what he wanted. Basically, she gave him an easy out, said he didn’t ever have to see her again, if that’s what he wanted. Oh, she said she loved him, and that she knew he loved her, but if not being able to have a child was a deal breaker, they could part as friends, no hard feelings.
One story I heard for the first time as we were putting together this book: Dad wasn’t sure what to do with Mom’s news. He read the letter with a heavy heart. He knew it must have been a difficult letter to write. His gut told him how to respond, but his head told him to think it through. He actually went to one of his professors for guidance.
DAD: There
was a fellow I used to talk to, the head of the business department. I guess you’d call him an adviser. And when I got that note from D.A., I felt I needed some advice. So I went to him and said, “Look, I’m not close to my father, I don’t really have anyone I can talk to. I really love this person, but she just told me she can’t have children.” I gave him the whole story, and he didn’t even stop to think about it. He said, “Walk away.” I said, “What?” I don’t know what I wanted to hear, but I wanted this person to at least give it some thought. He said, “Walk away. This is a lifetime decision. You’ve been seeing this girl for only a few weeks. You’ll regret it someday. Better to just move on now.” If you want to know the truth, it was probably the last thing I expected to hear from this man. He was somebody I’d come to admire, and I still admired him, but I could not agree with him. It wasn’t the kid piece. Who knew where our lives would take us? Who knew if we even wanted to have kids? No, it was the D.A. piece. It had been only three weeks, and already I loved her to death.
Relentless Spirit Page 4
