We never spoke of it. I never brought it up, and neither did she because she was a kind woman. Luckily, she didn’t fire me.
It was also at the Star that I spent a few months pinch-hitting for the book editor, who was on leave. I enjoyed the work but it came with a windowless office under fluorescent lights. Unacceptable! I was an outdoorsy girl and simply couldn’t function without daylight, even though I should have been grateful I wasn’t out there toiling in the newsroom with everyone else. When it came time to hire a new book editor, they gave me the courtesy of an interview.
I breezed in and began kibitzing with the interviewing editor. “Just two things,” I said,“there’s no way I can work in a windowless office, and I wouldn’t consider any salary under. . . .”And I named a ridiculous figure, I think it might have been $18,000 a year. This was 1975, remember. An arts position. The lips of the editor across from me twitched as he suppressed a smile. “Well, the salary starts at $24,000,” he said.
I was also fired from one of my first jobs, as an editorial assistant for a small publishing house. I thought I was doing fine,writing long, intensely articulate letters of rejection to the authors in the slush pile. But there were money issues and some office politics; the easiest resolution was to eliminate my job. The editor who hired me was kind about breaking the news. Unfortunately, I was inexperienced in being fired and I didn’t know that when this takes place you are not supposed to show up the next morning. I thought it would show character to work the following day to wrap up the projects on my desk.
I was sitting there dutifully typing when the editor came into the small office we shared.
“What are you doing here?” he said, possibly worried that I might never leave. No. It was just that I didn’t understand the etiquette of being fired.
Being hired has its unwritten rules too. Which my son has figured out. At 27 he is more job savvy than I ever was.
In studies of workplace satisfaction, the bottom line isn’t the size of the salary or the amount of responsibility you wield. It’s the sense of agency and being able to measure your impact on a project. When the job at hand is motherhood and the project is “assisting” your son as he looks for employment, sometimes the best strategy is the most unsatisfying one—to lay down tools.
Or enlist his father. Boys want more guidance from their fathers anyway. And way less from their mind-reading mothers.
The Other Shoe
“Sometimes I think our whole family should just shut up.”
– Casey Johnson
OUR SON and a friend, Adrienne,were on their way to spend a few days with us at the cottage. It was mid-August, and the days were getting shorter. After dark, when they were late to arrive, I headed down the gravel road to the sweet spot where I can usually get cellphone reception. I was going to call him to make sure all was well.
The “cottage”is a small cabin in the Laurentians we’ve been renting for the past 10 years. There’s no one else on the crescent-shaped lake except for us and the owners of the property, Anne and Arne, who live down the road with their two kids, Sara and Daniel. The lake sits on top of a hill, once volcanic, and backs onto miles of forest reserve land. Over the years the owners have become friends, and during his Montreal years Casey would spend the odd restorative weekend with them, chopping wood and hanging out with a family who do stuff without writing about it.
This is where Brian and I spend our summer holidays and relax. Casey loves the place too. But when all three of us are there, in the one small cabin with a spare bed in the loft, there’s no escaping family tensions. Sometimes this is where they get played out.
Last year Brian and Casey had their showdown, talking for hours at the end of the dock. I felt a bit guilty that I got off scot-free. But the next summer, the other shoe dropped.
On the road I saw the approach of his car headlights and scampered back toward the cabin, embarrassed to be caught punching away at my phone. I saw by how he braked and jumped out of the car that my anxiety had already, in two seconds, annoyed him.
“Were you planning to meet me on the highway?”
“I was just coming out here to call,” I said sheepishly. Then we went inside, where he regaled us with stories of the grand old Laurentian cottage he and his friends had just visited. He was full of energy, having just swum three kilometres down their lake and played a game of tennis. Now he was under our tiny roof again. I watched him from a distance, hoping this extroverted shine wouldn’t wear off under our parental gaze.
A few weeks earlier, I had sent him one too many messages about some music website I thought he might be interested in. (Attempts at hip mothering are generally a bad idea.) I had the feeling that this summer the time had come for my smiting. Everything I said and did lately seemed to rub him the wrong way.
The next morning, Anne and Arne and their kids were going for a walk, on a new trail they’d made through the woods, to the cliffs. It was early (my version of early), I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and wasn’t up for a trek.
“I’ll catch up,” I said half-heartedly.
“I doubt it,” Casey said. Not that he cared that much if I came along; it was the bullshit factor that bothered him.
Everyone headed off into the woods.
I ate some toast, put on my trail shoes, and ran through the wet grass, trying to catch up to the group to show him that his mother was a better person than he thought. I went the wrong way up the trail, but it was good to be on the move. At the top of the cliffs, I stopped for the never-disappointing view of the dark blue mountains to the north. Then I heard the snap of branches. Their son Daniel on his mountain bike thundered by, followed by the dog, everyone else, and Casey.
“You see,” said Anne, when she saw me coming toward them, “she did make it after all.”
“Was Casey disparaging me?” I said jovially.
“Yes, he was; he said you’d never catch up.”
“But I did,” I said, falling into step behind Anne.
Brian was the only one missing; he was eating a leisurely breakfast back at the cabin, free of ambivalence or guilt about such outings.
That weekend Casey was looking at us through son-goggles and seeing wall-to-wall neuroses. It’s true, the older you get, the more gargoylish all your mannerisms become. Just the way we both get into the lake: either standing thigh-high in the water for a very long time while waving the arms before pushing off (me) or standing on the dock, peering up at the clouds, waiting for a “window of sun” to dive in (Brian). It reminded me of a habit my father had; he would come through the front door and fall to his knees to pluck lint off the rug. More fodder for amusing stories about my family, for friends. Just as our habits are for Casey. But it also hurts when your own warm son starts viewing you through the other end of the binoculars.
It had been a frustrating year for him. He had worked on several ambitious proposals that had disappeared into the ether. I didn’t help matters when I tried to talk him into an internship with an institution that had already turned one project of his down. I was trying to make the point that you have to be persistent and not take rejections too personally.
This is advice I have never been able to accept myself.
Nevertheless, I pressed on. I talked, Adrienne knitted.
“Remember how your mother always saved your high-school textbooks in case you became a teacher instead of a writer?”Casey said, scowling at me as he lay on the too-short couch in our cabin. “How it really annoyed you? So, don’t do that. Don’t keep giving me belligerent advice about what I should do with my life. It’s all kinda tenuous right now, everything I’m doing, and I don’t really need the extra pressure of you saying, ‘Have you thought about broadcasting college?’”
Later in the day, he went for a long swim and then lay on the dock. I was sitting near him in a white plastic chair,with a book in my lap, not quite reading. The mergansers swam by, leaving little V’s behind them.
“It’s probably delusional,” Casey mused
, “but I wouldn’t mind being a pilot. Or maybe a bush pilot.”
I did not cite grim statistics about the dangers of bush piloting. I did not point out the years of tedious training required.
“That could work,” I said.
Everything was up in the air for him that weekend: his Montreal sublet was about to end, and the prospects for work in that city’s Anglo marketplace were not looking good. At the kitchen table, he sat at the laptop scrolling through Craigslist. Then out of the blue an email arrived from a friend in Toronto who had a room to rent, right away.
Moving to Toronto would mean more job possibilities and the company of old friends. He’d be closer to home, which might or might not be a plus. But it would require turning another new page in an already turbulent year.
“When does she need to know?” I asked.
“By Tuesday.”Two days.
“So go down and check out what’s available in Montreal, then make a decision, call her.”
A frown. “I’m not sure I want to pull up stakes so quickly in Montreal.”
“But it’s perfect, the apartment’s in a great location.”
“The rent’s $650.”
“That’s nothing for Toronto.”
More frowning.
“I’m trying to be more patient about making sure I make decent decisions, rather than barking up the wrong trees.”
“Well, that makes sense.”
I shut up. Hung the towels up and straightened the books on the side table, took the bananas off the window sill so they won’t go all black and mushy (again).
Then I went on about the internship one more time.
“Don’t reject it out of hand,” I said, “just because a woman in another department said no to something else.”
He looked impatient.
“Lots of people apply over and over, and sometimes persistence pays off.”
Adrienne, a visual artist who works at a library, was still knitting and enduring our conversation.
“I applied 14 times for my job,” she chimed in,“and eventually I got it.”
I could see that Casey was getting angry but I persisted. I didn’t just want to be blandly supportive for the sake of keeping the peace. I thought that although he had been more than diligent about applying for jobs, he needed to make some plans, soon, for the coming year. And if he didn’t have any, then I would push a couple on him, even at the risk of upsetting him.
“I don’t want you to be reflexively negative about things you haven’t tried yet,”I said. “Why can’t you be more receptive to things? I have some good ideas.”
“Yes, but you think your ideas are better than my ideas.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Well, some of my ideas are good.”
Although it was chilly and the wind was picking up, he went down to the dock, stood in the water for a time, and then pushed off, doing his strong, measured crawl to the middle of the lake. He had taken to doing marathon swims, sometimes an hour long, to help purge the frustrations of being in limbo and being with his family.
This was new. I could feel a complete rejection of me and my every opinion radiating off him. It was necessary and understandable, him not wanting to fall back into the embrace of the family. And I was being relentless. But I still found it bruising. I felt silly and crone-ish. I remembered my own grandmother, when I was four years old, flapping her apron and saying,“Take care! Take care!” as I slid down the banister. Now I was her.
Unspoken anger filled the cabin. I sat in the new glider-rocker I had just found at a yard sale, autistically rocking back and forth, unable to concentrate on anything. Casey lay on the couch, apologizing for being edgy but still edgy. With an arm over his brow, he tried to sleep. Adrienne knitted. Brian retreated to the bedroom, where his computer was set up. Dusk arrived. I felt mortified and sad. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and propel him down to the dock, look up at the stars, and say,“You have made me angry too. You’re stubborn and you think all my advice is stupid. But it’s not, and when you continue to not know where you are headed, it’s hard not to rush in with our suggestions.”
The night of our argument, I went to bed angry and fed up. Fine then, I thought pettishly, blow off the support and helpful perks of your parents. Make your own way, stay out in the rain. I laywith my head burning on the pillow, vowing to never send him a helpful email again.
And for once, I stopped worrying. His life was his problem. Good luck to him.
The next day when I was on the porch, he came out and sat beside me. I apologized and promised (again, but with new resolve) to stop with the work advice. He said he was sorry for being so touchy. He didn’t need to add that this had come at the end of a lousy year for him,during which he had worked hard for little money and had been ill for weeks on end.
I remembered my post-graduation year of panic attacks in banks and subways, the same year I was dumped by my first big love, then quickly fired from my second job. I realized that this is just part of the story of your twenties, but it was tough to see my son going through it too.
Anne and Arne were scheduled to do a roofing job on another cottage the following day and they asked Casey if he felt like giving them a hand. Working at something as opposed to thinking about everything seemed like a good idea, so he agreed. Brian and I were not disappointed at the prospect of having the lake to ourselves for the day.
Every summer, in August, there are usually one or two afternoons that feel unusually still. You can sense summer turning on its axis. One or two flares of red leaves begin to show up among the trees around the shoreline. These windless, hot days feel like a gathering before the season tips toward fall.
Brian and I spent most of the day on the dock, covered up with hats and towels under a clear sky and an intense sun. I thought about them working on the roof, in this heat. I was glad not to be there. We went up to the shade of the cottage in the afternoon and took advantage of our privacy.
Late, around 8 p.m., the car came up the road and dropped Casey off. He looked pale and complained of nausea and a headache. They had decided to keep on working and finish the job in one day,but it was hellishly hot on the roof, and he had sunstroke. Or heat exhaustion, or heat stroke—I knew the differences among those three were important, but I couldn’t remember what they were.
Casey went up to the loft and lay down. His face and neck were flushed but his skin was dry and clammy. Ever since Mexico, his tolerance for heat had diminished. I gave him lots of water, and then Brian and I walked up the road to have dinner with the others.
During dessert we got a text from Casey, but it didn’t make any sense:“Not feeling . . .” something something. I walked back down to our cabin. He was lying up in the dark, a bit deranged and delirious, his skin fiery to the touch. “I’m not feeling top-notch” was what he had tried to text.
I got some cold towels and put them on his head. I thought about where the nearest hospital was and whether we owned a thermometer. I was back in that familiar place, the calm, alert, mom-on-call place.
There’s an extra mattress in the loft, so I slept on that, a few feet away from Casey. I checked his forehead during the night. His skin blazed away but didn’t sweat. Sometimes he woke up, and I would give him water, and he’d drop back into sleep. He seemed grateful I was there. At a certain point, around dawn, his body began to cool down again.
The next morning, three hummingbirds began to trisect the air like lasers, zooming in on the feeder that hangs outside our window, then darting away. Hum,hover, sip, retreat. I borrowed Arne’s long tree clipper to prune away some of the ferns and foliage that were coming between us and the lake. Casey slowly made his way down the loft staircase, and said he thought he might be able to eat something. The heat spell had passed.
During the day, we played Scrabble (Brian won, as usual). Casey tried to get certain “Japanese”words by us. Because CBC radio features prominently at the cottage,we made up a
song about the new morning host, trying to find all the rhymes for “Ghomeshi”(“He’s no Joe Pesci . . .”) and recorded it on the laptop. It sounded pretty good. We got our laughter back.
Casey came up with an idea for a movie that would require everyone in the audience to wear sunglasses. He worked on the story while I took notes. “What’s at stake for the characters?”Brian reminded us. “There has to be something at stake.” We went back and forth, developing the plot, getting excited about it. Then came a swimming break, after which I made a peach crumble. At dusk, invisible bugs began to pucker the surface of the lake. One fish jumped, a sudden silver flash.
“Don’t forget to send me a copy of those notes,” Casey said before he climbed the ladder to the loft.
26 and 99
MY 99-year-old mother is dying. No one could argue that this is surprising or wrong, but I doubt that her age will subtract from the fact of her death. The flame of life either burns in someone or it has gone out, and one moment can’t be confused with the other. I told myself that this wasn’t anything to make a big fuss about and that dying will be a relief for her. But of course, it’s your one and only mother who is vanishing. There’s no getting around that.
She’s been in long-term care now for almost three years, most of that time immobilized in a wheelchair as her vision continues to fade. Her great intelligence remains, but the focus of it often wavers and blurs. Sometimes she is confused and calls me her sister; sometimes she tells us that her long-dead father came to visit and hung the painting of flowers above her bed. Other times she is on the ball, caustic and more searingly honest than anyone else in the room.
I’m thinking she will die at any minute. But although she is profoundly weak, barely able to push the words out when she tries to talk, she keeps taking another breath. The body just wants to go on living, the way a dog wants to run. Her physical presence in the bed, even though she scarcely moves, is still powerful, almost radiant, like Precambrian rock under tremendous pressure. The glossy cheekbones stand out, the eye sockets are deeper, a rosy colour, and her face, strangely unlined, looks carved and iconic. “Like a face on a totem pole,”Casey said after one visit.
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