This Is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

  7

  I am keeping my promises to Tita. We are in the Philippines with her family for a month. She lives in my place, and now my daughter and I are experiencing something of hers. We’re bridging the gaps between us in all the ways I know how.

  My daughter is feeding the chickens, having taken this on as her job under Tita’s mother’s direction. She is playing ball with Tita’s nieces, picking up Visayan words, swimming naked in the sea. I am getting to know Tita’s parents and siblings and, more importantly, Nico. He is a beautiful man, both physically and temperamentally—a gentle soul, a devout Catholic, a dedicated son to a mother of thirteen children. My daughter calls Nico Tutu. Tata and Tutu. I call them the Brangelina of Bohol.

  This trip is an investment in a shared future. Theirs and ours. Their future, Tita’s and Nico’s and the children they will eventually have, is not here. I understand why she had to leave; it’s not a big or complicated mystery. Life here is tough. It is all subsistence farming, with little prospect of getting beyond that. The work is relentless, and the result of all that labour? Rice on the table. With a bad harvest, not even that.

  We talk as much about Toronto while we are here as we do about what is going on around us. My real estate agent is forwarding me listings. Among them is what might be the right house. I show it to Tita before forwarding it to my mother back in Toronto. My mother goes to see the house for me. There is not enough of a signal here for me to view a virtual tour. My mother loves the house and she knows I will love it too, and so I buy a house over the internet. The details of the offer are negotiated via Facebook chat between an office in Toronto and a bamboo-roofed internet café on an island in the middle of the Visayan Sea. It’s a snowy February night there, a hot and humid February morning here.

  I make a great leap of faith over a lot of distance. And I’ve just spent a lot of money. There will be no more travelling for a good long while. It is time to stop running, time to settle down.

  I show Tutu photos of the house where we will all live, including, in the not-too-distant future, him. “Thank you for trusting my wife,” Tutu says. “Thank you for your good heart.”

  Tutu’s limited English forces us both to speak plainly. “I love Tita,” I tell him. “She’s my family. And that means you are, too.”

  8

  We have moved into our new house in the middle of the city. The new house is actually a rambling old house with rambling-old-house problems. It’s daunting—both the financial fact of taking on this house on my own, and the work it requires. I miss my brother, his enthusiasm for such projects and his handy ways. I am loathe to tell him we have moved from the house that he was such a part of making into a home. Here, I must start again.

  First off, the electricals need replacing; all the knob-and-tube wiring has to be torn out, just as in the old house. I hire the same electrician I hired two years ago, more for sentimental reasons than anything. His assistant, a Ugandan man whose own children are back home in Kampala until he can afford to sponsor them, looks me up and down when I open the door. He’s never seen me un-pregnant. He takes in my girl, no longer a baby.

  “Isn’t God great,” he says, shaking his head.

  He and his boss are kind men, both fathers. My daughter calls them “man” and “two man” respectively. She fills their toolbox with broken chalk and shells.

  Once the electricals have been replaced, Miles and I replaster patches of wall and paint most of the house with the help of a couple of friends. Miles will move in at the end of the month. I do not yet have a separate apartment—that will have to be built—so in the meantime, she’ll take the big front bedroom on the second floor. I worry a bit that privacy—hers and mine—will be an issue, whether we’ll each have the room for independent lives, what will happen if either of us begins to date. I hope we’ll find a way to talk about such things; I cannot say it comes naturally to either of us.

  There is work to distract us in the meantime. We fix a leaking radiator, then replaster a ceiling damaged by said leaking radiator. We learn how to force reluctant water through the radiator system so there is heat on the third floor. We replace a downspout from an eavestrough. We dig three-hundred-pound boulders out of the dirt in the backyard by putting all our weight onto the handles of two spades and rolling them onto a tarp. We take instructions from elderly Portuguese neighbours and videos on YouTube.

  Our neighbourhood is busier, and so are we. Tita takes the egg to a new drop-in school, and there they make a wider and more diverse circle of friends. It’s a longer walk, with many more distractions along the way. Miles is busy with her thesis. She has a deadline and she’s determined to reach it. She writes in a coffee shop for several hours every day, then gives her brain a break, watching horror films on her laptop in the late afternoon.

  I am teaching but still failing to write. During my sessions with Dr. B, I talk about the writer I used to be when I was young and life was full of chaos and tumult. It was intense, instinct-driven, risk-taking, passionate and often painful, and that was reflected in my writing. I wrote letters and journals, fiction and non. I wrote to communicate with people, for purposes of comfort or relief or rebellion, to work out something complicated or because language had taken hold of me and simply demanded a paragraph, a poem be written.

  Writing once fulfilled so many needs that could not otherwise be met. I am bereft without it, particularly when it could serve me in the very essential way it has done for most of my life.

  Dr. B says that I can write to her. That generosity cracks open my chest. It touches that place underneath where all the feelings that have yet to be put into words are trapped. Somewhere between sternum and diaphragm; a place very raw, very red.

  Soon enough, words are pouring out, two winters’ worth of ice thawing overnight: the grief and that tight knot of anger lodged in the pit of me becoming unstuck. Unmoored, though, they threaten to destroy everything. The feelings are bigger than me, stronger. I am afraid of their intensity; I am afraid of going crazy, of doing harm, of standing on a bridge plenty high enough, when this is no longer, if it ever even was, an option.

  One witness, though—one reliable and loving witness with the capacity to hold—can change what you are convinced will be the inevitable outcome.

  9

  My friend Agitu comes for dinner with her daughters. We first met when she came to Toronto as a refugee over twenty years ago; now she is a social worker in California and the mother of two lovely and extremely articulate teenagers. It is our friendship that led me to Ethiopia. Her story of escape from her country, the stories of her brothers, all of whom spent time in prison, all of these things led me there. Agitu is part of who I am, indelible.

  Over dinner, we are reminiscing about her first year in Canada. I have visited Agitu in California, but her daughters don’t know this place, where their mother’s new life began.

  She says she spent much of her first year in Toronto in a daze. She was plagued by nightmares, terrified of the police, startled by loud noises and thoroughly depressed by the Canadian winter. All these years later she has a name for what she was experiencing then: post-traumatic stress disorder.

  “English allows you to talk about suffering,” I remember her saying to me once. “It is shameful to do so in my language.” I knew how true this was, having spent a year in Ethiopia by then; the number of young men I knew who had been imprisoned and tortured under the Mengistu regime, their bodies testament to this, who would say nothing about these years.

  We had been at her kitchen table in Palo Alto, her daughters young, watching Barney, her husband, a man she had met in Addis as an undergraduate but been separated from for years, hunched over his computer. We were recording her life story. We were doing it for her and for her children. A long, unstructured interview that took place over two weeks. Tape after tape, which I transcribed when I got back to Toronto.

  Being able to put your experiences into a narrative gives meaning to the life you have lived. It can
allow you to make sense of the things that have seemed the most senseless and cruel by providing some context—even if that context is nothing more than: It didn’t kill me. I am alive to tell this tale. I am here, where I was once there. There is a story, possibly a universal one, of the passage between there and here.

  Agitu’s visit tonight makes me think about all of this. I met her after returning from Egypt. I was a mess. Agitu was even more disoriented. Here we are now, twenty-four years later, talking as mothers. I cannot compare my experiences to hers, but I can say that for all the respective disruptions we have experienced in our lives, there is this one simple certainty: we will be mothers for the rest of our lives, because of these girls, our daughters.

  Agitu leaves a present for my daughter long after she has gone to bed, a white monkey with big blue eyes. It feels wrong somehow—a white monkey with blue eyes from a black woman from Africa—but then I remember the stories Agitu used to tell me about growing up at the foot of a mountain, where the colobus monkeys used to call out in the night, her love for them and the nature that surrounded them.

  My daughter explodes with excitement when she sees the white monkey in the morning. She calls it Magitu and clasps it to her chest.

  10

  Grief is the overwhelming result of so many compounded losses that it is impossible to process as a whole. So you don’t. You spend a thousand hours in therapy talking about the thousand things that hurt, one by one, in excruciating detail. That mass of grief holds the loss of the person you loved, the idea of them, the person you were with them, the life you shared, the friends and community and extended family you shared, the idea of who you were together—it challenges the very idea of your life and yourself.

  And it collapses time: the present, the future and the past. It has the effect of a stone thrown into water. The stone descends, plummets through your past, stirring up all the associations that inform your experience of the present. This grief you experience in the present is a giant that has been fed by all past losses—the unexplained departures, the abrupt endings, the lack of resolution, the things that have gone unmourned for reasons of stoicism or denial or anger or inexplicability.

  And while it plunges you into the past, the splash above radiates in ripples, travelling farther than the eye can see. It encompasses things far beyond the known, swallowing up all the possibilities one has yet to even consider. It has a way of erasing the future before you’ve even dreamt it.

  I would have tried to conceive another child some time ago if my circumstances had been different. I can’t pinpoint the moment that desire started: it feels like it has always been there, perhaps buried under the mountain of grief, perhaps even a good part of the grief without my being aware of it; that loss of what you have even yet to imagine.

  I was certainly aware of the sadness I felt in March around what would have been my first baby’s second birthday. I think of him as my lost child. I wish I could recover that loss. That loss that might have been the miscarriage of my marriage as well. I wish, somehow, I could begin again, at least begin with the awareness that I am doing this on my own. Of my own choice.

  Tita senses my preoccupation and asks me what’s up.

  “Just do it, Mum,” she encourages me.

  “But I don’t think I could do it without you.”

  “Don’t worry, Mum,” she says. “I will be with you.”

  “No, Tita, you’re not going to be a nanny forever.”

  She has her own ambitions. She’s been thinking about going back to school for early childhood education. Working in a daycare. Perhaps starting a daycare of her own.

  It would seem I need only the slightest bit of encouragement, though. I lost my partner, not my ovaries. I find myself making an appointment to see the fertility doctor. Just to ask her if I’m insane.

  It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was spending five or six dark mornings of every month awaiting my turn at this clinic. In one line to have a needle poked into a bruised arm, in a second line to have an ultrasound to measure the swollen follicles, the burgeoning egg. That waiting room, the air full of a hundred unspoken stories: tales of failure and frustration, desperation and desire. Women of every hue. And several men.

  Hormones, eggs and sperm were all that mattered here, not the you and your story. I felt the quiet pain in the room. No one spoke. Everyone avoided eye contact. No one wanted to be seen. Chances were you would see someone you knew.

  I did sneak a few furtive glances. I wanted to know whether I was old, too old to be doing this. And now I’m even older.

  I asked my mother what she thought of the idea of my having another child.

  “You’d be making life very difficult for yourself,” she said, speaking from experience and never being one to spare me. I am, to my detriment perhaps, rather more romantic.

  “Am I insane?” I ask the doctor.

  “Possibly,” she says, “but let’s check it out.”

  And so once again I’m waiting to have blood drawn and an ultrasound. I’m on my own in this room in the early morning as I was always on my own in this room in the early morning. I never asked Anna to come. I thought it was unnecessary for us both to have to get up so early in the morning, and left her to sleep. Being in the room this time is an entirely different experience. There isn’t someone who could be here with me. It is a small difference with huge significance. I feel light, optimistic. I don’t feel pain in this room. Everyone here must be possessed with hope. They wouldn’t be here otherwise.

  The test results are all normal. Some part of me had hoped my body would relieve me of having to make a decision. It may still relieve me, but for now the choice to proceed or not is mine. In all likelihood I won’t be able to conceive or hold on to what might be conceived. I’m not interested in any kind of fertility treatment or intervention.

  Perhaps I am simply here in this room in order to rewrite the story. To make it my own, regardless of the outcome. Perhaps I am simply here in search of an end.

  11

  My mother has accompanied my daughter and me to a writers’ festival on the West Coast. We’re spending a night in Vancouver so we can see Micah and Ara. Lolo is taking Tita and Miles out for sushi tonight in Toronto, while we will be having dinner at my brother’s apartment. This will be the first time Ara, my mother, my brother and I have all been together in thirty years.

  My mother is having a wardrobe crisis. We are in our hotel room getting ready and she’s asking me if she looks fat. She is seventy-three years old and has never been fat in her life.

  We take a taxi to Micah’s apartment. He is waiting outside, smoking a cigarette, hanging with his dog, the Frenchie who is the new love of his life. He looks good: he looks healthy and happy. He is even-tempered and his hep C treatment is working. He’s wearing shorts and sandals. I haven’t seen him in anything but jeans and boots since he was a kid.

  Ara is there, too, smoking and leaning against a brick wall, looking like a tanned and shaggy-haired old hipster. “Holy crap” is the first thing he says when he sees us getting out of the cab. “Can you fucking believe this?” is the second, as Micah leads us up to the second floor of his apartment building. The dimly lit hall is half a mile long and smells of old dog and decades of smoke. Renting here apparently doesn’t require a credit check.

  He has a good-sized if rundown apartment with a view of the railway tracks and the mountains beyond. Sunlight floods the rooms. My brother has the obligatory bachelor-black leather couch and giant-screen TV. He has planted runner beans and cabbage in window boxes hanging off a balcony the size of a single bed. He is on his knees, grilling a feast for us out there on a tiny butane-fed barbecue. Eggplant, peppers, onions, mushrooms, B.C. salmon, Alberta steak. He doesn’t even drink a beer.

  “What happened to your beautiful long hair?” Ara asks my mother as they sit down together on the couch.

  “I cut it off thirty-three years ago,” she says. “You were there.”

  They both laugh
.

  He is attached to an image that didn’t even exist by the time he left. Perhaps we all do this to greater and lesser degrees. Perhaps we need to, in order to keep people with us. Dr. B has given me language for this. In the absence of someone, even someone who has caused you great injury, the very idea of them can still be self-sustaining. You hold on because you are holding on to something that keeps your sense of self intact. You have come to know and understand yourself in relation to this person. You can let go only when your sense of self, your cohesion, no longer depends upon the idea of them, an idea that remains for a long time inextricable from the very idea of yourself.

  12

  I tried for two months to have a baby. If I’d been younger and coupled, I would have tried longer and harder, but in my circumstances this was as far as I wanted to go. It gave me an answer, an ending I needed.

  Perhaps it is only when enough individual losses are articulated and mourned that a sense of grief can really shift as a whole. The process that leads you there is cumulative, though largely imperceptible. Subtle indicators along the way are the only measure, but the shift itself I experienced as a single moment. I will even dare, at the risk of sounding New Agey and flaky, to say I saw it happen.

  In the middle of the night, my three-year-old daughter asleep beside me in my bed clutching her monkey, Magitu, a cloud of white particles appeared beyond the foot of the bed, shimmered in slivers of streetlight coming in through the wooden slats of the blinds and then dissipated. I am a skeptic by nature, and I’ve never experienced anything like this before. And yet I entirely trusted that it was real. I knew these white particles had come from me. I dared myself to breathe in deeply in order to test whether this expulsion was really physical: if it was, there should be much more room inside me. I inhaled deeply and inflated like a balloon.