This Is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

  It was the idea of the life I was supposed to have. It was everything that included the words should be, supposed to. Surrender those words and you are left with what is.

  Grief is in no way a blessing. But in some way, working your way through it may offer an opportunity to mourn so many other things you have hitherto been unable to. Things that have kept you hurt or small or angry. Old things that have determined how you encounter the new.

  13

  My daughter is punching the iPod with a determined finger. At three, she has her own playlist. She tells me what to download. Her most recent addition? Katy Perry’s “Roar.”

  “Dance!” she commands.

  And so we dance, each of us uninhibited in our expression around this little girl, each of us better known to each other than we could ever be in her absence. She has made us who we are: tigers, champions, mothers, grandparents, uncles, aunts.

  My parents leave. I put my tired daughter to bed in the big room at the front of the house that Miles occupied until a month ago. Miles and her partner, Teiya, and I drink the last of the wine and then I see them to the door with Tupperware full of leftovers. They live five minutes away: proximity to us being Miles’s one condition when they were looking for a place. She is no longer a lonely gay. Teiya wants them to get a dog. Miles, almost thirty-six now, is leaning more toward the idea of a baby. My daughter thinks her baby should be called Birdy.

  Tita and I are in the kitchen doing the dishes after everyone leaves. She has her own apartment downstairs, newly renovated, two bedrooms, one for her and her husband, one for their baby. She is six months pregnant, having conceived on her last trip home, and although they could not have predicted this at the time, Nico’s arrival is now within sight.

  I accompany Tita to her midwifery appointments, and my mother takes her to her ultrasounds. This baby will be part of our family. I will get the chance to enjoy a baby. And whatever name they choose to put down on the birth certificate, this baby will be known to us as Angel Cinderella. My daughter has picked up her Tita’s fondness for bestowing nicknames.

  I ask Tita if she is okay downstairs, whether she isn’t lonely.

  “I have been lonely for thirteen years, Mum,” she says.

  “Oh, Tita,” I say, putting my arms around her.

  “Thirteen Christmases on my own.”

  “Not the last three,” I say, hopefully. “Not anymore.”

  “Can you imagine, Mum? Sitting in the Tim Hortons on your own on Christmas Day. I don’t want to look anywhere, because I look over here and this guy is talking to himself and this way someone is twitching around and if I look this way someone says: Can you spare some change? I want to yell at him: Do you know how hard I work for this coffee?

  “But it’s okay,” she says. “I am in a better position than them. At least I am not crazy.”

  “You still have your mind,” I say.

  “I still have my mind,” she repeats.

  I picture my father later. I think of the stories behind these faces, of what led these men here. I wonder if my mother held on to that psychological assessment of my father that was done all those years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised. She is a meticulous filer of all vital information. She is the keeper of secrets, after all.

  14

  Two weeks before Tita is due to give birth her husband arrives from the Philippines. It is the coldest winter in twenty years. I watch Nico take his first breath after the whoosh of the sliding glass doors at the airport opens to the parking lot. He looks startled by the sensation in his lungs. Everything, everything must be shocking to him, but there is no time to gently acclimatize. Tita takes him to Chinatown to show him where to buy rice, where to buy fish and fruit and vegetables. She takes him to various government offices to get his paperwork in order.

  Nico has brought traditional herbs from Tita’s mother. She squats over half a basketball in which the herbs are burning, bathing herself in their aromatic smoke. Nico rubs snake oil onto his wife’s belly. Tita’s mother killed the snake herself.

  I am an anthropologist in my own house. The kind of anthropologist my supervisor long ago implied was to my detriment: immersed somewhere to such an extent that my sense of self was shattered by leaving.

  But this time, this is my life. This is my house. This is my family. I have no life elsewhere to return to. I have no other home. I seek no other.

  Tita goes into labour five days early. After twenty-four hours of slow contractions, the midwife arrives. Tita suddenly says she is ready to push. The midwife says that gives us just fifteen minutes to get to the hospital, and so we pack ourselves into her car. We don’t even admit Tita, but take her straight up to a delivery room: the baby is on its way.

  Tita lies down on the cot in a delivery room, and while the midwife is punching her name into a computer Tita gives one mighty push, and Nico and I can suddenly see a head. The midwife is snapping her gloves on, the backup midwife has yet to arrive, and Tita gives one more long and mighty push and that black-haired baby is born.

  Tita didn’t need any of us. She didn’t need prenatal classes or someone holding her hand or pain relief. She carried a baby and gave birth with the same practical and efficient skill she applies to everything. She made it all look graceful, in fact.

  Hello, Mama Tita. You are the strongest woman I have ever known.

  And hello, Angel Cinderella. I am your Tita. Your ate—your big sister—is waiting at home.

  15

  Two dozen Filipino-Canadian babies are being baptized by an Indian priest in a small urban church. A street festival is happening outside; the steel drums of a calypso band underscore the proceedings, adding a certain surreality, and a levity I know will bother Tita. This is not her regular church—she prefers the Catholic church in our old neighbourhood because of the solemnity of its priest and its aged Chinese population. In all her years abroad, on her own, she has never surrounded herself with Filipinos, but this is both the church Tutu’s cousins attend and a church that doesn’t require godparents to have baptismal certificates. Miles and I, atheists of questionable orientation, are to be Angel’s godparents. Tita and Tutu are devoted Catholics, but their religion includes us.

  Never having been to a christening, I had thought it was all about protecting the child from the devil. Only once I am standing there, Miles and I the tallest and whitest, in front of the pulpit, do I understand that they are ensuring their daughter’s belonging in the house of God. That this is an act of communion, of community. That to raise a child with God is to protect her, in some senses, from the kind of existential loneliness that plagues some of us. Perhaps that is the devil.

  My father used to quote Marx: religion is the opium of the people. There was nothing of the people about him. He condemned weakness, human reliance on religion or the state. It didn’t leave my brother and me much room to consider a spiritual life or life as part of a community. We were raised not to belong.

  At the christening my mother wordlessly hands me an envelope. I stuff it in my purse for later, knowing what it contains. She’s found that profile of my father.

  “Mr. Gibb’s strong intellectual abilities are supported by an equally strong feeling of superiority,” I later read. He is “so convinced of his problem-solving ability that he doesn’t make use of a review mechanism that a more restrained, humble individual would normally use.”

  The psychologist goes on to characterize my father as “aggressive … restless and impatient to achieve a position of dominance,” and says that “seeing himself as exceptionally bright and superior, he feels that life and other people should treat him that way. He is demanding, outspoken, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued; he makes use of humour, but in a biting, cynical, sarcastic way which, I feel, displays contempt for people.”

  There is more. “A self-sufficient loner … Mr. Gibb wants to run his own show with relatively little interference from others. He is apt to set very high standards and be quite intolerant of people who cannot live up
to them. In assessing the motives of others, I find that he is overly suspicious and overly judgmental. In a supervisory role, I feel that he would be a cold, over-bearing dictator.”

  The report is dated November 1971, just three months after my mother, brother and I joined my father in Canada. I wonder how a psychologist would diagnose such a man today. The DSM-II, the edition of the diagnostic manual at the time, listed homosexuality as a mental disorder, but had no entries for any number of later-identified personality disorders that might have applied to my father.

  Would a label have helped? I don’t know. All I know is that there is no greater supervisory role than that of being a parent. And that there is no room for God when a man believes himself to be one.

  I wonder, too, whether this psychologist could have predicted that Mr. Gibb would become a man so afraid of the world, of the people in it, that he would disappear.

  As a consequence of my father’s parenting, I find faith in God one of the most challenging of imaginative leaps. I have long envied people with that capacity. I have written characters whose faith is the most important thing in their lives. Since my daughter was born, I have gone to the Quaker meeting house on the occasional Sunday to sit in silence among others. I sit there simply as an invitation to possibility. As a reminder to keep my head and my heart open.

  After Angel’s christening, we’re invited to a massive Filipino buffet at the home of one of Nico’s cousins. Nico hands me a plate. “C,” he says. “You are with us in everything.”

  16

  It is spring, finally, late and long-awaited spring. On a Saturday morning, Tita and I pack our daughters into my car for the drive out to my parents’ place in the country. Nico is riding ahead with my parents in their car, the first time he has left the city. He arrived in the dead of winter just three months ago and now he is a father to a baby eleven weeks old.

  I imagine spring through Nico’s eyes—the sudden and improbable burst of colour that erupts from barren ground and naked trees—seeing this transformation for the first time. Of learning the rhythms of this place, his daughter’s country.

  I remember how at seven and a half months pregnant I’d gone kayaking alone on a cold Northern Ontario lake. The bulk of my belly had been awkward, but the rest of the ride was easy, effortless even—sublime. I remember looking at the shore, its dense wall of pines, a landscape that has always struck me as monotonous and unwelcoming, if not outright hostile. I could picture my child seated between my stomach and the paddles, taking it all in for the first time. I suddenly felt an acute awareness that this was her country, the landscape she would inherit: its water, its seasons, its sky, its pines. It was a visceral awareness, a felt understanding of place and belonging that had completely eluded me before.

  After a mammoth lunch in the country, we fill the wading pool for my daughter. Lolo retires to watch golf, and Nico helps my mother out in the garden. He is a farmer, learning the names of new plants, how to distinguish nascent flowers from weeds. Tita plays with my daughter in the pool, her own daughter strapped into the BabyBjörn that I inherited from another writer and mother four years ago.

  I am sitting in the shade of the porch, doing the crossword puzzle. It was over two years before I could resume doing the puzzle, three before I could take any real pleasure in it.

  I look up at the scene in front of me, this tableau of people engaged in various tasks, all together in this particular place, in this exact moment, because of one little girl. She is at the heart of an even broader community of consistent and loving adults, adults flawed and damaged in the various ways so many adults are, all of them trying to raise a child with a healthy sense of herself. We are doing our best for her. She is the seed from which all this has grown.

  My daughter chatters to her Tita. Nico saws the dead branches off an unruly juniper, stopping when he discovers a nest—four eggs of an impossible blue cradled in the undergrowth.

  Doves are cooing in the background. The sound reminds me of England. In the garden of the house we lived in just before we left—Starlings, it was called, appropriately enough—my father kept doves and pigeons.

  There are sounds and smells I have carried with me, more sensory than literal memories of the place I was born. I grew up in this country. I remember when we moved into the first house we owned, a lush August day in the early 1970s, when we ate Kentucky Fried Chicken in a backyard full of dandelions. It was a small wood-frame farmhouse circa 1900, with a big front porch and a sloping red roof. It needed a lot of work, but my father, who was not only without much money but arrogant and cheap, was fortunately also resourceful and talented.

  There was a time when he put those talents to good use. The house needed rewiring, replumbing and reroofing. There was a crawl space of a basement, the house wasn’t insulated, and the garden was a jungle. For the five years my father was with us we lived in a building site. There was a perpetual film of sawdust on the floor, and there were always paintbrushes decomposing in stinking mason jars in the sink.

  My brother and I loved living in a building site. My mother preferred the results to the process. My father eventually completed most of the major jobs, though we could always see our breath on winter mornings because the house never was insulated, and I thought it was perfectly normal to share a house with squirrels and raccoons, the skittering of their nails across the ceiling a source of comfort.

  My father transformed our backyard—all 30 by 175 feet of it—adding a new back porch with steps down to a brick patio and a lawn, beyond which a stone path wound underneath a grape arbour suspended between a playhouse (where I had my first kiss) and a swing set he built for us. Past that there was a gardening shed (where I had my first cigarette) and two concrete-bound beds—one for vegetables (tomatoes, zucchini, squash), one for rhubarb and strawberries and fruit-bearing bushes (raspberry, gooseberry and redcurrant). Finally, a row of ferns lined the stone cemetery wall (the cemetery where I almost had sex for the first time).

  I have a thousand stories to tell my daughter. And through those stories, I can reclaim some of the happier moments of my childhood. If I were to string those moments together, I could tell a very different story.

  One day my daughter might tell someone that there used to be peacocks in the cemetery, a small detail of family history she might choose to adopt as her own. Perhaps belonging lies in these sorts of details, their accumulation and continuity, the meanings we assign to them, the stories we pass on.

  I have a job to do as a storyteller: we all do. To tell stories that make us knowable to others, most importantly our children. To give them the tools to help them know themselves. And perhaps we come to know ourselves differently as a consequence.

  This is the circle that could never quite be complete. One where we are truly bound for better or worse, in all sorts of complex and beautiful ways, where we become ourselves in relation to each other and carry something of the other—visceral, embodied—within us. It is a story with a different ending. A story without an ending at all.

  And this, I know, is happy.

  postscript—august 2014

  It is the end of a late-summer day and Micah and I are sitting on some rocks in the middle of a community garden near Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. This is where he comes to forage, for apples and blackberries, zucchini, tomatoes, pumpkin. He stir-fries whatever vegetables he finds, eating them with rice from a twenty-five-kilogram bag. He is learning this land, adjusting his diet with the seasons, making a crab trap to catch some of summer’s bounty of Dungeness.

  He takes what he needs, nothing more.

  A few months ago, desperate and out of work, he found himself on a fishing vessel off the coast, trapped for weeks with addicts and ex-cons, angry, troubled and volatile men getting through this stretch of tough, dirty work in a tough, dirty life in a daze of heroin.

  Once, my brother was a boy trapped on a farm with the unstable and unpredictable man who was our father. “There was just nowhere to run” is how
he spoke of it.

  It didn’t take long on that ship before he became one of those men. By the time he stepped ashore, he had lost the will to live. He went to bed for six weeks. Lost thirty pounds of muscle. And then ended up in hospital. From there, to detox and then rehab.

  Now he is sitting on a rock in a garden telling me that he has to live simply in order to be safe. He has to avoid making too much money. He works long hours on a construction site as a day labourer, earning minimum wage. When I saw my father in Calgary all those years ago, he was doing exactly the same thing. Different men, different reasons, same place.

  Micah leads me to a tree. “Apricots,” he says, full of wonder. They were just raining down. Incredible.

  I point out the nasturtiums. “You can eat those,” I tell him.

  “The flowers?”

  “Make yourself a fancy-pants salad.”

  He laughs. We both do.

  acknowledgements

  There are friends and acquaintances too many to name who have brightened my world at different moments along the way. Forgive me for not listing here all those acts of generosity and kindness and limiting individual thanks to those directly related to the text.

  My thanks to Tita, Miles, Lola, Vibika, Diana, Tim, Clare, Sonia, Naoko, Scott and Dr. B for reading and commenting on various drafts; to my friends and colleagues at University College for giving me the space in which to write for a year; to Ellen Levine for representing me; and to Kristin Cochrane, Brad Martin, Scott Sellers, Lynn Henry, Tim Rostron, Shaun Oakey and everyone at Doubleday Canada for their tremendous support. I reserve the greatest affection and gratitude for my editor and friend, Martha Kanya-Forstner, with whom I’ve had the privilege of working now for almost a decade and a half, and who always pushes me to delve deeper than I think I am able to go.