by Erin Davis
Twice during Lauren’s childhood, Rob gathered up our daughter, her suitcase, a little TV/VCR combination that could run in the car, and a few toys and headed south to Florida, just the pair of them on a two-day drive. I was unable to take March Break off (ratings were taken at that time) and so the inseparable duo took advantage of the free time to visit grandparents who were wintering in northern Florida. They made wonderful memories and ate at restaurants I might have tried to talk them out of (probably way more than I ever heard about)—places with “waffle” or “all you can eat” on the sign. One year while Lauren was with her dad on a road trip, I was hosting CHFI listeners at a Backstreet Boys concert in Toronto. She should have been there! But when it came to a choice between her daddy and BSB, BSB would have come in second. Those road trips just helped to strengthen the bond between Rob and Lauren.
Admittedly, not every family trip was a success. One Christmas, we decided it would be magical to wake up in the Rocky Mountains. We flew to Edmonton, Alberta, took a train to Jasper Park Lodge and spent a week there. Despite the opportunity to ski with her dad on Christmas Day, share a glass-topped train ride through the snow-dusted Rockies and skate with her tentative mother on a silvery lake with a glorious mountain backdrop, this wasn’t one of our daughter’s favourite family memories. She had arrived at the age of wanting to be where her friends were, and that was not in the mountains. So much for that attempt at a Great Canadian Christmas.
Another trip that began with high hopes but ended up being a distinct “meh” on the scale of teen excitement was one we took to Hawaii. Rob and I decided to treat my parents and Lauren to a stay at a condo in Kona. The crashing waves, dramatic sunsets and staged luau at a nearby hotel paled in comparison to the internet in the condo building’s lobby, it seemed. Nice try, folks. Reluctantly, we soon gave up on trying to plan family vacations. Besides, we’d really had more getaways than we could have hoped for, given how busy my work and freelance life was.
That is, until it wasn’t busy at all.
Perhaps that’s why one trip stands out as a shimmering chapter in our family’s story. It came against the backdrop of a very dark and rare period of unplanned unemployment (you’ll read more about this later). It was July 2004, and my second consecutive summer off. I had a fill-in position at a new radio station lined up for the fall, so we decided to take advantage of this period without alarm clocks and mandated bedtimes. Apart from the previous summer, when we didn’t really feel much like travelling after having suffered the shock and humiliation of my firing, I’d never had a vacation that lasted more than two weeks. While my one-time partner Mike Cooper spent most of his career avoiding a vacation longer than a week, as he (wrongly) feared that was all the time it would take station management to replace him, two weeks was the minimum duration I needed to wind down from a highly stressful existence, and then just begin to replenish and rejuvenate in preparation for my return to work. One particularly short-sighted boss warned me that if I took longer than two weeks, no one would remember my name when I got back. How grateful I was to have the opportunity to prove him wrong. When I actually returned to hosting a full-time radio show after more than a year off the air, we were astonished when it became obvious through radio ratings statistics that audiences had come back with me. But despite this time of uncertainty and concern about our long-term future, taking the opportunity to travel as a family and see some of the world together was irresistible. It was time to stop obsessing and take advantage of the gift of time that we had been given.
After scanning numerous travel brochures, we booked two back-to-back bus tours of Europe, cramming in visits to sixteen countries in the space of one month. Lauren was about to enter eighth grade and wasn’t yet interested in boys, the nascent internet or anything but exploring the world with us. It was the trip of a lifetime—hers and ours. Much to her annoyance (and amusement), I’d wake her up every morning playing Ringo’s drum solo from “The End” on her backside. In part thanks to some small hotel rooms, we were as close as three people could be, this REaL family of ours. Except for her gradual burnout on touring churches (as they did for many travellers, the letters ABC came to stand for “Another Bloody Cathedral” or, alternatively, “Another Bloody Castle”), it was all we could have hoped for.
It was a true gift to us, that month together, on so very many levels. Later, as her high-school studies opened up more of the world to her, Lauren would say, “I’ve been there!” when new locales and their histories were introduced. We were grateful for the opportunity and the ability to have taken that trip. It served both as a foundation for Lauren’s future and as a perfect example of taking lemons and making limoncello.
Travelling together was just one way that we tried to seize the day when it came to life with our daughter. We also sought musical experiences that we hoped would become memories to last a lifetime. Lauren had been a Beatles fan since the days we rocked her to sleep to their songs, so it was a culmination of all of our dreams when we steeled ourselves for the exorbitant second-hand ticket prices and bought front-row seats to a Paul McCartney show in Toronto. I’d been unable to buy more reasonably priced tickets on the floor fairly close to the stage, so I bit the bullet. It was one of the best decisions of my life.
As I stood arm in arm with Lauren, tears ran down my cheeks when Sir Paul played “Penny Lane” during the preshow sound check (attendance was a privilege that came with our front-row seats). Another frill that came with the VIP package we’d bought was vegan dinner before the show. It was tasty enough, I suppose, but our appetites had really been whetted for a quick appearance by the man for whom we’d adopted Meatless Mondays in our own home. Alas, it was not to be. It’s probably for the best: I likely would have turned into a blathering version of Chris Farley’s interviewer in a famous Saturday Night Live skit: “So, remember when you were with the Beatles? That was awesome!” Just as well.
Later, as we sat only a few feet from one of the greatest songwriters and showmen of our time, Paul made eye contact with and winked at Lauren while he sang. As if to prove to us (and everybody else there) that this was all really happening, the giant screens flanking the stage flashed our beaming faces as we sang along with the outro of “Hey Jude.” While we’d end up regretting that moment of unexpected exposure the next day, that night our feet didn’t touch the sidewalk as we made our way home through the busy Toronto streets. I expect that sharing that experience with us meant as much to our nineteen-year-old daughter as she meant to us. When she was ten years old, she’d written in a school project:
Since I was two years old, I have been trained to say that the Beatles were the best band in the whole wide world! Later in my life I realized they were. I stand by what I say. While other kids my age are into the latest bands, I’m booming “Strawberry Fields Forever” on my stereo.
I will continue to love the Beatles for the rest of my days. I will play the Beatles for my children and their children and their children. The Beatles are a true legacy that needs to be recognized by more people today. The Beatles will rock on in my heart for an eternity.
As if to remind us once again that there’s always a price to pay for the gifts we’ve been given (even though in this case the tickets were not gifts, but the ability to afford them most certainly was), I received an email the morning following the McCartney concert. A man who was sitting far, far back in the massive Air Canada Centre wrote me a letter dripping with disdain, and in a tone so angry it made me shake as I read it at work in our radio studio. Because we’d been shown sitting in the front row, the man assumed that I hadn’t paid for but had been given those precious tickets—or, worse, that we were occupying seats meant for our radio station’s listeners. He couldn’t have been more wrong, and I let him know that in an email response sent shortly after I’d read his. We had paid dearly for those seats and—until he’d written to us—had felt nothing but joy for having done so.
Wrong as it was, I let that man’s incorrect assumptions and
misdirected anger at being, as he later put it in a letter of apology, “on the outside of the bars looking in” taint the perfection of that night. I know full well that letting it bother me to this day is my own fault, and that I’m forgetting the “it’s his movie” lesson don Miguel Ruiz taught us in that tiny gold-mine of Toltec wisdom called The Four Agreements. I should forgive—or at least forget—someone’s taking an exquisite, golden moment in our family’s life and tarnishing it with his own dark and bilious thoughts. Let’s just say that, as with so many other things, I’m working on it. And those efforts to set aside the vitriol of strangers would be strenuously challenged again, in ways Rob and I couldn’t have imagined, during our darkest days after Lauren’s death.
From the early years of her education, I tried to share with our daughter The Four Agreements and many other words of wisdom. I would often tell her that the things people call her or think of her are none of her business, and that their perception of her is not truth. If I needed to really make my point, I would use a line that I often thought would make the basis for a good children’s story one day—a story I would call You Are Not Purple.
At its heart was a metaphor I would share with Lauren. If someone at school said that she was stupid or that her name was funny, I would ask her, “Are you purple?”
After the mandatory eye roll, she’d say, “No . . . but . . .,” and I’d ask her again. And again.
Until she got what I was saying: “They might as well be saying that you are purple. You and I can both plainly see that they’re wrong, because you are not purple. So why would you listen to what they have to say?” I hope that helped her; I’d like to think she would have tried to pass that same lesson along to her own little boy.
There are many lessons that I’ve learned through years of therapy and searching for ways to survive in a business where you are targeted for having an opinion, for being successful, for being a woman—just for being you. Just as people can like or love you without knowing you, they can also dislike or hate you: the yin and yang of the universe, as always. And it was this Buddhist-based philosophy of lightness and darkness working together that we tried to instill in our daughter. Most of all, though, I hope we were able to show her the importance of giving, of volunteering, of showing compassion and empathy. We only wanted to raise a good human being, someone who made the world better by being a part of it. In keeping with Lauren’s spiritual but not religious upbringing, we attended yoga classes together, hands touching during the quiet moments of the corpse pose, Savasana. On long car rides to the cottage, we’d sometimes discuss the “never judge” mantra I tried (mostly in vain) to adopt when I dipped my toes into the popular teachings of Deepak Chopra. She got used to the smell of Nag Champa incense in the house and cottage, the ever-present candles and India-influenced music on the stereo that meant I was probably in a good mood, centring myself (or something). Lauren and her dad waved goodbye to me at least a half-dozen times as I embarked on retreats in Sedona and Tucson, Arizona, and Essex, Connecticut, where I tried to seek answers from within (as well as above) and equip myself with tools to grapple with and ease the stress, anxiety and depression that would so often come home to wipe their grimy boots upon my heart and mind.
There’s little doubt that depression runs like a rivulet of thick, black sap through the veins of my family tree. My maternal grandfather, an accomplished western landscape artist, suffered from dark mood swings—so much so that he built a studio apart from the small house he shared with my grandmother in the flood-prone lowlands of a small Alberta oil town. There, he could escape to paint, to listen to his music, to read his Zane Grey western novels, to score musical parts for his dance band and to brood, coming out occasionally for meals and brief, terse conversations with my tough-as-nails grandmother.
Just like her dad, my mother was an accomplished painter. Also like her father, she was prone to depression and mood swings that were alleviated in her later years when she saw what antidepressants did for me and other members of our family. Before I learned about serotonin levels and heredity possibly being the cause of Mom’s moods, I attributed the darkness in her to the fact that she was so often a single parent; my father was frequently away, leaving Mom to raise four daughters on her own. How she and so many other Armed Forces wives in the same predicament didn’t end up stuck in the bottom of a martini shaker is beyond me. But she knew that between parenting and her job as a registered nurse, she had no time for that kind of escape—or, really, much fun at all. Our somewhat peripatetic life of being transferred among provinces and even countries left Mom without a strong social network. Prone to introversion, she didn’t make friends easily. She was often alone, seemingly disappointed in her life and depressed.
As you might imagine, that made growing up around our mother a challenge: Which one of us—me, one of my three sisters or our often-absent father—was she angry with? What had we done to incite it? And would it be better to disappear until her mood passed, or to try to find a way to make her happy? Being raised by someone who can be emotionally unpredictable puts a child in the position of Junior Storm Watcher: Are there clouds forming? Which way is the disturbance moving? And how do we best avoid being affected by whatever is coming our way? My best tool was humour.
I’ve come to realize that Mom’s tendency toward occasional emotional darkness, which was likely as prevalent within her DNA as her blue eyes, and my inherent need either to stay under her radar or make her laugh helped hone a sense of humour that would serve me well in both my career and my own future survival. So did being the third of four children, constantly trying to come up with new ways to get my parents’ attention. I wasn’t alone in these attempts, and this built a kind of division-forming rivalry between my siblings and me. Whether by design or accident, my sisters and I didn’t grow up supporting and loving each other; instead, we competed over who could earn the highest marks or the loudest and most numerous accolades. It was a no-win situation: even if you came out on top—and each of us did, in our own ways and times—there was little recognition that you’d done so. What were you going to accomplish next? If you achieved 90 percent, what happened to the other 10 percent? I thought that was a joke or a cliché until Dad asked if we wanted to be passengers in a plane in which the pilot only knew 90 percent of how to land. Good point, but . . .
The effort on my parents’ part at equanimity among the offspring was still going strong well into our adult years. A clear illustration of this came in 2015, when the Toronto Blue Jays invited a few Rogers media personalities, myself included, to join our dads in a Father’s Day discussion about parental pride. My father, flown in from several provinces away, answered the producer’s question about why he was proud of me by saying that he had four daughters of whom he was equally proud. He listed off their accomplishments (and, eventually, my own) as I sat there sinking into my seat. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed or disappointed; I just knew that—after all of the time, effort and expense they’d put into getting Dad to the Rogers Centre to film this bit—they weren’t getting the tape they wanted. Dad had spent his entire fifty or so years as a parent trying to distribute whatever praise there might have been on an equal basis. TV cameras or not, I was still only one of four: seemingly nothing less and nothing more. Having had only one child, I can’t say whether I’d have been any different.
I believe it is every parent’s hope to improve upon the methods by which we were raised, and perhaps be the mother or father we wish we’d had. I like to hope I would have encouraged each child’s fulfillment as an individual without nurturing a sense of competition. Is that possible, I wonder, or is it in a child’s nature to try to outdo a sibling? As I say, I cannot know.
* * *
WHETHER my own mom and dad nurtured our sibling rivalry or it arose on its own, perhaps it was because of that ongoing struggle to stand out that each of us has excelled in her own way: my eldest sister by five years achieved firsts as a woman and musical conductor in the Canadian
Armed Forces and is now a fully accredited gemologist; my next oldest sister, three years ahead of me, has battled systemic lupus erythematosus since her midtwenties with success and determination (and got to sing with her choir at Carnegie Hall!); and my younger sister by three years achieved rock star status in the field of sales and marketing. We all worked hard in our attempts to make our parents proud, but we fell short when it came to building close bonds with each other—bonds that for so many siblings come, well, naturally. My mother’s greatest wish in her later years was that her “girls” would get along. And, in truth, we did, for the most part, and continue to do so to this day. We just aren’t super-close—reverberations of childhood bitterness on many of our parts, I’m guessing. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why, on several occasions in her teen and adult years, Lauren looked at the conflicts that arose among my sisters and me and expressed gratitude that she was an only child.
Despite those occasional exclamations and her insistence from such an early age that she did not want siblings, Lauren wasn’t always happy being a “limited edition.” We were fortunate that she had a second cousin five years her senior who would gamely go along with us for trips to the cottage, playing the role of big sister. Lauren never wanted a younger sibling—just an older one! All of the benefits without the conflict? Quite a great arrangement, we thought. Whether it was an occasional would-be older sister or experiences we hoped would be indelible, Rob and I gave Lauren everything that we could, without going so far as to “spoil” her (or so we hoped). Our mantra was that if we were going to say “no” it had to be for a reason, and not just “because we said so.” We tried to parent her with reason, understanding, discipline and mutual respect, but not with fear or deprivation imposed just for the sake of authority. We taught her that actions always have consequences and that the feelings of others should always be considered first and foremost. We were also adamant that she should never, ever take for granted the many gifts and good fortune with which our family had been blessed. And that awareness extended to her own expectations.