by Laurie Gough
But Quinn wasn’t transforming the idea of death into anything universal. Death had hit him too hard. Instead, he was responding to death’s cold hard certainty in a different way: he was shutting down.
At the wedding the next night, Quinn surprised me by dancing. He was dancing all over the floor with his cousins and aunts, jumping up and down, hugging everyone, uncharacteristically extroverted. This was a new side to him and I was partly thrilled, partly wary. When the music got too loud, his aunt Nancy suggested we go out to her car to get a bag of hand-me-down clothes for Quinn. “I want to come, too!” said Quinn. I found his enthusiasm odd since Quinn isn’t especially interested in clothes, especially clothes four sizes too big for him. It had just started raining hard and the three of us ran through the parking lot toward Nancy’s car. When we got the clothes and started back to the wedding hall, Quinn slipped behind us and went the other way. “What’s he doing?” shouted Nancy over the deafening torrent. Through the pounding sheets of rain, I could see him alone in the corner of the parking lot, his face lit up by the street lights as he gazed up at the sky, water splashing off his bony shoulders, his hand on his heart, lips moving. I tried to get the words out to explain that Quinn was talking to my dad. Asking him to come back. I kept watching my son as the silver ropes of rain slammed the pavement and he pleaded with my dead dad to come back to us. Suddenly, I was overcome with a sense that the immediate world was made of thin glass about to shatter. The words stayed trapped at the back of my throat.
Journal, early October
I’m walking along River Road tonight, trying to lose myself in the stars. When I was a kid and things were hard or confusing, I’d stare up into the never-ending maze of the night sky until my worries evaporated. “We’re only one little planet,” I’d say to myself. “What does any of this matter? Who cares if life is lousy down here on Earth right now? Who cares if I have a mean math teacher?”
I’m trying to do this tonight. The clear and swirling night sky, bright-banded with shimmering far-off worlds, lets me fall into it, sets my mind at ease. I have to drag Quinn out here some night, I realize. I have to tell him, Look Up! I have to make him see there’s nothing to worry about when we have this streaming blaze of eternity above us. All you have to do is surrender to those stars and they’ll take your worries away. When you tilt your head up into the stretches of constellations you’re meandering through the centuries, the eons, the beginnings of time. And no matter where you gaze up there, you’ll always find a star, a nameless solar system, unknown worlds of infinite possibility, if only our vision could reach that far. The universe goes on forever. We’re as insignificant as a speck of dust. Why should we ever fret about anything with all those renegade stars wandering across the universe?
Today I visited my artist friend John to buy a little painting of his and while I was there, our friend Nathan showed up. (Even simple things that used to be fun, like talking to these two interesting and funny guys for hours, now seem weighted down by my anxiety about Quinn. You’d think these distractions might be an escape, but there is no escaping. An unwell child never leaves your mind.) Nathan, who spent twenty-seven years meditating in India, mentioned how death is such a primal fear that all the world’s religions are based on the fear of death. Fear of death makes people turn to religion. No wonder people sometimes get tripped up trying to make sense of death in their own quirky way, he said.
I think about this now as I look up at the Milky Way and collapse back into my childhood cosmology. Is my dad up there somewhere, hidden in the timeless arrangement of those stars? Would telling Quinn my musings about the stars and eternity help him at all?
I will tell him, of course, but I think he might have to figure out this particular human riddle on his own.
Since visiting our family doctor in Wakefield — she’d been very understanding and concerned — we’d been entered into the Quebec health care system on an eight- to twelve-month waiting list to see someone who’d tell us whether or not we needed to see someone else who specialized in OCD, and if we did (we obviously did) we’d be put on another waiting list to see that OCD specialist.
We couldn’t wait two years.
I decided we’d have to go the private route instead, which would be expensive, but it was our only option. I’d already contacted an Ottawa support group for parents with kids with OCD — and was about to attend a meeting of these parents at a diner in an Ottawa suburb — where I’d learned the names of the best private psychologists in the area who treated kids with OCD. In mid-September I’d made an appointment with a Dr. Prabhu, who kindly told me over the phone that we were doing everything right with the cognitive behaviour therapy, or actually, a branch of it known as exposure response prevention (ERP), but that unfortunately, his first available appointment wasn’t until December 19. I made the appointment, or rather, grasped it like a drowning sailor on a sinking ship. I also got on the cancellation list for every other Ottawa cognitive behaviour psychologist who treated OCD.
Email to my friend Dawn in Guelph,
early October 2013
Hi Dawn,
I’m still constantly worried about Quinn. He’s still trying to get my dad to come back. It takes up most of his day. We are desperate to get help. A friend of mine here who used to live in India advised me to fly there to see an OCD specialist. We’d get an appointment right away. Is this totally crazy? I’m actually thinking about going because I don’t know what else to do. We’re trying the cognitive behaviour therapy stuff from the books but we still need a therapist. It’s serious.
Laurie
Dear Laurie,
This is so worrisome. I’m so sorry. But don’t go to India. I’m researching how you can get help in Ottawa. I’ll send you some links. You’re brave. So is Rob. You can get through this. Remember Quinn’s birth? And how you guys got through Quinn’s colic? And those years of sleep deprivation? Remember: Everything changes!
xxoo,
Dawn
CHAPTER 9
It’s hard to imagine anyone being more naive about early motherhood than I was. After all my years of hitchhiking, vagabonding, and travelling to perplexing places not always on a map, I figured having a baby might be like visiting a spa: I’d lie around on a soft crush of grass under a tree while a baby slept beside me, and the baby would occasionally wake to crawl curiously around the garden, perhaps falling asleep again in a patch of sunlight.
When I brought Quinn home from the hospital I had no idea what was about to happen to my life, that I’d be so sleep deprived that I’d stagger around for a hundred days straight without more than two hours sleep in a row, that I’d be hauling him in a sleigh through the snow at midnight to get him to sleep, that (as I mentioned earlier) I’d be duct-taping his swaddled howling body to the top of the dryer to get him to stop crying. In short, I had no idea that when you tote a baby home from the hospital, life as you once knew it is effectively over.
In that first year, it seemed that every part of who I was had been stripped from me: my identity, my body, my mind, my fierce independent streak, my writing, my travelling; even my relationship had completely changed because Rob and I were now on full domestic duty instead of focusing on each other. I wanted to escape to a village of women, back to the Jamaican or Fijian villages I’d stayed in years earlier, where the large extended family of mothers, aunts, cousins, and sisters all shared in the child care. That seemed the only natural and humane way to survive being a new mother, far better than being an isolated couple trying to figure it out alone.
For the first year of Quinn’s life my girlfriends would ask me, “What’s it like being a mother?” Invariably, I’d reply, “I don’t recommend it.” When Quinn got a little older and became a sunny and fun toy-truck enthusiast who loved flying his tricycle down steep hills, I was so smitten that I couldn’t recall why I’d previously said that.
But I do remember his birth. The labour came on like an a
mbush. I was writhing in pain on the couch at midnight, shouting, “What lousy timing! I have food poisoning!” What had I eaten that had done this to me? Surely labour wouldn’t feel so intestinal.
The next day I was in the hospital, still writhing in pain, although now I knew it wasn’t food poisoning. I recalled the day several months earlier when it hit me for the first time that I was truly pregnant, that whatever was growing inside me was going to come out. No escaping the fact. It was a singularly terrifying thought and it had stopped me cold for several seconds. And now it was happening.
I was thirty-seven when I got pregnant. I’d talked Rob into the idea. When we met each other I was thirty-five and could not believe the luck that had found me after so many years of wrong boyfriends. Before meeting him, I’d begun to think that maybe there wasn’t anyone out there for me after all, that all my years of travelling had somehow marked me as someone with too many stories. Too many stories can sometimes scare men away, I’d found. I remember once going on a first date with a guy in Victoria, British Columbia, a slender artist with strawberry blond hair wisped across one brow. I’d recently escaped South Korea, where I’d gone seeking a teaching job and discovered I detested the place, had found it even more relentless than Sumatra, where I’d been just before that. But when I tried telling some of my stories to this guy in Victoria over sushi and headachy wine — there was one story, in particular, about an all-night, bone-jarring bus ride through the Sumatran jungle where I was the lone female passenger and the overhead TV played a Chinese porno — I could see his face changing as I talked, his hazel eyes flickering sideways and something tight-lipped happening around his mouth. I was scaring him away by the minute. He was still young and idealistic and even though I was only a year older, I could see he thought I was too much for him. But with Rob, here was someone who liked my stories, and who made me laugh until I couldn’t get air, who played guitar and sang Tom Waits songs with a deep gravelly voice, who pretended to be an awkward insurance salesman named Howard at parties just to confuse people, who liked hiking in the woods as much as I did, who had a master’s degree in forest ecology because he loved trees — trees! But what really convinced me that Rob was the right guy was the summer evening we’d walked my roommate’s dog in a Guelph park. Rob was holding the leash when the dog suddenly took off after a squirrel. Instead of dropping the leash or reigning in the dog as a normal person would, Rob began running as fast as he could behind the dog so it could chase the squirrel. I stood there watching him sprint behind the dog with his arm outstretched holding the leash while the squirrel dashed for a far-off tree. I watched agog as the three of them raced through the park. Finally! This was the man I’d been waiting for. And to think I was such a world traveller and had found him in my hometown. Here was someone not only fun but funny. Also he was interesting to talk to, and kind, with Jack Kerouac rugged good looks. And he wasn’t the least bit flaky. I have a low tolerance for flakiness.
But then I discovered that Rob had a problem. Soon after the dog and squirrel incident we went camping at Georgian Bay. The first evening, we were sitting in the back of his truck beside the Mediterranean-aqua bay when, to my surprise, he started playing the guitar and singing Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest” for me. I believe every Bruce Springsteen song has one line in it that breaks your heart a little and I was searching for that line in this song. Although Rob seemed a little reticent about discussing his feelings, he seemed to be telling me through this song that I should take a chance on him. He sang the song with so much surprising charge behind it that if the concept of being swooned no longer existed, it came back that night.
It was the second evening that the problem arose. We were walking along a gravel road beneath a thumbnail moon hanging canary-yellow in the sky and I was working up the nerve to ask him something. Finally, I took in a cool lungful of Georgian Bay air and out it came. I tried to sound casual as I asked him what he thought of the idea of having kids one day. “I don’t think I want them,” was his wrenching, staggeringly quick reply. I felt my heart slump and knew it wouldn’t have the gumption to rise again in my chest for a long time. An excruciating silence clouded the air. Finally, he knocked the back of my hand with his and said, “Do you want kids?”
“Yes! Very much!”
“Why?”
“Why? Why? Because I loved being a kid myself !”
“That’s your answer?”
My eyes slid up to the low-riding crescent moon. Clearly, I’d have to break up with him immediately.
“That’s your answer?” he repeated, chuckling.
“Isn’t that a good answer? If you have kids you get to relive your childhood, and be around kids all the time!” Even as I said the words I knew there was something wrong with them. I’d known from my brief early career as a primary school teacher, which, frankly, I was pretty bad at, that it doesn’t work that way. Just because you like kids and liked being a kid yourself doesn’t mean you’ll like teaching them. In fact, liking kids makes you want to be their friend, the worst thing you can be as a teacher, or so the other teachers told me. Kids walk all over teachers like that.
“Have you been around babies?” asked Rob.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Really, when?”
“Okay. So. Never.”
“I guess I told you my sister had a baby when she was still living at home,” he said. “The boyfriend wasn’t around so my parents helped her raise the baby at our house. I was sixteen. Those weren’t fun nights, all that crying, the wailing, the diapers, the tiredness I saw on my sister’s face.”
“But you’re making it sound so unpleasant. My mother said I was an easy baby. I’m sure I’d have an easy baby, too.”
“But my nephew was an easy baby. It’s just that all babies are hard work. Kids are hard work.”
“I’m not afraid of hard work. I’ve known hardship. I’ve taught school in the sub-Arctic. I’ve hitchhiked alone on several continents, hungry, lost, and friendless. I’ve been on Indonesian ferries in midnight, life-threatening storms. I survived junior high. How hard could a little baby be?”
I was also thinking of something else, something I couldn’t name. For the past several years, when I’d substitute-taught kindergarten classes, I sometimes found myself reaching out to touch the cheek of a little kid when he or she came to my desk. I couldn’t help it. I was overwhelmed with how impossibly soft their cheeks were. It filled me with a kind of deep sweet longing, a secret hope that someday I’d have my own child with soft cheeks to stroke. And at those same desks I’d sometimes seen photos of the young teachers whose class I was taking, photos of her with her husband and baby, all of them beaming at the Sears photographer in front of the mottled background. The husbands didn’t look terribly interesting or handsome, probably watched a lot of TV sports, but still. Still. They were smiling radiantly and holding a baby with soft cheeks. I wanted to be in one of those pictures one day.
And now that dream was slipping away from me. The man I wanted to spend my life with was saying he wasn’t interested in having kids. The only reason I didn’t break up with Rob the next week was because he said he was open to my talking him into the idea.
So for the next couple of months, that’s what I did. I talked him into the idea of me, him, and a baby. I’m not even sure what I said exactly since it was true that I was ignorant of every aspect of the realities of having a child. I wasn’t an aunt and all my girlfriends were, so far, childless. My only girlfriend who had kids had moved to Atlanta. I remember telling Rob that I’d have to know his decision soon, one way or the other. If he wasn’t interested in having kids I’d have to find someone who was. Time was running out for me. He told me he needed another week to think about it, then went on a solo canoe trip to Algonquin Park. When he came back he suggested we go for a walk. We went to the same park where he’d let the dog chase the squirrel. My heart was ricocheting callous
ly around my ribcage as we walked beside the river under a grove of tall maples. I was expecting the worst.
Finally, he said, a little nervously, “So … I’ve decided.”
“And?” I took a deep breath. “No, wait!” I inhaled deeply, imagining floating down the river in a rowboat by myself. Maybe I could adopt a child from another country, spend my life travelling in far-off Eastern lands with that child. Everything would be fine. Oh, God. This was hell. “Okay, you can tell me now.”
He cleared his throat. “I want to go ahead. To do it all. Get married, have a kid. I want that. I do.”
The trees around us began to blur in my vision. I stared at Rob for a long time. The moment shook me in its unexpectedness, like a shooting star searing by from another galaxy.
“Really? You do?” I jumped up in the air, high. He laughed and we hugged each other. I was going to be in one of those Sears photographs. One day, we were going to have a baby.
And now, three years later, that baby felt like a burning bowling ball ripping through my intestines. The labour wasn’t going well. In fact, nothing about this birth was going as I’d imagined. I’d imagined that having a baby would come close to what my touchy-feely baby books had promised: a natural birth in which labour pains could be blissful. What a crock.
I kept thinking, hasn’t evolution had time to work on this? Must women really endure this much pain after all these millennia? Evolution wasn’t keeping up. And you’d think anyone who’d been through this once would surely never do it again. Not only that, they’d tell their cave women friends never to do it. As soon as our species began communicating verbally you’d think that would have been the end of it. Even nonverbal communication could have conveyed the idea simply enough. A simple finger swiping across the neck to indicate BIRTH = BAD IDEA. Don’t even think about it!