It was so cold that you couldn’t smell anything; the world was frozen, antiseptic. “La, la, La La LA LA LA,” sang Peter, loudly, while dragging a sled along the side of the car, scraping the paint. I grabbed his arm hard enough that he could feel it through his down parka.
“Peter, you can’t do that, you’re eight years old — and you’ll wreck the car.”
We picked up Bohdan’s friend Thomas, then drove to the toboggan hill. Thomas and Bohdan wrestled in the back seat and I had to force myself to calmly ask them to stop instead of screaming at them. They kept wrestling in the back seat. Peter sulked in the front. I had no idea how to control all this boy energy. My hands shook on the wheel.
When I parked, Bohdan almost rolled into the street together with Thomas and I had to physically separate them. Their relationship consisted of death-grip wrestling and complete disregard for their surroundings. Bohdan complained about Thomas’s roughhousing but had a fatal attraction to him.
The wind whipped past me on top of the hill, penetrating every seam in my parka. My feet felt like frozen pylons within a few minutes, and the sky had that beautiful blue clarity it gets when the temperature is decades below zero.
Peter’s mood hung like a toxic cloud. I announced that everyone had to go down the hill twenty times for hot chocolate, an irrelevance for Bohdan and Thomas, who were already running up and down the hill, but I wanted Peter to exert some energy so he’d cheer up.
“I don’t want hot chocolate,” said Peter. He rolled his eyes in an amazing simulation of a teenager and plunked himself down in the snow.
“Peter, you have to go down the hill right now. Or else.” I had no idea what or else meant, but at least he got up and dragged his sled to the top of the run in slow motion. Then he proceeded down the hill in a lazy zigzag designed to annoy me. How long would I have to watch this performance?
As I sat on the hill and counted Peter’s achingly slow ascents and descents, I got colder and colder and almost gave in at eighteen. He slouched up for his hot chocolate, then spilt half of it on my parka.
“Jesus Christ,” I snapped, wiping off my coat with an already-grimy tissue. “You did that on purpose!”
“Sorry,” Peter said with a grin of utter insincerity. Bohdan and Thomas grabbed each other near the top of the hill, on the iciest part.
“Get away from there!” I shouted. “It’s dangerous!” They fell and rolled down the hill sideways, laughing, ignoring me.
When we got home after dropping off Thomas, I told the boys to change out of their snowpants and parkas. The phone rang just as I unzipped my newly-stained parka. Betsy. She was having a great day, productive, working with a colleague on a paper. How were we? Not so great, although I didn’t say that. Peter walked into the living room still in his boots, dragging a sled behind him and yelling at Bohdan. I tossed away the phone and wrenched him off his feet, carrying him and the plastic sled to the basement landing, and plunked him down hard. It felt good. The sled fell down the stairs in a big clatter.
“You do that again and I’ll sit on your head, do you understand?” I was shaking him and his face was white. He yanked on my parka and it tore from collar to zipper with a sharp rip. Bohdan jumped on my back to stop me from attacking his brother. I turned, put Bohdan down on the floor and he ran off. Then I told Peter, who was boo-hooing, to shut up and stay seated on the landing. I walked back to the phone in the living room.
“You still there?” I said, loudly. Yes she was.
“I can’t goddamn well do this.” My voice shook and I had to pause. “I’m afraid I’m going to hurt Peter. He just won’t listen.”
“Maurice, can you control yourself?” I was hyperventilating on the phone like an obscene caller. “Look. I’m coming home.”
“Oh God, you must be kidding. You’ve got work to do. That’s the whole point of me having them today.”
“Can you control yourself?” she asked again.
“Yeah, yes. Yes I will.”
Peter and I both had a time-out, lying on our beds staring at the ceiling for half an hour. I calmed down. Betsy stayed at work. I hugged Peter and Bohdan and promised them not to lose my temper again. Their faces were limp and shell-shocked but I suppressed my rage enough to get through the afternoon up to Betsy’s return. I had never seen my own father lose his temper, and didn’t understand where my quick-trigger fury came from.
On the weekend Betsy walked into the kitchen waving a snow shovel. “I really need you to put away the shovels properly.”
“Do we have to talk about that now? You know I’m going out.” I often went to book launches or readings, leaving Betsy to put the boys to bed.
“We’ve talked about this before. When you leave the shovels and rakes leaning all over the tool room, I have to stack them up before getting to the one I need. I feel like you don’t care about me, since you know I do most of the shovelling.”
“Christ, they’re just tools. Why are you ascribing symbolic meaning to the arrangement of shovels and rakes?” I said in my best Christopher Hitchens mode. “You’re making a category error. In a poem it would make sense, because in a poem everything is meaningful. In real life not so much.”
“What if your wife disagrees?”
“Then with all due respect to my wife, she’s just wrong. Some things are trivial and meaningless.”
“So my feelings are trivial and meaningless. There’s your tactic one — dismiss my concerns. Why don’t you ever listen to me?”
“Oh come on, Betsy. Let’s move on.” I felt the terrible joy of being an asshole, the knowledge I’d gone too far.
“Fuck you. It’s like having three kids. Why should I be married to someone who doesn’t give a shit?”
“Now you’re swearing at me. I don’t do that to you.”
“And that’s tactic two, pick on something about me instead of dealing with the issue we’re fighting about. And you wonder why we don’t have sex.” She strode out of the room. “Don’t follow me.”
It took everything I had to do as she asked, but the one time we’d visited a marriage counsellor together the advice was for me to leave her alone after fights. I hated that she boiled our arguments down to two tactics that I used over and over, even if she happened to be right. I wanted to persuade her that she was wrong, about me and our marriage, and especially her idea that sex was out of the question. During the book launch I barely heard two words of the reading, just sat there fuming as I kept replaying our argument in my head.
When I came back home I asked her if she was willing to talk. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t leave the room either.
I shuffled the coins in my pocket, which I knew drove Betsy crazy, while gathering my courage to speak.
“Can you tell me why you don’t want to have sex anymore?”
She was quiet long enough for me to count to fifteen.
“I need to be able to count on you as my teammate in the family. It feels like you aren’t really here with us. Whenever I ask for what I need, you label my concerns as ridiculous and unreasonable. How can I feel attracted to someone who constantly belittles me and disregards my feelings?” She was crying.
I was shocked by her tears but also by what she said.
“I didn’t know … I’m really sorry.”
She was quiet again.
“I’ve told you this before, Maurice. A lot of times.”
I swallowed hard.
“Give me six months, Betsy. Please. I’ll help more around the house, and make lists, I’ll do more with the boys.” She said nothing. “Honestly.” Still nothing. “I’ll go see a psychologist.” Betsy had been asking me to get help for years and I’d always resisted. “What do you say?”
“OK. But I’ve heard this before.”
I sat down on the far side of the couch from her in our TV room, and we watched an episode of “Survivor” together. Neither of us spoke.
Later that week I made my first visit to the shrink. She came recommended by someo
ne I trusted in the arts community. But I left the first session completely discouraged, certain the painful hour was futile.
My one ray of hope that winter came when I suggested we plan a big family vacation for the following year, and Betsy endorsed the idea. When she was a kid in Virginia, every summer her family rented a beach house on an island off the North Carolina coast. Betsy talked about the experience nostalgically, probably the only time she ever sounded that way to me. I said we should save our money and go there next year, make it a road trip. When our conflicts were unbearable I imagined lying on the beach in the hot sun, with Betsy beside me in a bikini, while the boys frolicked in the surf like exotic sea creatures. I hoped this was not a fantasy, and I booked another session with the shrink.
INVENTING MY FAMILY
I
Another cold Winnipeg spring. It was Mother’s Day, four years since Betsy and I had adopted the boys in Ukraine. The wind shivered the elm trees while the four of us walked briskly on the dusty sidewalk. Peter moved in front of me, slowing erratically so I had to avoid treading on his heels. He was nine and his feet were big. Bohdan scampered in front of Betsy, chortling at the birds and the sun and our impending breakfast. I held a shiny pink balloon, the kind you give recovering surgery victims in hospital. Two postcards were taped to the tail and they flapped in the prairie wind.
When we got to the schoolyard we stopped in the middle of the soccer field. The only sound was the wind soughing through the wire fence, the only smell the swollen river a quarter mile away, beyond the trees. No cars passed. I read the first postcard out loud. Bohdan had scrawled his message in large letters, and it had taken a lot of time and Betsy’s help for him to write this out:
Dear Mama,
I hope you are doing good at your age. I miss you when I don’t be around you. I am angry at you because you did not take care of me and I am angry at you because you did not act like you love me. I am angry at you because you put me in the orphanage, and I am angry at you because you did not feed me and you did not brush my teeth.
love love love love love love
Bohdan
When I finished reading Bohdan nodded his head and stared with his deep brown eyes into the distance past my shoulder. “I am angry at her,” he said. He did not remember his life before adoption. We had told him the story of how his mother left him and how he went to the orphanage with Peter.
Then Peter read his postcard, which he’d written quite quickly on his own:
Dear Mama, I miss
you a lot, I wish
someday we will
meet, when I am
still young.
Love, Love, Love, Love Peter!!
“You don’t feel angry at your mother?” I asked Peter.
“No,” he said. His long face was serene. I released the balloon and the chilly breeze and helium pulled it up. It glinted above the brick school, and shrank into blue sky until we could not see the postcards anymore.
Then we walked to the diner on Sherbrook Street for breakfast to celebrate Mother’s Day with Betsy. As she talked to the boys about their postcards, my mind drifted to Paradise Lost, how the preposition “of” begins the first two lines, how Milton hated rhyme. Peter said something. I nodded vacantly and Betsy said “Maurice” sharply and glared at me. Peter said, “I know you think about poetry sometimes, Dad,” almost as though he’d read my mind.
Betsy glared at me so hard it felt like a kick in the shins.
Walking home we passed the old stone church on Westminster with the bell-tower that reminds me of the one in Vertigo. When I was a kid every Mother’s Day began with a church service. Every Sunday did, even when we lived abroad. But although Milton spoke to me now, God was silent. We did not attend church. The only religion in our house since the boys arrived was Star Wars. Peter and Bohdan believed fervently that there was good in Darth Vader, the dark father. I hoped they were right.
In the evening I called my mother to see if her flowers arrived. She and Dad both got on the telephone. She thanked me for the flowers, then said out of nowhere, “Your father has never liked Mother’s Day.”
There was a pause, and I said, “Well, he was so young when his mother died. Do you remember much about that, Dad?”
“It was a long way to get to the hospital where she was, more than five kilometres. I think maybe we walked, is that right?” He knew I’d talked to Lil about it.
“Lil says you borrowed bicycles,” I said.
“Yes, that makes sense.”
“Do you remember anything of what she said the last time you saw her?”
“No.”
Mom cleared her throat. “Eric, you told me yourself.”
“No, I don’t remember a thing,” Dad said.
Mom insisted. “You did tell me, Eric. You said you wouldn’t fight with your sister.”
“Yeah, I guess I did. That’s right.” This was an old disagreement, and I couldn’t tell if Dad was sincere or just wanted to avoid an argument with Mom.
“You know why I hated Mother’s Day?” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“They made us wear these stupid white flowers, carnations I think, in school and in church. Everyone whose mother was dead had to wear a white carnation. If your mother was alive you wore a red one.”
“So that started in Germany in 1948?”
“Yes, it must have. And it continued in Canada for a long time. You had to go to church with your white carnation. I hated that.”
“Mother’s Day is hard for Peter and Bohdan too,” I said. “Today we had them write postcards to their birth mother, and then we taped them to a helium balloon and let it fly away.” I figured Dad would think this was flaky, but he said nothing.
“Is their birth mother dead?” said Mom. I’d answered this question many times before, but she was much more focused than usual today.
“Possibly. She might be a street person. We don’t know. We’ve told the boys only some of what we’ve found out.”
“Nah ya,” said Dad, and Mom yawned. Nah yah is what Mennonites say in low German when they’re tired or resigned to the fate of the world.
I said goodbye to them and listened to their telephones clicking off the line. My dad, I realized, had for the first time volunteered a shard of his fragmented childhood. He had just given me the gift of a bitter flower named so that I could almost touch it, a white carnation pinned on a little boy’s first suit.
My fifth monthly session with the shrink took place in May. This time I had something positive to report. The boys and I had watched Duck Soup together for the second time and they loved it even more than the first! We laughed like fools at the sight gags, especially Harpo burning the big street vendor’s hat and later pretending to be Groucho in the mirror scene. Now the boys were old enough to get the verbal humour too. We had so much fun and it felt great to relax my vigilance and just enjoy them. And to discover that like me they could watch a movie over and over. Betsy liked it too, but not enough for repeated viewings.
The shrink wanted to know if I still shirked on my household chores. Yes, but not as often, and at least I knew when I was doing so. She smiled. The hour ended faster than usual.
Later in the month, at our weekly Wendy’s dinner, Jeremy told me that, after three years of floundering from one thing to another in university, he had decided to take a year off. He was surprised when I endorsed his decision to go on a backpacker’s tour of Asia with a few of his friends. Over the next eight weeks, we received two postcards from him and regular emails, an unprecedented level of communication. I answered the emails immediately on receipt, short messages about the boys and our daily lives and felt grateful for the connection with him.
The first postcard, addressed to “Mo Peter Bohdan Betsy,” came from Cambodge, Cambodia, and showed a Buddhist temple with numerous monkeys scampering in the foreground. The message read: “I think this is the species of monkey that bit me.” In an earlier email, Jeremy had told us he’d been bit
ten by a monkey while visiting the temple and gotten a rabies shot.
The second postcard, a time-lapse photograph of Bangkok’s skyline at night featuring the beautiful Chao Phraya River, was addressed to “Betsy Bohdan Peter Mo,” which I momentarily worried might be a subtle way of reducing my status as his father. Jeremy’s poetically fragmented observation, written in the big childish scrawl that resembled my own, shattered the romantic illusion of the photo:
River boats, the only way
of getting around Bangkok
that doesn’t involve
taking your life in your hands, or fill you
with rage.
Miss you guys!
Love,
Jeremy
Jeremy was supposed to catch his flight home from Thailand. But in spring 2009 street protests almost shut down Bangkok for the second time in about a year. I clicked the refresh button on the New York Times Thailand web page every hour. Jeremy sent an email saying he wasn’t sure he’d be able to reach the airport. Betsy contacted a friend who lived in Bangkok, and she drove Jeremy through the city’s chaotic back roads to the airport.
When he was back in Winnipeg I noticed the darkening hair on his legs, the receding line of hair on his head just like mine at the same age, the sharp smell of his cologne. I hugged him for the first time in years, just for a moment, and I let go before he did. But it was not a board hug.
In our session with the child psychologist, she’d recommended that Peter write a journal, and that we discuss its contents with him. I liked the idea. My parents had encouraged me to keep a diary when I was about ten, and I’d kept one off and on ever since. For the first few years Mom and Dad had insisted I write every day, often correcting my spelling, though we never talked about what I’d written. My childhood entries were distinctly humdrum (“went to school; I hate math”), but occasionally the writing let me blow off steam.
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