It was the worst sex I was ever to have, though of course I didn’t know it at the time. We shall draw a veil over the details, which were unspeakable. So were his cowboy boots and his endless pretensions, but I couldn’t see that, not for years. Stupid Time was still unrolling in front of me like a rubber mat. It was like getting into a taxicab and suddenly realizing you’re in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver with Travis Bickle at the wheel.
What have you done, child?
When a man tells you you’re dumb, it’s rude to disagree, after all. I believed him when he told me his father was a millionaire inventor. This was a lie, which my mother spotted instantly, but all her look won her was a teenage sneer and something about the bourgeoisie.
He moved into my apartment rent-free, as FFs do, gobbled my student loan, alienated my friends and neighbours—the usual. And then he proceeded to deliberately disassemble my personality. In one “Specimen Day” in my diary, I recorded that he had insulted me thirty-eight times, always for my own good. My face, my hair, my feeling that he should clean up occasionally, my taste in books, clothes, my failure to volunteer as a dogsbody, it dotted me all day like grapeshot. I washed his car and clothes, bought his food and cigarettes, co-signed his loans, paid his missed payments. Once, I may even have paid his child support. I check my diary for that time. “Today he called me a horrible little girl.” But by then, ground down to a stub, I thought he had a point.
My mother had raised me to be nice. She hadn’t realized there was such a thing as too nice, or that human slugs crawled the earth looking for people’s daughters.
I dumped him a few weeks after Lennon’s death. He was angry and patronizing. I don’t think he ever quite believed that his worm had turned, so to speak. My parents took me back. They were nice. I’m not attacking niceness, believe me, just its poor aim. They repaid the money he stole from me.
Twenty years later, walking beside Lake Ontario, a body of water so huge it looks like an ocean, I apologized to my mother. Then I replaced the seal on the jar where I keep my pickled snakes, and asked her never to mention it again, which she has not.
• • •
I know what you’re thinking: Why is she telling me this?
Sure, as stories go about the monstrous regiment of men, this isn’t even a skirmish. FF starts out equivalent to a Ted Bundy wrapping his uninjured arm in a sling and asking pretty, young university students to help him carry library books to his car. But he didn’t proceed from there to the strangulation, the sodomy, decapitation, the trading of female legs when his corpse collection built up. All he did was hijack my life in ugly interludes for five years.
But that isn’t the point.
The point is the inoculation.
I could never get suckered again.
That’s not the only point. The other point is that I don’t want you to get suckered ever, at any stage of your life. Consider this story your inoculation. If already inoculated, make it a booster shot.
Some woman reading this might have had a FF in her life, who hit her and savaged her emotionally and maybe even fathered her children. And if she hasn’t, she might well be vulnerable to one. I worry because she may not recognize her experience was an inoculation. Life isn’t short. Life is long. And if she hasn’t had her needle by age twenty, she might well have eighty years ahead of her to catch the superbug.
You have to bend with the blows. Hold yourself rigid and you break. At twenty, you are supple, better able to bend. At forty, fifty, sixty, without your inoculation, you are even more vulnerable to a million FFs on the prowl for you and your home, your nest egg, your self-esteem, your child. At that age, you may shatter with the blows.
Furthermore, as you age, you are less likely to have a safety net. The parental bank account, the brief move back home, the obtaining of a degree or two until you qualify for a job that pays well, all these things come from a loving family. Now, you may not have a particularly loving family, but they probably don’t do to you the things that a FF will do, and that’s something.
Every woman needs a pit crew. She needs solid friends (and there won’t be many of them; most will melt away in a crisis, leaving a core pit crew) and she needs her family. For they offer a refuge, not just a bed and all the rice pudding she can eat in her jammies, but someone to say, “Yeah, I always knew he was one of those.”
Well, why didn’t you tell me? she will say.
Would you have listened? they will ask.
No.
It isn’t just the pain that seals an inoculated woman in wonderful Plexiglas from brutes. It isn’t even a better-developed sense of that great gift—fear. It’s knowing that she is not alone.
I can spot a FF four lanes away from me on the highway now. I can smell him going down on the escalator as I go up, at the next desk, on the barstool beside me. The problem is that I fear that the young women in my life cannot. They were raised to be nice. I am of two minds about raising girls to be nice. They’ll be better off if we raise them to be mean, but who wants a world staffed by two damaged genders? If men weren’t violent, if they didn’t have the FF gene floating among them, maybe I could feel at ease about girls being taught tedious patience and infinite kindness, especially as it relates to boys.
Girls have to know some things that I did not know, hard facts about class, that money has little to do with character and also that men without money aren’t by definition good. “Poor but honest” can just as easily be “poor but psychotic.” Tattoos are a bad sign, as are motorbikes and a desire to be a cop or a security guard (for a man whose dream it is to be given a gun often has an authoritarian streak in him, and it can be as domestically directed as it is publicly). Bathing is good, as is graduating. Never lend a man money.
People tell me that young women are smarter now. I don’t know. They binge-drink as much as I did and they have infinitely less self-esteem, since the demand for female-body-as-skeletal-remain runs full-throttle. They refuse to call themselves feminists and like the word “girl.” Even now, nobody points out the obvious to them: that sex is just awful until you either meet the right man or turn thirty—and it’s their fault, not yours. The young women I know are soaked in self-blame and in hating their bodies, while the completely unjustified self-confidence of young men continues to run amok.
What this means is they may well meet men who plan to treat them like cowpats. What I’m saying to them is this. Why suffer hard and long when women like me did it for you and are offering you a FF vaccine, at no charge? If you wake up one morning and are told that you murdered John Lennon in your sleep, apparently, and you’re in trouble with your FF, you’ll smile a secret smile because you have read this story and you are planning a smart exit.
I was rescued, you see. I am in debt.
And I, like other feminist stepmothers, mothers, mentors, aunts and friends who owe such a debt, will pay it off this way. We call back memories of a little girl’s kisses, the sensation of the skin behind her ears at six months, her fragrance, or a young woman’s smile, or the decency in a female student from a small town where she was taught the naiveté that makes her blind to her own brutalization. It doesn’t even have to be memories of the young woman who needs rescuing. We are all women; we will do it in the name of a little girl we saw once, in my case a beggar in Guadalajara in 1978, to whom I gave no money, and who haunts me still. We will remember our own selves as little girls. We owe a debt to those fragile children.
And if the vaccine hasn’t taken for someone—a daughter, stepdaughter, friend, sister or niece—we will stay loyal until that young woman’s vision clears and she is willing to be rescued. It may take years but we can outwait FF. There’s a reason FFs isolate a woman from her friends and family. He’s the cult; they’re the deprogrammers.
We’ll always be there waiting for her return. And that is because we’ve had our flu shot, our misery jab, this free UNICEF-type inoculation.
Won’t get fooled again.
A mother black bear is visiti
ng our house. I have awaited her return for four years. Her young ones are with her. Two. And my three sons are with me.
We watch through the big square window in our kitchen. She sniffs the air before rising onto her hind feet to walk toward me. For a moment we stand face to face, staring directly into one another’s eyes. I know I have been given a powerful message, the breadth of which I will decipher later. But one thing feels certain. I am safe again.
The Pawnee believe when a bear stands on its hind legs and lifts its paws toward the sun, it is receiving its healing powers.
I live beside a small lake in the boreal forest near Yellowknife. In this sub-Arctic frontier, unburdened by the technological crush of civilization, it becomes possible to feel the ancient ways of knowing that guided the indigenous Dene peoples. This is where my odyssey of motherhood begins, alone in the woods save for the babes at my breast, the ravens outside my window and the unspoken mysteries beyond. The more I seek to unravel those mysteries, the more I see of the bear.
My husband, Francois, and I discover the bloated, fetid bodies of some three thousand whitefish, northern pike and suckers floating beside our new home in June 1991. The lake’s giant ecological belch, later deemed a natural phenomenon caused by algae dying and robbing the water of oxygen, is a wonderful way to meet the new neighbours, who mind not a whiff that the place stinks. Gulls and ravens gorge on the death, yielding only to the authoritative swagger of a half-dozen bald eagles. Three black bears appear at the farthest point of our bay, eating their way closer to us each day. When they finally reach our driveway, Francois yells, “Go away, bears.” And they do.
We conceive our first son in July after a spicy hot sauna and naked dip in the lake.
July is a time of estrus for female bears, and promiscuity for both sexes.
The first thing I do after confirming my pregnancy is cycle ten kilometres, rationalizing that childbirth will require the ultimate fitness and stamina. My mind brims with thoughts of the new life inside me, of how I will do everything within my power to ensure it grows safely into a healthy baby. As I near the steep hill that always defeats me, I look to my left and see a bear running beside me. We travel at exactly the same speed, glancing at each other, straight ahead, then back at each other. A surge of adrenalin wells from my abdomen, from the embryo itself as I imagine this fledgling being ripped from inside me. “Not now,” I say to the bear. “Not with my new baby.” The big hill fast approaches.
As I begin my ascent, so does the bear. My thighs feel detached from my upper body, now locked in a death grip with the handlebars. I reach halfway, the point where my legs and lungs normally scream in agony, without being winded. The bear veers left into the thick brush. I cycle home as if two lives depend upon it.
In time, I conclude the bear was a test. My instinctive reaction, to protect my unborn child, was correct. As for physical fitness, what further proof did I need that my body is capable of feats I cannot yet imagine? Like the bear, I am strong and protective, fit for motherhood. My prize comes the following April. A son.
Bear cubs and their mothers emerge from their womb-like dens together in April, a time of rebirth and new beginnings.
I nurse Max day and night for nearly two years. I am mesmerized by his beauty, ferociously protective and exhausted by his demands. During this period, no bears visit my house. I see bears along the highway, but always far from my home range.
Most male black bears avoid the territories of lactating females, preferring those in heat. Mother bears generally move out of another bear’s territory, rather than risk a turf war.
Each day I anticipate hiking through the wilderness with Max on my back. So calming, so invigorating are these enchanted woods, compared with the nagging drudgery of housework, that I never give a thought to any possible harm. The forest casts a benevolent spell on us.
• • •
I am pregnant again. This baby is due in November, the same time tiny blastocysts in a pregnant black bear have to decide whether or not to attach themselves to her uterine wall.
The fertilized eggs in a sow float freely in her womb for five months until she is ready to den. If she does not have the fat reserves necessary to bear and nurse her cubs through winter, the blastocysts dissolve, sparing her the agony of starvation.
I miscarry at eleven weeks.
Sentiments of sympathy pour in, but I revel in relief. The disquieting depression that accompanied this pregnancy has been a bad hormonal trip. I drink beer and paint Zulu and Haida designs on the kitchen and garage doors, unable to discern if I am being driven crazy—or kept sane—by my environment.
Our dog is barking maniacally at a raven taunting it from the roof. Max toddles out and conciliates the dispute by speaking to the bird in Raven. Then I watch all three of them walk side by side down a path, Max in the middle, the raven hopping awkwardly as it struggles to keep up, and in that moment I realize there is greatness and beauty and magic in my life, if not adult conversation and paycheques.
Come winter, I crave another baby, mating dutifully on all optimum days for conception. My pregnancy is quickly apparent. At three months, I look six months pregnant. I cup my swollen belly, musing that this cannot be just one baby. It isn’t. Like a faulty gumball machine, I have double ovulated.
Copulation induces ovulation in a female black bear shortly after each encounter.
As my September due date looms larger than life, so do the pressures of toting my enormous girth. I turn forgetfully and whack it on things, nearly passing out from the pain. My stomach prevents my arms from reaching the kitchen sink, and I am grateful when my mother comes to look after me. While I insist she and Francois help me into the forest—easing me down on my side so I can pick cranberries—I am too slow and foggy to do much except wait.
As bears prepare for denning, they can spend virtually the entire day resting. This is known as “walking hibernation.”
At term, I deliver my strapping twin boys naturally, without drugs. Both Calvin and Levi wriggle determinedly for sustenance at my breast, latching on hourly after that with a tenacity that leaves my nipples chafed and bleeding and fuels record-breaking weight gains within their first month.
Mother black bears nursing multiple cubs have been known to splay themselves belly down in order to stave off relentless feeding efforts.
Sleep is but a fantasy. By October, when bears crawl into their dens, I wear my fatigue like a disease. Each day becomes darker and drearier, heightening my desire to curl up and tune out. Occasionally, all three boys fall asleep with me in bed after nursing in our den of flannelette and down. The heavenly gift of sleep, the four of us enveloped in darkness. For all the times I miss the work world, this is not one of them.
By November, the mother black bear’s metabolism slows to half its summer rate. She continues to slumber while her cubs are born in January or February, blind and nearly hairless. They are about eight inches long and weigh less than a pound. The mother begins an external pregnancy, or second womb-time. Even in this suspended state, she is able to respond to her cubs’ cries and needs, maintaining a level of subconscious caregiving.
The bears are out in force the next summer, all around our house. Our first encounter is a mother with two tiny cubs and a much larger third, shambling across the road. She manages only a glazed stare of forced interest in our direction. Her ribs show through her dull and matted fur. “They’re sucking the life right out of you, aren’t they,” I commiserate.
The twins are in baby swings on the deck watching Max tour in his push-pedal car. I am doing dishes. Two cubs play in a tree at the back of our house while their mother grazes below. When Francois spots them, he tells them all to go home. The mother gathers her young and walks away.
On August 19, 2002, a healthy black bear in the resort town of Fallsburg, New York, knocks five-month-old Esther Schwimmer out of her stroller and carries her into nearby woods, where she dies of head and neck injuries. A wildlife pathologist says the bear may ha
ve been attracted to Esther’s milky odour.
Daily hikes are still integral to my happiness, but when the twins get too big to carry in my amautik, an Inuit coat, I push them along the highway in a double stroller. One day in September, a cold, snowy rain pelts down on the back of an icy wind. I put off the walk until I can no longer stand the anxieties that accumulate after a day cooped inside. The twins howl in protest as I strap them into the stroller, while a raven stares down at our spectacle from a tree. “I hope I get an especially good reward for this,” I say to the bird.
We’ve managed the equivalent of a city block when the dog bolts across the road and begins chasing a bear, toward us. I turn the stroller around and order Max to head home. “Don’t run!”
Fleeing-prey behaviour can trigger a bear’s predatory pursuit instincts. In July 2000, Canadian Olympic biathlete Mary Beth Miller of Yellowknife is killed by a black bear while jogging outside of Quebec City.
When the galloping bear is right beside us, it glances at me then veers in the opposite direction.
• • •
Max is five. We take him on a fishing trip to a pristine lake accessible only by a gruelling trek through five kilometres of swampy, mosquito-infested portages. The night before the trip I dream I am standing with the children on a concrete platform of stairs surrounded by lake and woods. Francois is canoeing toward us when a male bear, snarling and frothing at the mouth, appears in the water behind him. When Francois tries to climb onto the concrete the bear claws and eats his arm and back. I clang on a pot with a wooden spoon. The bear rears on its hind legs, twists its head toward the sound …
I awake so tired and distracted, I forget to tell Francois the dream.
Five minutes after launching the canoe, we see a bear on a flat outcrop of rock ahead of us. It paces back and forth then sits complacently on its haunches, content to watch us drift silently past.
The ensuing summer is fraught with forest fires, ambitious house renovations and long spells of single parenting while Francois joins firefighting efforts along our road. I worry more about keeping my three energetic boys from slipping unnoticed into the blackness of the lake, or dismembering themselves with the workers’ power tools. A cousin arrives in the midst of this mayhem with her three-month-old son, whose tiny lungs cannot handle the black smoke outdoors, or the choking drywall dust inside. I feel trapped and personally responsible for everyone. Daily, I consider fleeing my home range.
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