Choosing Hope

by Ginny Dennehy

  Not wanting to sell our just-renovated Yew Street home, we decided to rent it out. That gave us enough financial leeway to buy a house in Alberta. Barely a year after leaving, we were back in Edmonton, living in the Sherwood Park area. I started work for IBM as a district purchase specialist, travelling around western Canada and convincing customers to buy the office products they had been renting. I was good at it, and I loved the travel, the people I met, the learning curve I was on, and, of course, the income.

  Unfortunately, Concept 111 Realty didn’t turn out as Kerry and his partners had hoped. So, within a year, we made the choice to move back to Vancouver. I loved my job, but Edmonton didn’t suit me, never had. IBM was wonderful, not blinking when I asked for a transfer. Kerry hit the job market, doing a number of different things until he passed the Canadian Securities Course and began working as a broker. We settled into a comfortable new routine of work and married life, picking up with old friends and making new ones. We hiked and swam and played tennis and squash and took up that most Vancouver of athletic pursuits: jogging.

  In the spring of 1983, I popped into our family doctor’s office because I hadn’t been feeling that great. I thought I had the flu, so I was completely taken aback when he did an exam and then looked at me and said: “Ginny, you’re pregnant.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Kerry and I had talked about having kids, and coming from big families ourselves, we wanted to have a big family of our own. Although we hadn’t planned when that might happen, we didn’t take precautions after we got married, so my pregnancy shouldn’t have been such a surprise. But it was. Kerry was beyond thrilled, as was I. We were having a baby, and life could not have been more perfect.

  Baby Dennehy was due October 28. Luckily for me, the pregnancy was uneventful. I didn’t have morning sickness and didn’t gain much weight. I kept working and even managed to take my daily dip at nearby Kitsilano Pool over the summer. I did stop playing squash for a bit, and I thought better of jogging, which meant I had to forfeit doing the hard 26 miles of another marathon. Kerry and I had first done one before we were married and another in Seattle right afterward. As expectant parents, we did all the exciting firsts: attending prenatal classes, undergoing an ultrasound, prepping Daddy for what he might expect in the delivery room.

  A week before the baby was due, I went on maternity leave. Of course, as is so often the case, the baby had other plans, and October 28 came and went. I kept busy, baking furiously and fretting over the nursery. The baby’s room was near ours on the second floor. I painted the walls pale green and stocked up on diapers and cozy little green sleepers and blankets for the crib. Everything had a baby animal motif.

  I went into labour in the middle of the night. I quietly got out of bed and walked around the house, and when the pain became unbearable, I woke up Kerry and told him it was time to go. He sat up, reached into the bedside table, and pulled out the to-do list from the prenatal class, which for some reason suggested we pack a lunch before leaving for the hospital. So instead of helping me get ready, Kerry did just that: he went right to the kitchen and began making sandwiches and packing cookies. It was hilarious, though less so at the time.

  I was in labour for forty-eight hours, two long days hooked up to a fetal monitor. None of the medical tricks worked, and the doctor told us I would probably need to deliver by Caesarean section. I wasn’t happy about it, and the baby didn’t much like that option either: I suddenly needed to push, and before we knew it, Kelty Patrick was born the old-fashioned way. It was November 23, 1983. In my arms was the most beautiful eight-pound, two-ounce blue-eyed baby boy we had ever seen.

  Kerry and I had talked about a name before the baby was born, and both of us liked Kelty. We had a friend in Edmonton named Bruce Kelty, and Kerry’s mom, Dodie, had given all of her kids good Irish names. Kerry’s dad was Gerald Patrick, so when our baby turned out to be a boy, that middle name seemed to fit. It’s hard to explain, but this new little man even looked like a Kelty, robust and raring to get on with life. In his naming, there was also a prescience we could never have imagined—years later, we found out that Kelty roughly translates to “troubled waters.”

  Kelty was a fussy baby. His lack of interest in breastfeeding was a bit disheartening, and trying to get him to nurse became a chore. Thankfully, my mom came to help out for the first few weeks, and she was a godsend. Kelty eventually took to the bottle, though he wasn’t keen about sticking to the schedule Mom and I tried to keep him on. Our new son ruled the roost, which meant he didn’t sleep much. And neither did we.

  Less than three months after Kelty was born, my boss at IBM convinced me to come back to work. It was a dilemma: I wanted to stay home with Kelty, but we also needed to pay the bills. The feminist revolution that so defined our generation had somehow convinced women that not only could we have it all—marriage, kids, and the career—but that we owed it to our gender to do it all well and without complaint.

  The only way it would work for us was to find a nanny. After interviewing, we hired a woman named Sham, who was from Guyana. Sham was wonderful with Kelty, and they took to each other right away. That was very important to me. Kerry had a new job as a general manager for the Earl’s restaurant chain, and I was away a lot—IBM decided a group of us needed sales training, which found me in Atlanta a few times during Kelty’s first year—so the stability Sham provided made all the difference for us as first-time parents.

  I still cooked dinner as often as I could and made homemade baby food, freezing puréed fruit and vegetables in ice cube trays. I loved being a mom and was always buying Kelty new toys and baby clothes, going overboard every time I walked into a store. As any parent can attest, a newborn brings a different level of hectic to a household. We never seemed to get any sleep, and, tough as it is to admit, I used to line up bottles of milk in Kelty’s crib so that when he woke up he could grab a bottle, fill his tummy, and fall right back to sleep. I worried that he would become more attached to Sham than to me, and one time, when Kerry brought him to the airport after I returned from a business trip, Kelty played shy with me. It didn’t last, but it hurt me to the core to think my baby boy saw me even fleetingly as a stranger.

  The Dennehys were Catholics with deep religious roots, and Kerry felt strongly about raising our children as Catholics. As a Protestant, I had no problem with that, but I did tell Kerry that he would need to take responsibility for our son’s religious education. He agreed, and Kelty was christened in a little church down the street from us.

  Kelty was a restless baby, so it was no surprise that he was walking at nine months, tearing around the house and keeping us on our toes. He was always laughing and making us laugh. He was occasionally plagued by eczema, which meant slathering him with calamine lotion and giving him oatmeal baths, but he took it all in stride. Our boy loved to eat—anything and everything. Most kids would turn up their noses at delicacies like paté, but not Kelty—put it in front of him and it would be gone in a heartbeat. He was happy-go-lucky, full-speed ahead. Chasing ducks at the park or playing down the street with the neighbourhood kids was pretty much the perfect day for him. We spoiled him, of course. His favourite toy was Todeye, a stuffed white bear that he took everywhere. No one can remember where Todeye’s name came from, but Kelty seldom let him out of his sight, not caring a whit that all those washings and all that manhandling were starting to wear on the little bear. Every summer, a group of us would head over to a resort on Vancouver Island, and one year we left Todeye behind by mistake. Kelty refused to go to bed without his best friend, so I had to phone the resort and get Todeye sent home immediately by courier.

  Kelty couldn’t sit still, and the minute he found his feet, he’d started climbing out of his crib. Once, in the middle of the night, I heard a weird “meow” sound, like a distressed kitten, and jumped out of bed to find out what it was. I followed the sound downstairs but couldn’t see anything until I opened the door to the basement and saw Kelty, hanging by his tiny fingertips fr
om the back of the open staircase. I fetched the little monkey and put him back to bed, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

  Kerry and I still spent our summers in Winnipeg, splitting our vacation time between my family’s cabin and Kerry’s family place at Victoria Beach on Lake Winnipeg. When Kelty was about eight months old, we decided to enter him in the annual Victoria Beach summer masquerade parade. We weren’t quite sure how to dress him up, but we finally put a big Pampers diaper box over his baby carriage and dubbed it the Pope mobile.

  Life was good. We had our families in Manitoba and a big circle of friends in Vancouver, getting together with our kids at each other’s homes or nearby parks. We were always going out to dinner parties, the kind where everybody dressed up in crazy costumes. Once Kerry and I showed up in lederhosen for German night, and another time I covered myself with pink balloons for a pink-themed party.

  Kerry’s job at Earl’s was going well. The perks included trips for the managers, usually to exotic places where much dining and drinking was on the menu, and every once in a while I would go along, leaving Kelty in the care of Sham. One junket in late 1985 found Kerry and me travelling all over Europe by train with a group of other Earl’s managers and their spouses, visiting vineyards and wineries. I love my wine, and it was a glorious trip, but for some reason, I couldn’t drink. We’d get up every morning and go down for a lovely breakfast with Kerry’s colleagues, but I couldn’t eat, either. All I wanted was a cold glass of milk, which I couldn’t find anywhere. I didn’t think much of it, figuring I had a touch of the flu.

  Kerry had been to the doctor before our trip after discovering an odd bulge on the left side of his abdomen. It didn’t hurt, and while they tried to figure out what it was, the doctor told Kerry it was okay to take the trip as long as he avoided contact sports. One night in Barcelona, we were walking back to our hotel after a lovely dinner when we were mugged. Kerry was carrying the bag with all our money and our passports. The mugger knocked me over, then knocked Kerry down and took off with the bag. Kerry set off in hot pursuit. I yelled at him to stop; all I could think of was that he was going to tackle the mugger and hurt himself. Thankfully, he let the guy get away. It was a hassle replacing our papers at the Canadian embassy, but I was just grateful that Kerry was okay. When we returned home, we got the results of his tests. The bulge was a sac full of waste material that his kidney wasn’t processing, and Kerry ended up in hospital having the kidney removed. It was a serious operation, and it was difficult afterward to see him laid up and taking drugs for the pain. Thankfully, his physical health and die-hard athleticism stood him in good stead—he recovered well and adjusted to managing with just one kidney.

  I had booked my own doctor’s appointment after we returned from Europe, and for me the news was better: I was pregnant. We couldn’t have been more excited at the thought of welcoming another Dennehy to the family. Our second baby was due in late June 1986, which meant a gap of almost three years between the two. Kelty was just the right age to welcome a new little brother or sister.

  My wider family was expanding, too. My sister Cath had been living in Vancouver with her second husband, Rick, and their boys, Rory and Jesse, were born in 1978 and 1980. Their daughter, Tegan, arrived in 1985, after Cath’s family moved back to Winnipeg. My sister Nancy had married Ray in 1983; they moved to Scotland, where they adopted two children, Tina and Matthew. My brother Ted married Dyan in 1982 and settled in Vancouver. They had three children: Kailey, Sam, and Lauren. My sister Cheryl married David in 1990. My brother Robbie married Cathy in 1986, and their two children were named Jacqueline and Robbie. Both Robbie and Cheryl still lived in Winnipeg.

  It was another good pregnancy. I wasn’t sick, and I managed to keep working and doing everything I had been doing before. But at some point, Kerry and I looked around our Yew Street house and knew that with another little one coming, we were outgrowing the place. We also knew we could no longer afford anything on Vancouver’s west side. We decided that the North Shore might be the answer, and one day we checked out a rambling modern house on Hadden Drive in the British Properties. I loved it from the moment we walked through the front door. It was a post and beam bungalow in the woods with a walkout basement. A little trail went down to the creek in the ravine out back. It reminded me so much of the family cabin back in Winnipeg—all glass walls, beamed ceilings, and sprawling layout. The house was over our budget, but we bought it anyway.

  Our moving date was June 30. Riley was due June 28, which meant I was going to be either very pregnant or packing a newborn during the move. If that wasn’t stressful enough, Kerry decided that to save money we would rent a truck rather than hiring movers. On moving day, I was feeling almost as big as our new house, sitting in the front seat of the Budget Rent-a-Truck cradling Kerry’s stuffed grayling fish, his prize possession, and wondering what we were thinking. But we got there and managed to unload the truck without me going into labour.

  In the midst of the chaos, we’d also had to hire a new nanny because Sham didn’t want to move to the North Shore. We interviewed again and ended up taking on Jo, a young woman from England. She told us she wouldn’t be able to stay for more than a year or so, but she was the kind of nanny we were looking for, warm and no-nonsense, so we agreed and she moved in with us.

  On July 2, with the house full of unpacked boxes, I went into labour in the middle of the night. This time we got up and headed straight to the hospital. The whole way I was in tears, my hormones raging. All I could think about was how different our lives were going to be, how our perfect little family of three was going to change. I was excited, but I was also worried about how it was going to work out. The labour was a tough eighteen hours. But when Riley Rae, our gorgeous baby girl, was born with blue eyes just like her brother’s, healthy and hale at eight pounds, eleven ounces, it didn’t matter anymore. Kerry and I had already decided on a name. My good friend Susan Dowler’s middle name was Riley, and I’d always liked it. Rae was after my mother, Barbara Rae. When we got Kerry’s mom, Dodie, on the phone, she was especially excited because Riley was her first granddaughter. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” she exclaimed. “What’s her name?”

  “Riley Rae,” I said.

  After a silence, Dodie said: “Well, I guess there’s nothing we can do about that now, is there?”

  It was sweet, but we understood. If Kerry’s mom had had her way, she would have named all the kids in the family. If Riley didn’t quite fit the bill, that was okay with us.

  My mom was on a plane as soon as Riley was born and, as with Kelty, she was a big help, keeping the house clean and food on the table while I did my best to adjust to a brand new routine with two small children. Kelty loved his baby sister, but he definitely noticed a change in the family dynamic. He no longer had our undivided attention. He started waking up during the night and would come in and wake us up, too. Most nights, I would lie down with him in his bed and sing him the Irish lullaby “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” until he fell back to sleep.

  Like her brother, Riley didn’t take to breastfeeding. In those first few weeks, she vomited so much that Mom and I took her to the hospital one day to have her checked out. She was fine, but as we were pulling into the driveway back home, we saw Kelty sitting high up in a tree in our yard. When he spotted us, he promptly fell out of the tree and split open his chin. We had to turn the car around and go straight back to the hospital, where he needed stitches to close the gash.

  Even though he was a rambunctious kid, Kelty seldom had health problems aside from the usual kids’ stuff. Riley, though, had problems from the start. At eight months old, she began having so much trouble breathing that we took her to emergency. The doctor told us she had asthma. That first spell was the start of a pattern. We never knew when an asthma attack was coming, so we were always on the alert, Riley’s puffers and medications at the ready.

  At about eighteen months, while Kerry was away on a fishing trip up north, Riley had a severe attack. The emergency room
doctor began going through the usual routine—admit her, treat her, send her home. But this time, a nurse took me aside and quietly suggested that Riley should be transferred to Children’s Hospital in Vancouver. Riley, she implied without saying so, needed more attention than she was getting. The doctor resisted my request but I insisted, and eventually Riley was taken by ambulance to Children’s. Within two hours she was in intensive care on a respirator, in an induced coma. It’s hard to explain the feeling of seeing your baby hooked up to machines and IVs and tubes. Riley was helpless, and so was I. They were doing everything they could, but she didn’t seem to be getting better. Since Kerry was out in the bush, I couldn’t get in touch with him at first. All I could do was stay by Riley’s side and try to comfort her. One morning, a nurse came into Riley’s hospital room and told me they had summoned a priest.

  “Mrs. Dennehy,” the priest said to me, “you’re going to have to figure out how to deal with Riley’s death.”

  I told the medical staff she wasn’t going to die. I would will Riley to live. And I did. I don’t know how, but I stuck by her side and slowly, so slowly, she got better. It took three weeks before she was out of the woods, and she needed to be weaned off the drugs, which were hard on her little body and had even caused her to hallucinate. She was brave through it all, but she would cry and say, “Mommy, Mommy, no more pokies” because she hated the needles. Because she had been in bed for so long and the drugs were so strong, her recovery included painstaking physical therapy rehabilitation. She also had to take steroids to build up her strength. Riley came home from the hospital in a wheelchair, transferring to a walker until her legs became strong enough for her to walk on her own again. It all seemed too much for such a little thing, but there was something in Riley that spoke to an inner strength and determination, and she never gave up.