by Camilla Gibb
This summer I took the egg kayaking in the Northumberland Strait. We bicycled through shady ravines in the city. We visited friends on Lake Huron, where we bobbed together in the chalky waves. We spent weekends with my parents in the country.
I can appreciate the beauty of these moments when I describe them, but I have little feeling of beauty inside me. I can create happy moments for us and I can know that they are happy. I am doing my best to give my daughter a good life, exposing and introducing her to diverse and interesting people and experiences. I am watching her, watching the world. I have spent so much of my life watching it from a distance. Now it seems I am twice removed.
I’m reluctant to call this depression, but the ongoing absence of my ability to write is by this point starting to read like a symptom of some serious, underlying disease. I was relieved of any significant depression for all the years I was with Anna. And I was full of words. I worry that my relationship with Anna just masked what is broken in me, what has never been fixed, what may never be fixable. The near decade with her is bookended by the darkest two periods of my life. Perhaps this is the real me, not the happier, healthier, more confident and outgoing person I felt myself to be with Anna. I have to find some way to endure myself. I have a child to live for. I have to write.
I feel deeply ashamed walking into Dr. P’s office all these years later. I come to her as a failed person.
“You left analysis too early,” Dr. P says.
“Is that it?” I ask. “Is it that simple?”
“Mmm-hmm,” she nods.
This gives me some reason to hope. Perhaps a process of transformation had been under way in analysis, something that could possibly be resumed. But I cannot afford Dr. P. She was expensive back then—she is even more expensive now.
Dr. P refers me to Dr. B.
I enter psychoanalysis for the second time in my life.
3
I am describing a steel box the height of a building, the four corroded walls that surround me. I sleep in the rusty corners and spend my days pacing in semi-darkness from wall to wall. There is no food or water.
I am creating a picture of my internal world for Dr. B.
Being a psychoanalyst with a medical background, she introduces the idea of taking an antidepressant. I had taken the Celexa my GP had prescribed after my daughter was born for just a month. Dr. B’s suggestion sends me catapulting back twenty years. I know the slippery slope that can begin with one pill. Prescriptions for drug upon drug, which blunt and bloat but do not relieve you of nihilism and anhedonia.
I see that potential, but I also see a very warm and courageous person before me, someone willing to share something of her own experience with depression. She takes a pill every day. She doesn’t imagine a day when she won’t. She is humble and humane and honest and perhaps for no other reason in that moment than a desire to be humble and humane and honest like her, I will try.
It occurs to me later that I have written the story of this steel box before. In those early days of attempting to write short stories about people and places that mattered to me, I wrote a story about an African man in prison.
For more than two years I existed in confinement so solitary that I began to forget myself. I lived in a three-by-three-foot cell with a piece of sky the size of a banana leaf one hundred feet above me. There was barely enough room for me to kneel, let alone lie down. Since I hadn’t the strength to scale the walls, I clung like a silverfish to the dank, mildewed cement.
There is that tiny prick of light that Ian Brown described. A piece of sky the size of a banana leaf one hundred feet above.
I tell Dr. B about that piece of sky. She leans over the steel box, this prison, to look inside it. She can see me there. I can see her. She is not hazy. She can hear me. And she is looking straight into my eyes.
4
Tita takes my daughter to the drop-in centre at a local school. It’s a busy kaleidoscope of white, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and African kids and mums, and a good number of Filipina nannies. My daughter makes friends and so does Tita. Both of them suddenly have a social life, with play dates and potlucks and picnics and trips to the mall, all quite separate from me. They clear out the furniture from our living room so that five nannies and eight children can play. The nannies cook pancet and adobo. Their largely blond, blue-eyed charges tuck into Filipino food.
My daughter spends more time with her nanny now. I feel I have become more of an employer to her with this shift.
And now the nanny is mad at her employer. I’ve misplaced a necklace. I misplace everything these days. When I ask Tita if she has seen it, she hears an accusation. She bursts into tears, and I hate myself for even having mentioned it. It’s no different to me than misplacing my keys, but I have no doubt there is a fine tradition of employers suspecting their nannies of stealing. “I realize this is a sensitive issue, Tita, but please trust me, you know me, I’m not accusing you.” But she will not be reassured.
“I don’t want to lose my job,” she sobs.
In that moment I don’t know what I can say to reassure her. For all the trust I thought we’d established, for all the intimacy of the past year, she seems not to know me. Doesn’t she understand her power in this situation? Her value to me? She takes care of the thing that is most precious of all to me. In fact, I don’t even know, don’t even want to know what it would be like to have to raise my daughter without her.
“Why I work for you if you don’t trust me?” she says angrily.
Is it really this tenuous? I don’t feel it is, but then I am not the one in the vulnerable position. I might be dependent on her in many ways, but my livelihood is not one of them. Her work permit binds her to me, but the reverse is not true.
“I’ll find the necklace,” Tita says, and turns away from me. She disappears into her room.
I sit at the kitchen table and pour myself a giant glass of red wine. Early on I was aware that Tita’s presence would have a significance for us that would outweigh ours for her. Perhaps that’s why I want to make some kind of difference in her life. I think about the fact that I have made promises to Tita that speak to my desire to connect us in some lasting way. I have told her we’ll take a balik bayan to the Philippines next year ourselves, travel to her small island and stay with her family on their farm. I’ve said Nico can live with us when he finally gets here if they are not in a position to afford their own place. I will help her go back to school if that is what she wants to do. The nascent future I envision includes her.
But perhaps Tita, Micah and I are even more alike than I had realized. I suspect we can all be domesticated by love, but when love is threatened or broken, our suspicions and mistrust are confirmed. Experience has made us this way. Perhaps she simply does not believe my promises that speak of permanence because the disappointment, if I fail to deliver, would just be too much.
It makes me wonder if this, in part, is why Micah had to run away. Because if you believe in what’s promised, if you become invested, you take the risk of a broken heart.
I miss Micah, tonight more than most. One of the things I miss is the time we spent talking, filling in the gaps for each other. We didn’t grow up in a house of stories. There was much my mother likely had to bury for our protection, and the stories my father told made less and less sense. I can count on one hand the stories I know about my mother’s childhood. I have no idea how my parents met, or whether she was attracted to him. There were proposals before my father. Why him? I remember asking once. Her answer, nothing more than: I was twenty-six. It was time.
After becoming engaged, my mother embarked on the most mysterious chapter of her career with MI5. She went to Trinidad for two years in the mid-1960s, leaving her fiancé behind. Predictably enough, she will tell us nothing about what she was doing there.
We have become, as so many children do, excavators in the next generation. As we fill in the bits and pieces for each other, the authorship becomes shared and the stories altered, embelli
shed, bettered perhaps.
Stories become shared in marriages, too. You can be so familiar with your spouse’s family stories, so well acquainted with its characters that you begin to think of those stories as your own. It’s what we do together—build a common history. Anna and I separated our furniture and the books and CDs and photographs, but the stories are so much harder to disentangle. It’s one of the things I find saddest about the end of my marriage.
My ex-father-in-law died quite suddenly late last year. He was a man I loved and respected and had known not just for the duration of my marriage but for a lifetime in a way—through Anna’s stories about him. He was a man of the world. He gave me an atlas one Christmas—the biggest and best atlas there is. I spend hours with it, much as I did poring over my father’s atlas when I was a child. I miss him. I feel his absence more than I do that of my own father.
I can’t afford to lose any more people. Come home, I say to my brother via text—the only way he’ll communicate, the cheapest way. The job he’d lined up in advance hasn’t worked out. Within his first three weeks in Vancouver he has used heroin again. He’s back on methadone after all those painful months spent weaning himself off. After the methadone, the OxyContin, the Tylenol 3s. He swears he never shared needles, but he has just been diagnosed with hepatitis C. He has gum disease. His body is breaking down as a result of all the years of abuse.
You cannot be a drug addict at forty. You can be dead. Fuck, Micah, come home.
But what do I even mean by that? Come home to my house? Bring your big messy self back into the fold? My baby is no longer such a baby. She is very much aware.
And my house is not the cozy and accommodating bubble it once was. It’s a mix of people with individual needs that can’t always be met within these walls.
The fight between Tita and me seems to have suddenly reduced our relationship to simply one between employer and employee. I can’t believe that it can be so easily stripped of all its layers and complexity. It can’t for me. I will keep my promises. I will prove to her that this has more substance and depth; that I do.
I know her in ways that transcend our employment relationship. I know her as moral and strong-willed, open-minded, mischievous, sarcastic, moody, irreverent, adventurous, artistically and musically talented, shrewdly attuned to people, uncannily wise to what makes them tick. And I know some of the stories of the formative moments in her life. I know, for instance, that the night after her wedding, all of her jewellery was stolen from her house. The house was under construction. There were bars on the windows, but no glass. They had entertained the entire village that day. Most of the villagers are also relatives. Lots of people stayed over, sleeping on bamboo mats outside. Hands reached through the bars in the night.
She has not felt the same way about the village since. With that violation it ceased, in fact, to be home.
The morning after our impasse, Tita and I are polite, but the cloud lingers. I break the silence and ask again where I went wrong. She is willing to tell me now that despite my denials, there was something in my tone that she did take to be accusatory. I apologize, I grovel, I am practically on my knees. She cries, I cry. She hugs me, I hug her.
“Do you think it reminds you of when your own jewellery was stolen?” I venture.
“There might be a connection,” she says, picking up a crumb off the table with her finger.
“Ah,” I say. “Who’s the resident psychologist now?”
She smacks me gently on the forearm.
5
After a very bad start in Vancouver, Micah has managed to pick himself up. He’s in a methadone program again and taking interferon for the hepatitis, fortunately an easily treated strain. He’s found himself a job working for a condo developer with fifty years of projects ahead of him. He has also changed his name.
Our father did the same thing, several times in fact. I had given the private detective I hired to find him, thirteen years after he disappeared, a number of different names. He had spent his last years in Ontario living as someone else.
“Nice new business card,” my mother (ever a precise proofreader) compliments my brother (a dyslexic speller at best), “though you’ve misspelled both your first and last names.”
“It’s my new persona,” my brother says.
Miles has moved to the city. She has an apartment nearby, so close that I can take the baby out in her stroller and meet her for coffee. We often spend the weekend together, living a life that revolves around a baby. We take her to nearby parks and paddling pools, go for bike rides, my daughter in her seat on the back. On Saturday mornings we go to the farmers’ market, where my baby girl keenly samples artisanal cheeses and sausages.
We are not a couple, even though we must appear to the world as if we are. I love Miles; she is a gift in all our lives—a friend and a sister and an important part of my daughter’s life—but she is not my lover or a parent. There are times when we look like a family—my daughter careening between us, holding both of our hands—times where I unwittingly step outside the moment and become conscious of what this is not. It can take some of the happy out of the happy moments.
In the absence of both Miles and Tita, I remain daunted by the hours with my baby. The entertainment, the patience, the repetition, the boredom, the isolation. I distract the egg with outings as best as I can, but on weekends, seeing other couples with their children, other people being normal families, I feel the sadness welling up in me. I am afraid of time alone with my daughter in large part because of the anticipation, the expectation that I should be experiencing joy when what I experience is the conspicuousness of its absence. That makes me feel like a terrible mother.
It is easier to be on the move or to be surrounded by others than to face both the reality of mothering and my fear of it.
On my own, I can imagine only water. I knew my daughter would be a swimmer long before she was born. I took her into the bath with me the day after she was born and have been swimming with her from the time she was three weeks old. She had swum in the waters of Lake Ontario, Lake Huron, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic before she was even a year old.
In my one fantasy of the future she is on water. I am driving her long, lean, petulant self down to Lake Ontario in the dark early mornings to rowing practice. She is fourteen. She slams the door of the car and makes her way from the parking lot down to the lake. I stay in my car, drinking tea, reading the newspaper, loving her despite her disdain.
6
In the new year, having waited nineteen months, Tita finally gets preliminary approval of her application for permanent residency. The process of sponsoring Nico can now begin, and she has the freedom now to make some choices. Her work permit is no longer tied to a specific employer and she is no longer obliged to be a live-in caregiver. She is free to choose where she lives and works, how much she works and for whom.
Free and not. Living elsewhere, alone or in an apartment shared with friends, costs money. So does taking courses. A family gets used to receiving a certain amount in remittances—in fact, the economy of the Philippines would collapse without them. It’s hard to reduce that amount, making the case for short-term cutbacks as an investment in bigger, longer-term rewards, especially when people back home are hungry. Ten people back home are dependent upon Tita.
But what work is she going to do if she doesn’t have some further training? She is not uneducated. She has a university degree. But without some specific schooling here it won’t get her anywhere. She knows that. “I can work at Tim Hortons for minimum wage,” she says. Less money than she makes now. “Then I have to pay my rent.” And then there is nothing left. Nothing left to send home or save for a house or go back to school or raise children. She’s met women who have returned to caregiving after stints at coffee shops. Women who have gone back to living-in. Many Filipinas remain as caregivers for the rest of their lives.
If Tita and Nico could live with me, she could go back to school and work part-time for
me in lieu of rent until she is working full-time elsewhere. If she lived with us, my daughter would continue to have access to her Tita. She doesn’t know a life without her. But this would require my finding a bigger house. If there was a separate apartment, perhaps Miles could rent it until Nico arrives. She is with us much of the time as it is. My daughter would have a playmate in residence, I would have a friend. It would have to be a big enough house for Micah to stay in as well if he wanted or needed to. And while I’m at it: with enough room for Lolo and Lola in their later years.
When I last looked for a house, just two years ago, I simply looked for somewhere that felt safe for me as a single pregnant woman, somewhere for me and my unborn child to land. There was urgency to the decision, a desperate need for containment at a time when I could not have felt more vulnerable and uncertain. There was no Tita then, no Micah, no Miles. My parents weren’t with us for dinner twice a week. There wasn’t even a baby. But while I knew she would arrive, I couldn’t see the others coming. I couldn’t imagine that I would soon find myself in a house populated, and at times overrun, by a family.
The house I am looking for now needs to be big enough not just to contain us but to afford us all a little privacy. We clung to each other in the first house; now we all need the room to grow. I need the room, both physically and psychically, to entertain new possibilities. What if I were to meet someone? What if there were to be another child—someone else’s or even my own? I have a fantasy of a house that could be a home for even those I have yet to imagine.