My carefree, precarious lifestyle carried on this way for a few months, until one day I woke up and had a strong hankering for hot dogs. I don’t particularly like hot dogs, but I managed to gobble down a whole package of uncooked wieners for breakfast, to my grotesque satisfaction. I knew right then and there that I was pregnant. I took a home pregnancy test to confirm my suspicions and, sure enough, I was.
When Jeremy got home that day, I told him the news. He didn’t seem to be too enthusiastic. “We’re not ready to have a kid,” he said. He thought we were both too young, but I didn’t listen to him. Jeremy was in his early twenties, and I had just turned twenty. We had only known each other for a few months. I told Jeremy that, whatever happened between us, I wanted to keep the baby. I stopped partying right away and expected that Jeremy would be on board with me, but he didn’t change his ways. We started arguing a lot. I told him to get out, even though I didn’t mean it. He took my threats seriously. As he was packing his stuff to leave, I said, “With or without you, I’m having this baby!”
After he left, I couldn’t afford to keep the apartment on my own, so I ended up moving back into my grandma’s house until I could figure out what I was going to do. While Jeremy and all my so-called friends were out gallivanting, I was at home alone, taking up knitting. I knitted the baby a cute, yellow mini-pillow and blanket. I was so excited for this baby. I knew that I was ready to be a mother, and I already loved him. Him. I knew in my heart that he was a boy.
Jeremy would come and go throughout my pregnancy and, like a fool, I would easily let him back into my good graces. I ended up landing a job as a receptionist with the government and rented myself a bedroom in a nice penthouse suite in the mall, off a man who won the lottery. He had purchased real estate all over the world and travelled a lot, so he was never around. The suite was great. It had all the amenities I needed, but I was lonely. I didn’t eat properly. My main craving was eating sugary cereal before bed.
During the end of my pregnancy, Jeremy was willing to try to be a father. I’m not sure if he was back with me because it was a place for him to hang his hat or if he honestly cared. Whichever the case, I welcomed the company. Jeremy and I would go out together to the local pub on the weekends with his friends. We would sit at the bar together and I would watch him drink way too much whisky while I sipped on coffee to keep up. I suspect that this might have something to do with why my child is so energetic and can’t sit still, even to this day.
Jeremy didn’t make much money, but he saved up enough to buy me a cute little garnet promise ring to express his love for me. I ended up having to sell the ring for grocery money not long after because we were low on cash, but it was the thought that counted. If he had known any better, he would have known that garnet is not my birthstone. But, it turned out to be a significant coincidence that foreshadowed part of my future with Jeremy.
Before the baby came, I wanted us to have our own place rather than a rented room. Having a place to call home was more important to me than ever, because I was in the nesting stage of my pregnancy and I wanted to have a room ready for the baby. Jeremy ended up getting hired on at the diamond mine on a two-and-two rotation, so we could afford a nice, two-bedroom apartment near the lake. At that time, Yellowknife was booming from the diamond industry. The downside was that the mine was located way out in the tundra, and it was a fly-in, fly-out camp. Sadly, many of the families that have partners working at these mines fall apart. Jeremy and I weren’t an exception to the rule.
I was alone most of the time in the new apartment building, even when Jeremy was in town, and I swear that it was haunted. Rumour had it that someone had hung themselves in the stairwell back in the eighties, and it’s been haunted since. I would stay at the apartment during the day but, as soon as evening hit, I would leave and stay at my grandmother’s house because of the fearful feeling I had in my gut. One day, after baking a batch of cupcakes to bring to work with me, I was leaving my house and trying to lock the deadbolt from the outside of the door. I could have sworn that someone was on the other side of the door, holding the lock. The creepiest feeling came over me and I threw the cupcakes in the air and ran down the empty hallway to the nearest exit.
I asked my cousin to stay with me one night so that I wouldn’t have to be alone. We woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of the front doorknob violently rattling, like someone was trying to get in. The doorknob rattled off and on for a few minutes while we sat in the living room, frozen in fear. I was too afraid to move, so my cousin got up the gumption to check it out. She grabbed a knife for protection and quickly swung the door open, but no one was on the other side of the door. There wouldn’t have been enough time for someone to run down the long hallway without being seen, and we had no explanation for what could have caused the doorknob to rattle. We couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night, and I gave my move-out notice the next day.
***
RIVER WAS MY PRIDE AND JOY. He was the roundest, cutest, happiest baby I had ever seen. I was overjoyed to have this little companion in my life to love and nurture, and he kept me on my toes. My motherly instincts kicked in immediately; there was no place in my life to be anything less than the best mother I could be. I just wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t put him first, before anything else.
Jeremy, on the other hand, did not change. I tried to get him on board with me, but he would disappear for days on end just to come crawling back, apologizing. The situation was not ideal, but I was willing to work on the relationship for River’s sake. I wanted River to have his father in his life.
One night, while River was sleeping in his crib, we had a few friends over. Everything was going great. My girlfriend and I were out on the porch visiting with each other, while her boyfriend and Jeremy were inside watching hockey. I had no idea that they were scheming to leave us and go out. Before I knew it, Jeremy came up to the balcony doors and locked them shut. “Come on, open the door,” I said, laughing and thinking he was playing a joke on me. But Jeremy and his friend merrily ignored us and walked out of the apartment. I watched helplessly as they jumped into a cab. Jeremy didn’t seem to care for one second that our baby boy was inside the house, sleeping in his crib, while I was stuck outside on the balcony of our apartment. I panicked. My friend tried to calm me down, but we both didn’t know what to do. It was only a matter of time until River would wake up, crying, and I wouldn’t be there for him. I tried to break the glass, but it was too thick and I had nothing to break it with. The only options were to either jump off the balcony, hoping to land on my feet and not break my neck, or climb across to the neighbour’s balcony and pray that I wouldn’t fall onto the concrete below.
I slowly reached for the balcony beside mine, careful not to look down, and made it to the other side. The neighbours heard me knocking and opened the balcony door. “I’m sorry, but I’m locked out of my house and stuck on the balcony!” I said in a panic, and they let me go through their apartment to get to mine. Thankfully Jeremy hadn’t locked the front door. I ran to River so fast to check on him, to make sure he was still breathing, since I was an overly cautious mother in the first place. He was sound asleep and oblivious to what was going on.
I was so angry that Jeremy would do something like that, without even thinking of the consequences. It was so uncaring and selfish. I’ll never understand how an urge, an impulse, can be more powerful than the safety of your own family. I often blamed myself for Jeremy’s behaviour. Maybe I did something to make him do that. Maybe I needed to be nicer to him. Maybe he just needed a break. Excuses, excuses. The truth was, I didn’t know Jeremy. This was not the person that I fell in love with. I fell in love with a charismatic, vibrant, funny, protective man, but this Jeremy was someone I didn’t know. His behaviour was unpredictable. If I tried to talk to him, I would be left defeated and confused. I started to think about the possibility that he was starting arguments just so that he would ha
ve an excuse to walk out the door.
Something needed to give, so I decided it was going to be me. I needed to make a change. I wanted to go back to school, so I started researching the options I had. Since I didn’t graduate from high school, the doors weren’t exactly flying open for me to attend the top universities. I found a school for esthetics in Edmonton that piqued my interests, and the requirements to get in seemed lenient; no high school education was required. I decided to give it a try and submitted my application; after all, it couldn’t hurt to try. After a few weeks of waiting, my application was approved to attend school in the fall. I was going to be a college student after all.
When River and I arrived in the big city, I realized quickly that I needed to be on my toes. Down south, everything is go, go, go. In the North, it’s the opposite. Everyone takes their time; they arrive late, leave early, no one rushes. Living in the city is like a rat race, always running from one place to the next because it takes so long to get anywhere.
I didn’t exactly have a plan set in place before we left Yellowknife, and I didn’t know where we were going to live. I just thought that things would fall into place once we got there. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be to find a decent, safe apartment near my school. Since the school was right downtown, the affordable rentals were taken and the rest were ridiculously expensive. I ended up taking a chance on an expensive bachelor suite in a posh building a few city blocks from my school. Our tiny apartment was lonesome, but at least we had each other and that was all that mattered to me.
I placed River into a nearby daycare, which was situated in a government building. He was the youngest baby in the daycare, only four months old. I would drop off River in the mornings and speed walk to school, trying not to be late. After school, timing was always an issue because the daycare would lock their doors at exactly five fifteen every day and I couldn’t leave the school until five sharp, so I would end up locked out of the daycare on some days, knocking on the windows and waving down the janitor to let me in. The daycare staff would give me the same lecture about being late for pick up: “You know you can’t always be late picking him up, Catherine; we close at five.”
There were times when I got so mixed up with my days that I couldn’t tell one day from the next, because I would be so rushed and sleep deprived. I even thought I forgot River at home once. I was still in a dream-like state from exhaustion and called the daycare from school to make sure he was there.
The program I took was learn-as-you-go. We practised our skills on paying customers and, because we were still learning, clients received a discount price. I learned to do the basic spa treatments: pedicures, waxing, relaxation massage, facials. The only problem was, I wasn’t very good at any of them. I lacked confidence as an esthetician and, as a result, I made a lot of mistakes on those poor paying customers. I have one too many horror stories of my days at beauty school.
One day a tall, dark, handsome and very hairy man walked into the spa to get his back waxed. I tried to hide in the back room and pretend I was busy cleaning the waxing pots so that my instructors wouldn’t choose me to do it, but they knew I didn’t have experience doing a back wax yet and thought it would be a good idea to place me with the hairiest man possible to fine tune my inadequate waxing skills. I hesitantly entered the small spa room with him and said, “Okay, so, ummm, just take your shirt off and lie face down on the table,” trying not to turn beet red in the face. When he lay down on the table, the room suddenly got hot. I began to sweat, and my heart was beating out of my chest. I tried to focus. “I’m a confident professional,” I told myself, but I was so nervous that my hands were shaking.
I just wanted to get the job over with as soon as possible, so I scooped a big glob of wax from the jar on the table next to him with my wooden spatula and smeared it down one entire section of his back. Any esthetician knows that you are only supposed to start off with small sections, not an entire strip. I smoothed a long piece of paper over the wax and rubbed it in to get a good grip on the hair but, when it was time to pull it off, I hesitated. You are never supposed to hesitate when you are waxing, never. The man yelled out in pain, “What the hell?” and turned around quickly with a snarl. “I’m so sorry!” I said. “It won’t happen again.” But I couldn’t be sure.
The next time I tried, I closed my eyes and prayed that it would work, while beads of sweat rolled down my forehead. I pulled the strip, but I still had the technique wrong and his skin pulled up again with the strip. “I’m so sorry!” I apologized repeatedly. By that time, the paper was stuck to the wax and the wax was stuck to his back. “Please be patient with me, I’m just learning,” I said, but that didn’t seem to help with the situation. He was fuming and confused as to why I didn’t know how to do my job properly. After what seemed hours of gruelling labour on both or our parts, I was finally able to get the last bits of wax off his back. He didn’t end up paying for his service, and I don’t blame him.
This client distress went on and on at the school. One woman came in the day before her wedding to get her sideburns waxed and, to no surprise of my own, I left her walking out with large purple bruises on both sides of her cheeks from not pulling the wax off fast enough, even after I had warned her that I didn’t know what I was doing and there were no guarantees that I would do a good job.
Another woman came in for an armpit wax, but her armpit hairs were too short, so I had to manually pluck every single one of them out with tweezers, instructor’s orders. Not everything was my fault, though. One woman came in for a pedicure because she thought it might help her with the severe frostbite she had on her toes. She was a runner and was doing a marathon in the mountains when her toes got so badly frostbitten that they turned a bright green colour. Northerners know all too well that green is the colour they turn before they turn black, and black toes mean they are dead and need to be amputated.
Catherine and her Papa at her college graduation
During my final days at school I became very skilled at waxing, and it ended up being my favourite service, ironically. When I graduated from beauty school, my papa flew to the city to attend my graduation ceremony. My grandma didn’t come — not because she didn’t want to, she just wasn’t one for the city. It was too big for her.
Even though my papa would never admit it to me personally, I knew that he was proud of me. The graduation ceremony was an important day for me as I finally got to wear a real cap and gown, something that I had missed out on from not graduating high school. My Papa bought me a nice silver dress, sliver shoes and a matching sparkly clutch. He dressed up in his black leather jacket, slicked-back hair and aviator shades. He looked like an older version of James Dean, and I was proud to have him as my date. It was such a great moment for him as well; after that he would always say, “You’re going places kid, you’re high class.” He was one of the few people in my life who believed in me and knew how important it was to get an education. No one in my family had graduated from college, let alone high school, and he had placed his hope in me to set the bar high. He put me on somewhat of a pedestal after I graduated. I wanted to prove to my papa and to the rest of my family that I would make them proud, live up to their expectations and go after my dreams. I wasn’t only doing this for myself anymore. I was doing it for them.
***
WHEN I RETURNED FROM SCHOOL, I returned to the old apartment that Jeremy and I had shared before River and I left. Jeremy and I had a deal that he could keep the apartment while we were gone and that we would remain in a long-distance relationship and see how things would unfold when River and I returned home.
My graduation present from Jeremy was a cushy, king-sized bed, and the first thing I did when I got home was dive into it. I felt like I was floating on a cloud. I had never had a brand-new bed before, let alone a king-sized, pillow-top mattress. The second I lay down in it, I was out like a light. I must have been so exhausted over those last eight months
that I finally had a truly restful sleep. That peacefulness was short lived because I soon found out that, while I was in school, Jeremy hadn’t changed his ways and we found ourselves right back where we started. Shortly after I moved home, he packed up and left.
Life was simpler and undisturbed with just me and River. I found work at a spa and was practising my trade. We developed a suitable routine, but it wasn’t long after we were back in Yellowknife that I noticed something out of the ordinary on River’s body while giving him a bath. I took him to the emergency room that night to get him checked out. The emergency room doctor said that he could have hurt himself somehow while running around. It made sense; after all, he was a pretty rambunctious kid. The doctor said, “The swelling should go down in a few days,” so I took his advice and thought nothing of it.
A few weeks went by and the swelling was still there, causing River a lot of discomfort. I brought him to our family doctor, who immediately sent us in for an ultrasound. Both the doctors and a specialist confirmed that it was a tumour that needed to be removed right away. The next day we were on a flight down south to the children’s hospital in Edmonton, so River could get an operation. When we arrived at the children’s ward, the doctors ran tests on River. I felt helpless having to hold him down while the nurses poked and prodded him. He looked at me through his tears as if to ask me, “Why?” He was too young to understand what was happening to him. When he came out of the operating room, he was heavily sedated, but as soon as he saw me he jumped off the stretcher and into my arms, saying “Mommy” over and over. The tumour that was removed turned out to be cancerous, and they kept us in the hospital for more than a week to run more tests on River to see if the cancer had spread throughout his body.
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