by Bif Naked
My parents’ work in Bareilly meant they were active in their local community, which suited them well, both being idealistic young socialists. Soon, though, they would find themselves the guardians of two small children, with all that entailed.
TWO
Baby Gilmore Out of India
CHILDREN’S BEHAVIOUR IS USUALLY MOTIVATED BY desire. Mine was no different. My constant striving for validation, affection, and love often manifested itself in provocative displays. My birth mother was a provocative child, rumored to be not only uncommonly beautiful but also overly friendly. This overt friendliness ran through my blood too.
My birth mother, Maureen, was pregnant at age fifteen and gave birth to me at age sixteen. Those green saucer eyes of hers got her into trouble, I reckon.
My soon-to-be parents lived in a compound behind a seven-foot-high brick wall; the compound consisted of a hospital, a dental school that was part of a larger dental hospital, a seminary, and their house. The dental school had the latest state-of-the-art dental equipment, so that’s where foreigners from all over India went for dental work. The mission’s dental school saw a lot of patients—Bareilly was only a five- or six-hour drive from New Delhi—many of whom were regulars.
A nurse who worked at the local orphanage reached out to my mom, thinking she might be able to help with a baby who had been brought in. The girl had been surrendered by her family two months earlier and was now deteriorating in health, and not much more than skin and bones. When terrible sores began to threaten the infant’s life, my mother went every day to care for and hold the baby girl. Eventually, my parents took her to their home and began to care for her full time. The baby, named Shireen, recovered and began to thrive.
News of my parents’ new baby girl spread, and the mission was excited for them in their role as new parents. Before long, one of the dental patients, a nurse from Lucknow, asked my parents if they might be interested in taking another baby. She was friends with Dr. Stringham and his wife, the couple running the psych hospital in Lucknow. Their friends were diplomats from Canada whose teenaged daughter was expecting a baby in a few months. They were trying to find a suitable couple willing to adopt this Canadian child. As my dad tells it, he said, “Sure, if nobody else wants the baby, we’ll take it.” (At this point in the story, my father always laughs.) Dr. Stringham began to correspond with my parents, acting as the contact person between them and the pregnant teenager’s parents. My father and mother never had any direct contact with the Canadian family.
When the time finally came for them to go to New Delhi, my parents were ready with a letter signed by Dr. Stringham on behalf of the birth mother. They went to the Holy Family Hospital as per the arrangement, and attempted to give the letter to the hospital staff, who promptly waved it aside and handed the white baby to the white people. It was 5 a.m.—they had arrived early in an attempt to beat the heat of the day—and they had a long drive back home, so they left with me. They hadn’t signed anything or received any documentation; they just went on their way.
And this is how the adoption process started, with their applying to the Indian courts in Bareilly to legally adopt my sister and me, so that they could return to America with us. Adoption by Christians was not all that accepted in India at that time, as only 3 percent of the population identified as Christians. The courts had difficulty understanding how we came to be in our parents’ care. There was no proper paperwork for me, a Canadian baby in India, no father listed. Good luck with that. My parents should have saved themselves all the stress and just lied. But they were good people and so patiently and painstakingly went through the process.
Shireen and I remained blissfully oblivious to the fact that we were almost seized and taken away from them. We just played under the big wooden desks as my parents pleaded with the judges, trying to explain why they had no proof that we had indeed been handed over to them, other than the agreement letters they had signed for guardianship of us.
India had no real way of dealing with Americans adopting Canadians within its borders, and it was incredibly difficult to get the proper paperwork from the US Department of Immigration once the court finally did give its approval for my parents to bring Shireen and me to the United States based on their intention to adopt. I was finally accepted into the States just two days before we were to depart from India. Many months later, in a South Dakota courthouse, and the adoptions of one brown kid and one white kid from India were granted to the nice Methodist couple.
We moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, my parents still fresh from their mission work, and my mom now pregnant. Before long, Shireen, the eldest daughter, and I were adjusting to our new baby sister, Heather.
I battled ear infections monthly, likely caused by sticking all manner of things in my ears and nose. I had an amazing talent for getting up to things, from wrestling with geese at the man-made lakes of Golden Valley, the suburb of Minneapolis where we lived, to hiding in the church closets during service.
With optimism in their hearts, my parents sought out their next mission from the Church. They were unable to renew their visas to India through the Board of Missions—likely something to do with funding—so they were asked to consider the Congo—there was a possibility of setting up for training for dental therapists in Kinshasa. Half the costs would be paid for by the United Methodist Church mission agency and half by the Congolese government, headed up by good ole Mobutu. The Congo had just produced its first five Congolese dentists. My dad asked these dentists if they might supervise the dental therapists he trained, and he even visited several towns with these brand-new dentists. Although it was becoming increasingly clear that this was no time for foreigners in the Congo to start up some new—and to many there, wacky—dental therapy program, my parents wanted to go to investigate the possibility nevertheless. It is amazing to me now to think that they were seriously considering moving all five of us to sub-Saharan Africa. What a life-changer that would have been.
My little sister was less than a year old when my parents left for the Congo (a fact that, I suspect, causes my mother a lot of hand-wringing to this day), Shireen was three, and I had just turned two. We two older girls stayed with a family who had a daycare in their home, with as many as ten or fifteen kids there every day. We would be staying with this family for the entirety of my parents’ sojourn. Heather stayed with a lovely young couple who could devote their time to a baby.
Breakfast every morning involved all those white kids (I identified myself as an Indian kid like my sister, though the reality was that I was white as well) who attended the daycare standing around my sister and me as we ate our cereal at the kitchen table, still in our pyjamas. They didn’t speak to us. They just stared. I can’t even remember feeling anything at all in response to this early effort to alienate my sister and me (or so it seemed to us), even though we were staying there and they were there just for the day. People trying to alienate us was something we’d battle throughout our childhood years spent at public schools. It was an action built on bigotry, and not helped by the fact that we moved to a new city every couple of years, just like military brats, so that we were always outsiders.
Within months, upon their return from Congo, my parents and the Board of Missions had grown unhappy with each other and mutually agreed to part ways. With only three more weeks of pay coming to him, my father was faced with looking for a new job. So he found an opening in a program in a place a far cry from India and Africa, but exotic nonetheless.
THREE
In the Canadian North
MY PARENTS RETURNED FROM AFRICA AND HAPPILY announced that we were moving to Canada—“North of the fifty-third parallel, where the polar bears live.” I will never forget their saying this. I was about three years old and I couldn’t wait to see the polar bears.
My father accepted a teaching position at a community college in The Pas, Manitoba. We relocated there in winter. It was so far north that it seemed like it was dark night and day. My poor mother was
much less excited about the move than Shireen and I were—I don’t think the Great Northern Tundra was at all appealing to her. She was isolated indoors with three little kids—we girls couldn’t run about outdoors during the northern Canadian winter—in a very cold, very dark, and very lonely little town. We lived in a heated construction trailer, the kind with a central hallway with rooms off to the sides and a small bathroom. We lived there and we ate there and we froze there. We stayed there for several months, until a house was available. It too was really just another trailer, but more permanent.
Our new trailer was stationed in a parking lot of the community college where my dad taught. It was cramped quarters, and I cannot imagine my mother being pleased with this existence either, but I know it was better for her psyche than living in, say, Calcutta. Or in Africa. It was the right choice with three little kids like us, especially me, the holy winking terror. I winked at all men, at every opportunity. Everyone thought my winking was cute, but my mother knew better.
My best friend at age five was Amy, who had a dog named Chico. Amy’s mother was from the Philippines, and her Canadian dad worked for the forestry company and was never home. By then, we had moved into a house my parents bought in a new development in The Pas, a growing town. My and Amy’s houses were just down the street from each other.
The neighbourhood was beautiful and clean—and safe: back in the seventies, we kids were not often supervised while playing outside. To us, the “neighbourhood” was the last row of new houses in the subdivision, with a big greenbelt of forest at the back. Amy and I almost burned down that greenbelt in our makeshift fort behind her house. We were trying to smoke a cigarette, using some matches we stole, and in no time a fire had started at our feet. We swiftly sprang into action, Amy putting it out with a metal trash-can lid that we’d scavenged from someone’s yard.
Amy and I were always into some small mischief. We ripped off the neighbourhood kids by selling lemonade that was so watered down it was flavourless. Our customers protested, but with Amy and me frowning, arms crossed and giving the kids the stink eye, no one did anything about it.
My parents finally gave in to my and my sisters’ constant whining for them to buy us a dog. When summer arrived, we picked up a puppy on a trip to Minnesota, where my mother took us for holidays. We bought a little cockapoo-dachshund, hiding her under blankets in the car as we crossed the border back into Canada. This “smuggling” was a thrill for me, and I felt proud that my mother could pull the wool over the border guard’s eyes. She became my hero.
Muffin was a loving puppy and so great with us all, so sweet. She was a cocker spaniel crossed with a poodle and a dachshund—a cockapoo, a word that always made me laugh out loud. I said it often, knowing full well I couldn’t really get in trouble for doing so. This little dog loved me and my sisters, but I was the most in love with her and monopolized the poor dog’s time. She accompanied me everywhere. I loved dogs. I guess I have always been a dog person, with one exception.
The neighbours had a Great Dane that constantly knocked us girls to the ground, then proceeded to climb on top of us and hump us while we screamed and shrieked in horror, the neighbourhood boys laughing hysterically. The huge dog remained undisciplined for at least as long as we lived there, and we avoided the beast as much as possible.
The Anderson family had all boys. Kenny, who couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, was skinny and blond, and wore dark-rimmed glasses. He was very responsible for his age, so he was often asked to babysit us. Shireen and I were terrors. Heather, the youngest, was too shy to misbehave, but Shireen and I were a constant handful, especially me.
I felt it was my duty to torture Kenny, and it was never long before I took all my clothes off and ran naked, yelling “Chase me!” and waving my arms madly. I’d laugh and squeal down the hall, then down the steps of the back porch. I’d run naked down the lane, the poor kid desperately running after me, waving my footed pyjamas and begging me to come back. This was to my utmost delight, and I repeated the pattern over and over with every single babysitter who came to the house. (I learned that Kenny later went into the priesthood. It would not be the last time I drove someone to religion.)
Shireen and I endured the first few school years of what seemed like constant spankings from schoolteachers. One teacher pulled me right out of my chair and paddled my butt in front of the whole class. Nobody said a word about it—not the other teachers present (it was an open-space school), not my classmates, not my sister, nobody. I was too ashamed to tell my parents—doing so would only ensure that this action was repeated at home, as they would have suspected—quite accurately—that I had earned the walloping.
“The Lord’s Prayer” was broadcast over the school’s PA system every morning. Wherever you were, you had to stop and stand still while reciting along with the taped prayer. At some point, this was replaced with a sung version of the prayer, so then we had to stop and sing. I had a dance routine I performed to the song, to try to get laughs from the other kids, and it never failed.
In The Pas, about half the students were white kids and about half were Cree. It was a wonderful introduction to public school in Canada. When I was six, my father caught a couple of boys and me in the garage, attempting to copulate. They were from the neighbouring Cree reservation, and the three of us were constant companions for getting into trouble. I wrote letters to the boys saying they were beautiful and often waved at them in class. I learned a lot from them. They taught me how to skip a rock across a pond, how to tie a perfect knot, and games that sexually curious kids sometimes play when no parents are around. One day they taught me how to steal.
I stole a package of chewing gum from the grocery store. I was so nervous about the package fumbling around in my parka pocket. Later, my mother found it in my pants pocket while doing laundry and asked where I had got it. Consumed with guilt, I confessed, and she promptly marched me down to the grocery store to give it back and apologize to the owner. I was so mortified that I never stole anything ever again.
My poor mother used to find the strangest things in my laundry, including blue fuzz. Without fail, I had bright blue fuzz in my underpants. She must have eventually figured out what I was up to, as she took away my Grover doll. I never asked about him, but I knew my mother knew. It just made me pray harder to God.
Shireen and I asked my dad a lot of questions a lot of the time, about bodies and sex and things people do and, in between fits of giggles, other sex questions. My dad never flinched. Instead, he laughed his big laugh and answered our inquiries without hesitation or embarrassment. That was just how my dad rolled. We never dared ask my sweet mother, as we didn’t want to embarrass her. So all the tough questions went to my dad.
During my prepubescent years, I had no real concept of girl-love, with the exception of what I shared with my two girl buddies from my first-grade class. The three of us had spent a great deal of time in the tent pitched in my backyard all summer. My parents’ intention was to keep us out of trouble with this offering of a canvas pseudo-fort. But inside the tent, we were fooling around, exploring—a lot. Long summertime sunsets in northern Manitoba and the innocence of laissez-faire parental supervision didn’t hurt. Predictably, once back at school in the fall, without discretion or secrecy, we held court every recess, educating the other kids on how to have a special nap, just like parents did. Our classmates abandoned their recess plays, their homages to George Lucas’s new film, and sat, chin on hands, transfixed by our embellishments and theatrical descriptions. We should have charged speakers’ fees. We loved those captive audiences.
Now, these were the seventies, and by that I mean they were “happier” and more “whimsical” times. We simply had no frame of reference for anyone or anything that might cast a judgmental, negative, or sinister shadow on our innocent play, our private games. That is, until one of the older girls got wind of our information assemblies and crashed the playground party, announcing to everyone that we were—gasp—lesbian
s. Hilarity commenced among our loving fans, our loyal audience, and they abandoned us, cackling. With one word, that girl pushed us off our pedestals, crushed us, knocked the wind out of us. And we didn’t even understand the meaning of the word. Yet she changed our perspective on our little sessions, and that of our young classmates.
I felt embarrassed and ashamed. I didn’t know why the girl would say that. Why did she want to make us feel so bad? I decided to muster up the guts to ask my dad, not that it was particularly frightening to ask him a question; it was the question itself that had me flustered. But I had to know what the word meant, this word with so much power, this word that silenced us all in the schoolyard. And my father would know—he knew everything.
That morning, I insisted on having my hair done first, ahead of my sisters, so that I could seek my father’s wisdom before we left the house for school. I stared at him quietly, breathing nervously, inhaling the scent of his shaving foam. It smelled like trees and mint. It smelled like my dad smelled when he hugged me.
The water was running in the sink as he stood over it, the steam rising, fogging up the mirror. The upstairs bathroom in my parents’ home needed repair, but the hot water pipe sure worked. I was convinced it might burn my skin clean off if I got too close. So I stood in the doorway.
Dad was wearing those white underpants that all dads wore (or so I thought), kind of baggy and weird, and his church clothes were hanging on the hook on the back of the bathroom door. That silver hook, high above my eyeline, jutted out like a big knife.
“A lesbian is a woman who loves other women,” he said, rinsing his razor in the half-filled sink, then going back for more. He didn’t look at me, just answered my question. My father was absolutely neutral about the whole thing. This pragmatic approach was typical of both my parents. I said nothing, willing my six-year-old brain to memorize his words.